PART 1 OF 2
The following is a true story about a real person, a real sports fan. Some names have been altered to protect those involved.
Poker used to be a man's game, one that was played amongst casual friends in smoky rooms with poor lighting. Poker used to be something that was intimidating to card novices and beyond comprehension to most women, all soccer players, and nearly the entire continent of Europe. Thanks to ESPN (aka the World Series of Poker station), the number of people who know how to play Texas Hold'em greatly outnumbers the amount of people who can find Texas on a map.
The days of kids playing countless hours of real sports in their front yards, dreaming of winning a Super Bowl or NBA title are over. The kids of today have traded in their footballs and basketball hoops for a pile of chips and the Michael Moore diet in an attempt to become the next Chris Moneymaker.
While the majority of the poker world is quickly nearing sellout level, you can still find true underdog stories in the game. Stories of men that were pushed to their very brink of existence before fighting back with everything they had in them; stories of ordinary people who overcame insurmountable odds to do what no one believed they could. This is one of those stories; this is the epic of Montana Pete.
It wasn't that Paul Chapel was a bad guy; he just couldn't catch a break to save his life. The longtime Cleveland Browns fan spends his Sundays in his suburbanite home watching his Browns fire more blanks than a cowboy in a John Wayne movie. It wouldn't be as bad if his Saturdays weren't spent dwelling on the newfound mediocrity of the Ohio State Buckeyes and their world of post-Maurice Clarett issues. The longtime NHL fan's favorite franchise in sports, the Toronto Maple Leafs, hasn't won a cup in his lifetime. To a hardcore sports enthusiast, this is not an ideal setup; however, Paul would've considered himself lucky if his only troubles came from aligning himself with terrible sports franchises.
Shortly after graduating from college, Chapel landed himself a less-than-stellar part-time job working in video production. A man of no great size or skill, the majority of Chapel's successes in life came through victories in NHL 2005 for PS2 and in finding better-than-average parking spaces at various retail outlets. He did befriend Wayne Gretzky during a chance encounter at a minor league hockey game, where Chapel actually defeated the Great One in a shooting contest, but unfortunately, this event only transpired in a dream.
During the World Series of Poker craze, Paul took up the game of Texas Hold'Em poker. Not surprisingly, Chapel was never a successful gambler. In three trips to Vegas during his college days, only twice did he ever win an amount greater than $2, one of which being the time he slammed his foot on a $5 dollar bill on the sidewalk before several miscreants were able to pull it away with the fishing line attached.
Chapel, in true Chapel style, never won a single poker game he played in. He routinely flopped, sometimes even before the flop. His bluffs were called and his pairs were flushed. He was a magician with one trick, his ability to make tall stacks of chips disappear at the blink of an eye.
While Paul had been dealt some bad cards in both poker and life, he did have one thing going — he was engaged to the girl of his dreams. As the old saying goes, a person is either "lucky in cards, unlucky in love," or in Paul's case, "unlucky in cards, lucky in love" as he had been with his bride-to-be Cherie for nearly three years. Everything else in his life was secondary to him; the ineptitude of the Browns, the collapse of the Buckeyes, the incompetence of the NHL owners and players, his poker beatings, and all other shortcomings meant little to him when she was near.
September 21st was his third anniversary and started like any other day for Paul; he went to work, ate lunch at Chipotle, his favorite restaurant, and was looking forward to escaping the rest of his life to spend a quiet evening with his beautiful Cherie. Chapel's life took a tragic turn that evening when Cherie ended their relationship ... over the Internet ... on their third anniversary.
Paul found out the next day that Cherie had been cheating on him ... with a farmer, a marijuana farmer. Crushed by his separation, Paul turned to sports to lift his spirits. After his breakup, his Ohio State Buckeyes lost three straight games. His Cleveland Browns went on to lose 11 of their next 13 and his beloved National Hockey League remained locked out with little promise of a season. Paul was not at a great spot in his life.
Little did he know that around the corner his luck was about to change. Little did he know that his immediate future would include, among other things, a man known only as Montana Pete and the smoke from his trademark Macanudo White Label Prince Philip cigar...
TO BE CONTINUED
Mark Chalifoux is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Tuesday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Mark at [email protected].
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