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Doyle Brunson, Poker Champion Known as ‘Texas Dolly,’ Dies at 89
In a lucrative career that began in Texas saloons, he won back-to-back World Series of Poker titles (and 10 in all) and wrote a definitive poker manual.
Doyle Brunson, a champion poker player who, in a long, lucrative and colorful career with a deck of cards, won 10 World Series of Poker events, including two back-to-back titles, and influenced countless players with his definitive guide to Texas hold ’em and other games, died on Sunday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Anjela Brunson.
On his website, Mr. Brunson was once immodestly described as “the Babe Ruth, the Michael Jordan, and the Arnold Palmer of poker.”
The comparisons were apt. The first person to win $1 million in tournament play, Mr. Brunson — nicknamed Texas Dolly — became a star to a new generation when poker became a fixture on television in the 1990s, his cowboy hat and no-nonsense drawl a gentlemanly foil to brash, talkative younger players.
“The testosterone that floods most of today’s games owes its existence to Brunson’s philosophy of attack, the outlaw whiff of his style, the cowboy jingle-jangle of his prose,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 2005.
Advertisement
Mr. Brunson, whose career in poker began in illegal games in the back rooms of Texas bars, won the World Series of Poker main event, the sport’s most coveted prize, in 1976 and 1977. His total tournament winnings exceeded $6 million.
Since the 1960s, he had presided over a high-stakes private cash game in Las Vegas known as “The Big Game,” reserved for the most fearless and well-financed poker players as well as wealthy amateurs.
Mr. Brunson “bridges the span between the dangerous road games of the 1950s and the safely legitimate mountains of money in the 21st century,” the poker journalist James McManus wrote in “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker” (2009).
When Mr. Brunson won the World Series of Poker main event, he wrote that people thought of him more as a professional gambler than a poker player. He acknowledged that he had made millions and lost much of it early on betting on other sports, especially golf.
Advertisement
But he became famous for winning at poker and then teaching it, especially no-limit Texas hold ’em, a variation of the game that he first played in 1958, when it was becoming popular in his home state.
Doyle Frank Brunson was born on Aug. 10, 1933, and grew up in Longworth, in north central Texas, the youngest of three children of John and Mealia Brunson. His father was a farmer and cotton gin manager, his mother a homemaker. Doyle did not learn until his mid-20s that his father had secretly put his first two children through college by playing poker.
Initially an undersize basketball player, Doyle grew about six inches in a year and helped lead Sweetwater High School, in nearby Sweetwater, to the state tournament in Austin. The night before the semifinal game (which his team lost), schoolmates introduced him to poker, which he had seen played only in movies.
He also excelled at baseball and track. After missing the deadline to accept a full scholarship to the University of Texas, he attended the Baptist-affiliated Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene and started playing poker there. Five times he faced a school disciplinary board for gambling but avoided suspension because of his success as an athlete.
After almost leading Hardin-Simmons to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Mr. Brunson landed a summer job at the local gypsum plant. His athletic career was ended when a stack of Sheetrock fell on him, mangling his right leg.
Advertisement
He earned a master’s degree in education while playing poker for income. But shocked at how little school administrators were paid, he decided against an educator’s career and took a job selling business equipment. While making a sales call on a pool hall in Fort Worth, he stumbled on a poker game, joined it and in three hours equaled his month’s salary. He quit his job and started a life of illegal poker in Texas.
Mr. Brunson soon joined a betting partnership with Thomas Preston Jr., better known as Amarillo Slim, and Brian Roberts, known as Sailor, in which they shared bankrolls until they lost all their money in Las Vegas in 1970. Each of them would eventually win the World Series of Poker main event.
In 1962, Mr. Brunson married Louise Carter, a Fort Worth pharmacist. She survives him, along with their son, Todd; their daughter, Pamela Brunson; a stepdaughter, Cheryl Carter; a grandson; a step-grandson; four step-great-grandchildren; and one step-great-great-grandson. His first child, Doyla Brunson, died in 1982. Mr. Brunson died at a hospital in Las Vegas and had lived in the city for several decades.
Mr. Brunson was among the three dozen players invited in 1970 to the inaugural World Series of Poker, a name that belied its modest beginnings. The tournament was the brainchild of the casino owner Benny Binion and Jimmy Snyder, then a public relations agent better known as Jimmy the Greek.
