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For Christsakes, Phil Ivey, will you please call me on the phone? Or text me. Or email. Or facebook. (Are these even verbs?) Or have one of our hundred common acquaintances get us together. Shauna and I are putting together the four-part “Looking for Ivey” series that will appear in this blog the next four Sundays and it’s a real chore when I have no recent input from The Man.

It’s like I’m chasing a ghost, and that’s dangerous. By dangerous, I’m talking about the danger that I’ll look like a jackass if I don’t get it right.

For example, one of my sources told me that he heard third-hand that Phil Ivey won $22 million shooting craps at the Venetian last week. I normally wouldn’t report such a rumor, but if you read on, you will recognize that there’s no danger that anyone will give the rumor any credence based on its appearance here. I could have just as well posted that Chris Ferguson won $22 million shooting craps.

I heard this rumor late Wednesday night. When I passed it on to Shauna early Thursday afternoon, she asked, “How do we find out if it’s true?”

I started to work the phones but I was interrupted by what I interpreted as a stricken expression on Shauna’s face. She was sitting across from me, reading news headlines, and proceeded to tell me the story of six year-old Falcon Heene. But the story came out in pieces, full of information that may have been untrue or, in any event, made no sense under the circumstances.

We don’t have a television in my office but from reading some stories online as it unfolded, I had no trouble seeing how the media instantly turned this into a boy-falls-down-a-well story:

• This family had a balloon – a flying vehicle capable of rising 8,000 feet in the air, unattended in their back yard with young children unsupervised.
• The balloon became airborne. How? No explanation.
• A six year-old boy was in the basket of the balloon. How do we know that? One of his (not much) older brothers said he saw his brother nearby before it took off.
• The parents were both home while this was happening.

So I said to Shauna, “If these people wanted a dog, they would have to apply for a license. But they are allowed to procreate freely without supervision.” Then I found more information about the parents:

• It doesn’t look like anyone in the family works, which is why both parents were home.
• The balloon was part of the father’s calling as a “storm chaser.” As far as I can tell, and I actually looked into this subject a couple of months ago, “storm chaser” is not a job. It’s like being a “dare devil,” or “militia man.” And it has approximately the same respect factor and sanity factor.
• The parents are reality show veterans, having appeared twice on the ABC’s, “Wife Swap”. Twice.
• According to Wife Swap, “When the Heene family aren’t chasing storms, they devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm.”

After learning all this, I managed to break away to send a text to one of my chief sources on craps rumors, Ted Forrest. I initially called but received the-by-now-all-too-familiar message that his voicemail box was full. Since I can’t even tell you what continent he’s on, I didn’t know if I’d have better luck with the text.

By this time, it was clear from the reports that TV news outlets were tracking the balloon. There were also helicopters from the Colorado Army National Guard involved, along with radar and police following the balloon from the ground. They also considering having a light aircraft fly over the balloon to lower a rescuer onto it or drop weights onto the balloon to get it to gradually sink to the ground.

Denver International Airport, the nation’s busiest airport west of O’Hare, briefly stopped take-offs on certain runways and I think air traffic in a wide path was directed away. (A friend of mine was flying in from Chicago and his flight left on time but landed twenty five minutes late, a common result on westbound flights on Thursday.)

I was surprised by Ted’s almost instant response to my text. Unfortunately, it didn’t contain the answer, and raised more questions: “I’m on a plane. Phone dead. Don’t know.” I don’t know how Ted was able to send me the text from the air if his phone was dead but I decided not to complicate matters by telling him he might be up the air for a while because of the developing balloon boy drama.

As I was explaining this to Shauna and checked my address book for other sources to contact she started crying, “The balloon came down in a field, there was no sign of the boy.”

Shauna was too emotional to go on so I went back to my computer for more news. If the kid was in the balloon and they were following the balloon with radar, TV cameras, and helicopters, how could the kid not be in the balloon when it came down?

