Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the ESPN.com Sports Desk by Hunter S. Thompson
Untouchable as a journalist and uncontrollable as a human being, Hunter S. Thompson is perhaps not the first person you'd think of to provide insight into the more 'common' aspects of gambling. He's certainly not the man to turn to for advice on staking strategy or creating statistical models.
"Dr Gonzo gives us enough classic gambling psychology to raise Freud from his home under the ground."
But with Hey Rube, the compiled craziness of his ESPN column, and the last book to be published before it all got a bit much and he covered his kitchen with his brains, Dr Gonzo gives us enough classic gambling psychology to raise Freud from his home under the ground.
It is not hard to imagine the jaw-droppingly impulsive Thompson—a man with one of the world's all-time great addictive personalities—as a gambling nut. Were anyone bothered enough to catalogue it, they would no doubt find that his great body of work contains more references to gambling than it does to drugs. The fact that Hunter's legacy won't reflect this in the slightest is due not only to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas being his most well-known book but also to the massive chasm between the rock 'n' roll sham credibility of drugs and the old-man-in-smoky-betting-shop stigma that still mars the betting world like an unsightly boil on a leper.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of Hey Rube as a diary of a gambler is the startling contrast between his common-man approach to gambling and his honesty in defeat. It's a refreshing change from all reckless Sky-Super-Sunday-Scorecast bettors and their miraculous 'profits' generated from one winning bet back in 1974.
And whereas even the mildly delusional could no doubt admit to this:
"Indeed, I had caved in to the deadly temptation of betting like a Fan again, instead of like the cold-blooded Gambler that I like to think I am."
It takes a bit more to own up to the "scars on my soul from past gambling disasters that will Never heal over", like this snippet, for example:
"Suddenly all the fun had gone out of the gambling business. I was missing mortgage payments, borrowing from friends, kiting checks, and feeling far too nervous to write anything longer than a French postcard. I aged about six years in three months, and things were getting worse every day."
"Hunter stayed with the entertainment - right on the edge, where last second 3-pointers don't just make you shrug and grumble"
Or:
"I still suffer hate and pain in my head every time I see the word 'Duke' on a TV screen, and that rotten Thing happened nine years ago when that Swine Christian Laetner hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky."
Thankfully for the reading public, the fun never left out the other end—this is a man too intrinsically reckless for the gambling to become as boring as stockbroking. Hunter stayed with the entertainment—right on the edge, where last second 3-pointers don't just make you shrug and grumble but stick your best friend's head through the television before firing off several rounds of an Uzi into the emptiness of the Colorado mountains.
As a whole, Hey Rube is far from Hunter's best work, although you're never more than a page away from an infuriatingly funny and poetic turn of phrase. Only one other journalist has ever matched Hunter on this account; that was H.L. Mencken and he's been dead much longer than HST.
Amid the sports, there's the usual political ranting and raving, the 'where were you when the fun stopped' doom-talk aimed at the system that finally sent him over the edge. At times he seems to be parodying an earlier, even more eloquent, version of himself. Whether this is because the magic was waning or because there are only so many ways you can insult a politician, and he used most of them up on Richard Nixon, is hard to say.
"...you do have to possess some form of cephalic shortcoming not to appreciate the writing of this particular betting fiend"
So it's not required reading, and it's far from his best work, but even an ailing Hunter can beat most other writers like a ginger stepchild before sending his brain to the moon and stomping on them all over again.
In Hey Rube Thompson ponders whether or not "habitual gambling really is a fatal disease worse than brain cancer." I couldn't possibly say; but you do have to possess some form of cephalic shortcoming not to appreciate the writing of this particular betting fiend.
BBC