Advertisement
The World Series expanded its roster of poker contests to include several variants of the game, but Texas hold ’em remained the most publicized and lucrative event. Mr. Snyder called Mr. Brunson “Texas Doy-lee,” which reporters mistook for Dolly, and the nickname Texas Dolly stuck, though it seemed incongruous for someone who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed well over 250 pounds.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1973 for steadier gambling opportunities, Mr. Brunson won the tournament’s main event in 1976 and 1977, widely viewed as the world championship, earning $560,000 in a winner-take-all format. His 10 World Series bracelets are tied for second behind Phil Hellmuth’s 16.
In 1978, he self-published his book “How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker,” which included chapters by other top pros. Later renamed “Super System: A Course in Power Poker” when it was picked up by B & G Publishing in 2002, the book and its follow-up, “Super System 2,” remain top-selling poker manuals.
“As a postgraduate guide to the intricacies of high-level, high-stakes poker the work has no equal,” wrote the English poet Al Alvarez, who covered the 1981 World Series of Poker for The New Yorker. “The grammar may be shaky in places, the punctuation baroque, but the voice is distinct and the message is clear: aggression, constant aggression.”
Mr. Brunson was inducted into the World Series of Poker Hall of Fame in 1988.
After steady growth, poker had its cultural moment in 1998 with the release of the film “Rounders,” in which Matt Damon’s poker-playing character recites Brunson maxims while wielding a copy of “Super System.” That same year, poker became a late-night and cable television staple, and Mr. Brunson became a familiar figure.
Advertisement
Competitive into his later years, Mr. Brunson won a 2004 legends event on the World Poker Tour and $1.2 million. In 2005, he won a hold ’em event for his 10th World Series title.
A few days earlier, his son Todd, also a professional player, had captured an event, making them the first father and son to each win at the World Series. Mr. Brunson reached the fourth day of the 2013 Poker Players Championship, though he confessed that the game was taking its toll.
“Sometimes, when I’ve been playing for a couple of days, I get into a position where I’m uncomfortable,” he said. “My leg, say, starts hurting a little bit. But I don’t change position. I’ll sit there and let it hurt, just as a reminder to make myself play good.”
He was still playing poker in Las Vegas in 2022. “Watching Doyle Brunson play poker at the Bellagio is like watching Tiger Woods play Augusta,” Joe Levin wrote in a profile in Texas Monthly last July.
Mr. Brunson thought that his legacy would be “the fact that I’ve played longer at the high levels than anybody else ever did,” he said in 2003. “I mean, I’ve been playing at the high levels — the biggest games I could find — ever since I was 23 years old.”
But he would not milk his age for sympathy.
“Would I like to win the World Series again for the old guys?” he said in 2002. “Nah, I’d like to win it for ol’ Doyle.”
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Len Miller
1937 - 2023
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Len Miller Obituary
Len coached at UC Irvine from 1973-1979. His 1975 and 1976 cross country teams won the NCAA Division II Cross Country Championships, and his 1976 track team won the NCAA Division II Track & Field Championship. While at Irvine, Len recruited and developed the greatest miler in United States history, Steve Scott, who held the American record in the mile for 26 years. From Irvine, Len went to Arizona State University; his 1981 team won the Pac-10 Championship and he was named Pac-10 Coach of the Year. Len began his career at Porterville High School and he also coached at Victor Valley, Laguna Beach, and Dos Pueblos High Schools, and Santa Barbara City College.
Len is survived by his three children, Rick (and Dianna) Miller, Jackie Miller Joseph, and Jim (and Debbie) Miller, and their mother, Moira. He was also a beloved grandfather to Alece (and Clif) Campbell, Brandon Miller, Thomas (TJ) Miller, and Bailey Joseph, and had three adorable great-grandsons, Colt, Cody, and Copper Campbell. His spirit lives on in the countless lives he touched and the love he shared with his family, friends, and athletes.
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
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Those who receive my yearly Season's Greetings Cards or my rather frequent emails will recall the influence that Len Miller had in the less than one year that I had him as a coach during my first year (my sophomore year) at Victor Valley Senior High School. Today, while reading the Los Angeles Times, I happened upon this obituary:
I will always cherish the moments I spent with Coach in February of 2022 at his house in Las Vegas. It was a special time.
Richard Miller; Businessman, Philanthropist
Richard Miller, a Los Angeles businessman who began supporting Cedars-Sinai Medical Center when it existed as Mt. Sinai Clinic in Boyle Heights in 1939 and was deeply involved in a support group that has raised more than $6 million for that hospital over the years, died Sunday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 78 and died of complications from leukemia.