Reading quotes from law enforcement and emergency preparedness personnel I came to the conclusion that everyone involved in this story was an idiot:

• After the balloon landed, Sherriff’s deputies secured it to keep it in place, shoveling dirt on top of it. This is a good idea anytime you have a crime scene or suspect foul play. If, for example, someone had done harm to the child and sent off the balloon to hide the evidence, covering that evidence with dirt is exactly what you would want the police to do. At least it’s what the criminal would want.
• The same geniuses put crime-scene tape . . . around the house. Apparently, they did this instead of searching the house, though they decided that some kind of crime had taken place. At least they didn’t cover the house with dirt.
• Some guy from the Colorado Division of Emergency Management – it had to be a political patronage position – fielded questions by saying that the craft had some kind of electric power unit which was run by double-C batteries. He did, however, assure everybody that the balloon did seem big enough to carry a six year-old.

As quickly as the story had hijacked our attention, it was over. Just moments after it happened, I read Shauna the news that the boy was found hiding in a cardboard box in the attic and was never in the balloon. That didn’t mean, however, that the participants could stop acting like morons.

After millions of people wasted hours of their attention, not to mention the cost in law enforcement time and resources and jet fuel of all the airplanes that had to circle around, the sheriff regarded the entire wild goose chase as good news. He turned to news reporters during a news conference and gave a thumbs-up and said, “The boy was at the house. Apparently he had been there the whole time.” Was the sheriff putting up his thumb because it had been up his ass for several hours, because his department was too busy putting tape around the house to look inside for the kid?

This morning, the same sheriff concluded (after what kind of investigation?) that the whole thing was not a hoax. He must have had some convincing evidence. He would have to, to contradict the kid telling Wolf Blitzer last night, “We did it for the show.”

With the matter of balloon boy stabilized, I contacted another of my top sources for crazy gambling stories. He picked up on the first ring, from Hawaii. I cut right to the chase, skipping the parts about balloon boy and asking him if he knew anything Phil Ivey winning $22 million at craps at the Venetian last week.

He didn’t hear anything about that, but he thought he heard a story about Ivey hooking up with some rich guy and winning a huge amount from some kind of gambling. He had just assumed, if that was true, that it was from poker. We shared a laugh about how people take these rumors, add their own biases and assumptions from the circumstances, and pass the stories along. But the more embroidery the stories accumulate, the more likely they are to be mistaken for fact. We agreed to get together sometime soon, assuming flights to the mainland are back on schedule.

While looking for some final truth on the balloon boy story, I ran across the headlines of a new tragedy. “DAVID ARCHULETA’S FATHER FILES FOR DIVORCE.” I have barely even heard of David Archuleta but even if I had, is there anybody on the planet so famous that THEIR PARENTS filing for divorce is news?

But I guess the news media is correct, because instead of heaving my computer out the window, I clicked the link to the story. The divorce filing occurred a month after his father’s arrest in a Utah massage parlor. (Who even knew there were massage parlors in Utah and who can imagine what they are like?) His father claims he was just there for back pain. This was their second divorce filing; they previously filed in 2002 but reconciled after David won a talent competition.

So let me recap, just so all the facts are set out clearly and there is no misunderstanding:

• Phil Ivey won $22 million in craps from the Venetian. But maybe he didn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t craps and it was something else or some other amount. Or maybe it was from a rich guy. Or maybe he’s just playing golf or doing something else these days.
• David Archuleta is okay. I repeat: DAVID ARCHULETA IS OKAY. He was not hurt during the balloon landing and was never in the balloon.
• His parents, however, are getting a divorce.
• My own hunch from having seen David Archuleta once very briefly on TV is that he is a space alien, but I can’t confirm this. Perhaps we should ask the balloon dad.
• And let’s not discount at least one conspiracy theory. I think maybe the boy was in the balloon all along and he was trying to escape.

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4 Responses to “#875 – Phil Ivey May (or May Not) Have Won $22 Million at Craps (or at Something Else, or Not)”

1. Syrenski Says:
   October 18th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

   Thanks Michael Your blogs are always great. Keep ‘em coming!

2. Gambler Says:
   October 19th, 2009 at 9:27 pm

   LOL for christsakes Phil! Call the man. Love your blog!

3. Joe Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 3:54 pm

   This blog was all over the place. I guess if you mention Phil Ivey in a blog people will read it. It should tell you a lot about your blog’s topic that nobody wanted to read another balloon boy story so you had to throw in Ivey.

4. mcraig Says:
   November 8th, 2009 at 8:42 pm

   And yet, here you are. Thanks for generating the traffic, buddy.

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