'look Up And He's Got Your Money'

"Y'all go ahead," says Baxter. "I'll be there in a minute."

Julie makes a face. "Par for the course," she says. "Sometimes you have to wonder—how much entertainment does it take to satisfy a man?"

Baxter looks up from his figures. "You call this entertainment?" he says.

Julie says at least it's better than when they first came to Vegas and lived for nine months at the Dunes. "The poker players would drop by and stay for four or five days," she says.

Baxter, joining in from his operations center, says it was a matter of being polite. "Sid Wyman ran the Dunes then, and he put us up in the Cary Grant Suite and never sent a bill. I won so much I got to feeling guilty about it, so once a week I'd go down to the casino and play blackjack or craps. Ordinarily I walk right through a casino without looking left or right. Casinos are for the tourists. But I'd go down out of obligation and lose forty or fifty thousand. I'da been better off paying the hotel bill."

The gambler's wife learns not to count on anything, says Julie. "I even had the decorator fly to Reno to go over a few things because Billy was there for a tournament and said he couldn't get home. When I went to see if he'd be done in time to be able to make dinner with us that night, he was down to his last $130. But he didn't show up for dinner. When he finally got to the room, he'd won the tournament and more than $100,000. One afternoon he came walking through the door carrying two grocery bags. I thought, 'Oh, good! At last he's being domesticated. He's brought home the groceries!' But instead of going into the kitchen, he took the bags upstairs. They were full of cash."

"Some people would consider that bringing home the groceries," says Billy, smiiiiling.

Dipping into the chicken salad, he says it's all academic anyway now, because he'll be retiring soon and moving the family back to Georgia . Julie rolls her eyes. "I want my kids out of here before they get to thinking this is the only way to live," he says. Be someplace where you can smell the flowers, and where he and his boy can hunt and "start enjoying the games by going to them."

"Oh, I'll still gamble," he says, waving his fork. "I'll still want to come back to play in the tune-aments, maybe bet the bowl games. But, hey, I'm in boxing now, and I enjoy that, and I'm good at it, and I could do it anywhere." He smiles. "Maybe I'll even do a little promoting. I could promote fights. It'd be fun. Wouldn't Don King love it?"

A few days later, Brunson is asked if he thinks Baxter is serious about giving up the bright lights and the big pots and going home to Georgia . Brunson says you have to understand that "Billy's from the South. People from the South are more sensitive. Nicer, I think. This is a cutthroat place. You come here, you lose confidence in people. I don't think Southern people ever get used to that. They're always talking about going home."