Ship It Holla Ballas! (35 page)

Ballas, circa 2012, outside Manhattan’s Per Se restaurant (from left to right): Apathy, durrrr, Raptor.
(Photo courtesy Peter Jetten)

Newly sponsored Good2cu poses for a publicity photo in Vegas.
(Photo credit Melodie DeWitt)

Acknowledgments

Anyone who’s spent time at a poker table knows that it’s a game of courage. But it’s still hard for us to fathom the guts it took for the characters in this story to open up their lives, warts and all, to a pair of complete strangers, without any guarantees of a flattering portrayal. Talk about your gambles.

But these aren’t just any characters, and winning a lot of money isn’t the only way they’ve beaten the odds. It would have been so easy for these kids to grow up to be assholes. Instead, we discovered a remarkable collection of thoughtful, self-possessed, and charismatic young adults who are just as interested in the world outside of casinos. As incredible as it might seem, given the exuberance of their youthful indiscretions, each and every one of the Ship It Holla Ballas we talked to has grown up to be the kind of person that would make any parent proud.

There would be no book—or, for that matter, a Ship It Holla Balla crew—without our brilliant and fearless tour guide, Andrew Robl. He was subjected to many torturous hours of impertinent interrogation, gamely answering questions that would have driven a lesser man to mortification. Our greatest fear about this book is that we haven’t done an adequate enough job of conveying just how far he’s come in terms of maturity and personal growth. Thanks for taking the leap with us, Andrew.

Special thanks also to David Benefield, who always found time to set aside his own fears of personal embarrassment to respond to our panicked Facebook messages whenever the waters got murky. His honesty, especially in regard to the emotional highs and lows, was invaluable.

Ditto to Craig Hartman, who has been an instrumental ally throughout, and, as we came to discover, one of the most amazingly cool guys we’ve ever met.

Peter Jetten, Kevin Boudreau, Alec Torelli, and Aaron O’Rourke all deserve to be thanked twice: once for their generosity in sharing intimate details and photos; a second time for their tolerance in regard to their portrayal. We’re sorry for any liberties we might have taken on the way to producing what we hope is a coherent narrative.

Max Greenwood, Mario Silvestri, Jonathan Little, Casey Diener, and Aaron Nadell were all extremely forthcoming with their time and helped us to get the ball rolling. Thanks also to Harry Greenhouse, Chantel McNulty, Travis Rice, Ivan Solotaroff, Melodie DeWitt, Bryan Hadley, and Dustin Woolf.

As proprietary as we’ve come to feel about the Ballas and their incredible story, we can’t take credit for having discovered them—Nick Gair, Michael Kaplan, and Chris Vaughn all wrote about them first.

A shout-out also to Jim McManus, for inspiring us to play and write about the game of poker, and to David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth, for giving poker players a virtual home, plenty to read, and plenty more to talk about.

It’s going to be impossible to butter our agent, Daniel Greenberg, with any praise that he hasn’t already heard or read in countless other literary acknowledgments; suffice to say that all of it is earned. Same goes for everyone at St. Martin’s Press, especially our visionary editor, Marc Resnick, who understood where this book needed to go and what it needed to say long before we did, and his tireless editorial assistant, Kate Canfield. And to Michael Cantwell, the attorney who, with relentless good humor, helped us wrangle our story into legal compliance.

Finally, to our wives and sons, for their unwavering patience and support throughout this project and beyond. There’s not enough money in the world to pay the debt we owe you, but hopefully our love, delivered in steady doses, will gradually chip away at it.

Holla!

Jonathan Grotenstein
Storms Reback
June 26, 2012

About the Authors

Jonathan Grotenstein (left) has authored or coauthored nearly a dozen books with NFL linebackers, comedy legends, celebrity dog trainers, and the occasional fictional character. His first book,
Poker: The Real Deal
(with Phil Gordon), remains one of the bestselling poker books of all time.

Storms Reback (right) is a writer living in Austin, Texas. He is the coauthor (with Jonathan Grotenstein) of
All In: The (Almost) Entirely True Story of the World Series of Poker.

SHIP IT HOLLA BALLAS
! Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Grotenstein and Storms Reback. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Young Jin Lim and David Baldeosingh Rotstein

Cover photograph of people © kzenon/iStockphoto; poker chips © Pocike /shutterstock

e-ISBN 9781250021274

First Edition: January 2013