Born in New York, Miller came to Los Angeles as a boy and studied accounting. He founded his own accounting firm here, became a partner in an auction company and more recently was a managing partner of the Los Angeles Mart.
Among his first philanthropies was the Mt. Sinai Clinic, which later merged with Cedars of Lebanon Hospital to become Cedars-Sinai. He served on the center’s board until his death.
Miller also was on the Board of Directors of Caltech, was involved with support groups at UCLA and Big Brothers Inc., and headed United Jewish Appeal fund-raising efforts at the Hillcrest Country Club.
Survivors include his wife, Rose, a son, a daughter, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild and a brother.
Donations in his name are asked to the Medallions Group, the Cedars support group in which he had been active since its founding as the Mt. Sinai Men’s Club in 1943.
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Denny Crum, Who Made Louisville a Basketball Power, Dies at 86
He led the Cardinals to two national championships in the 1980s and amassed 675 victories over a career that led to his induction into two halls of fame.
Denny Crum, who won two N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships and built the University of Louisville into one of the dominant programs of the 1980s during a long Hall of Fame coaching career, died on Tuesday at his home in Louisville, Ky. He was 86.
The university announced his death after being informed by his wife, Susan. No cause was given. Crum had a mild stroke in August 2017 while fishing in Alaska and another two years two ago.
Nicknamed Cool Hand Luke because of his unflinching sideline demeanor, Crum retired in March 2001 after 30 seasons at Louisville with a record of 675-295 and championships in 1980 and 1986.
A former assistant under the renowned U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden, Crum often wore a red blazer and waved a rolled-up stat sheet like a bandleader’s baton as he directed Louisville to 23 N.C.A.A. tournaments and six Final Fours. He was voted college coach of the year three times.
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He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in May 1994, with Wooden, his college coach at U.C.L.A. and longtime mentor, at his side. Crum finished with 11 more wins than Wooden had amassed at U.C.L.A. and was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame, in Kansas City, Mo., in 2006.
Denzel Edwin Crum was born on March 2, 1937, in San Fernando, Calif. He played guard for two seasons at Pierce Junior College in Los Angeles before transferring to U.C.L.A. in 1956.
The Bruins went 38-14 in Crum’s two seasons as a player. He briefly served as a graduate assistant to Wooden before coaching Pierce in the mid-1960s.
Wooden hired Crum as his assistant and chief recruiter in 1968, when the Bruins were in the midst of their dynastic run to 10 N.C.A.A. championships. Crum is credited with luring the future Hall of Famer Bill Walton to U.C.L.A., and the Bruins went 86-4 and won three N.C.A.A. titles during Crum’s three seasons there.
He succeeded John Dromo as Louisville’s coach in April 1971.
Until then, Louisville had enjoyed little postseason success, reaching only the 1956 N.I.T. championship and the 1959 N.C.A.A. Final Four. The Cardinals lost Crum’s first game, 70-69, to Florida but then reeled off 15 consecutive victories.
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“Denny was so good that I knew I wasn’t going to keep him very long,” Wooden once told The Courier Journal of Louisville. “I was pleased when he got the job at Louisville. I had always hoped when I retired that he’d be the one to succeed me, but he left and proved to be just what I thought he was.”
Crum’s Cardinals won the Missouri Valley Conference — the first of his 15 regular-season league titles — and then reached the Final Four, where they met Wooden’s Bruins. At the time, Crum was the third coach to lead his team to the Final Four in his first season. But the Bruins won, 96-77, on their way to a sixth straight championship.
The schools met again in the semifinals three seasons later with a similar result: U.C.L.A. won, 75-74, in overtime. By then Crum had employed much of Wooden’s fundamentally focused style, but with pressure defense and a fast-breaking flair. Instead of an offense built around a dominant center, Crum used athletic guards and forwards who could finish plays with the high-flying dunks Wooden eschewed.
Crum’s philosophy helped make the Cardinals perennial N.C.A.A. tournament participants, with 20 or more wins each season from 1975 through 1979. Louisville’s breakthrough came in the 1979-80 season, when the homegrown star guard Darrell Griffith and the so-called Doctors of Dunk marched through the regular season, 26-3, and won their second Metro Conference championship in three years.
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Crum’s second-seeded Cardinals reached their third Final Four in nine seasons, only to run up against U.C.L.A. again, this time coached by Larry Brown. Louisville finally prevailed, with a 59-54 championship-game win in Indianapolis led by the high-flying all-American Griffith.
Crum’s second title followed in 1986, when Louisville beat Duke, 72-69.
The second half of his tenure was not nearly as successful as the first. Louisville endured two separate N.C.A.A. investigations and never again returned to the Final Four under his watch.
After his retirement, Crum was a co-host with Joe B. Hall, the longtime Kentucky men’s basketball coach, of a sports radio program heard in Kentucky. Hall died last year at 93.
Crum remained a respected presence around Louisville. He frequently attended Cardinals games on the KFC Yum! Center home court bearing his name. He was present for the September 2022 dedication of Denny Crum Hall, a new campus dormitory for athletes and students. And he had a front-row seat in March 2022 for the introduction of one of his former players, Kenny Payne, as the Cardinals’ coach.
Complete information on Crum’s survivors was not immediately available.
Doyle Brunson, Poker Champion Known as ‘Texas Dolly,’ Dies at 89
In a lucrative career that began in Texas saloons, he won back-to-back World Series of Poker titles (and 10 in all) and wrote a definitive poker manual.
Doyle Brunson, a champion poker player who, in a long, lucrative and colorful career with a deck of cards, won 10 World Series of Poker events, including two back-to-back titles, and influenced countless players with his definitive guide to Texas hold ’em and other games, died on Sunday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law, Anjela Brunson.
On his website, Mr. Brunson was once immodestly described as “the Babe Ruth, the Michael Jordan, and the Arnold Palmer of poker.”
The comparisons were apt. The first person to win $1 million in tournament play, Mr. Brunson — nicknamed Texas Dolly — became a star to a new generation when poker became a fixture on television in the 1990s, his cowboy hat and no-nonsense drawl a gentlemanly foil to brash, talkative younger players.
“The testosterone that floods most of today’s games owes its existence to Brunson’s philosophy of attack, the outlaw whiff of his style, the cowboy jingle-jangle of his prose,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 2005.
Advertisement
Mr. Brunson, whose career in poker began in illegal games in the back rooms of Texas bars, won the World Series of Poker main event, the sport’s most coveted prize, in 1976 and 1977. His total tournament winnings exceeded $6 million.
Since the 1960s, he had presided over a high-stakes private cash game in Las Vegas known as “The Big Game,” reserved for the most fearless and well-financed poker players as well as wealthy amateurs.
Mr. Brunson “bridges the span between the dangerous road games of the 1950s and the safely legitimate mountains of money in the 21st century,” the poker journalist James McManus wrote in “Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker” (2009).
When Mr. Brunson won the World Series of Poker main event, he wrote that people thought of him more as a professional gambler than a poker player. He acknowledged that he had made millions and lost much of it early on betting on other sports, especially golf.
Advertisement
But he became famous for winning at poker and then teaching it, especially no-limit Texas hold ’em, a variation of the game that he first played in 1958, when it was becoming popular in his home state.
Doyle Frank Brunson was born on Aug. 10, 1933, and grew up in Longworth, in north central Texas, the youngest of three children of John and Mealia Brunson. His father was a farmer and cotton gin manager, his mother a homemaker. Doyle did not learn until his mid-20s that his father had secretly put his first two children through college by playing poker.
Initially an undersize basketball player, Doyle grew about six inches in a year and helped lead Sweetwater High School, in nearby Sweetwater, to the state tournament in Austin. The night before the semifinal game (which his team lost), schoolmates introduced him to poker, which he had seen played only in movies.
He also excelled at baseball and track. After missing the deadline to accept a full scholarship to the University of Texas, he attended the Baptist-affiliated Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene and started playing poker there. Five times he faced a school disciplinary board for gambling but avoided suspension because of his success as an athlete.
After almost leading Hardin-Simmons to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Mr. Brunson landed a summer job at the local gypsum plant. His athletic career was ended when a stack of Sheetrock fell on him, mangling his right leg.
Advertisement
He earned a master’s degree in education while playing poker for income. But shocked at how little school administrators were paid, he decided against an educator’s career and took a job selling business equipment. While making a sales call on a pool hall in Fort Worth, he stumbled on a poker game, joined it and in three hours equaled his month’s salary. He quit his job and started a life of illegal poker in Texas.
Mr. Brunson soon joined a betting partnership with Thomas Preston Jr., better known as Amarillo Slim, and Brian Roberts, known as Sailor, in which they shared bankrolls until they lost all their money in Las Vegas in 1970. Each of them would eventually win the World Series of Poker main event.
In 1962, Mr. Brunson married Louise Carter, a Fort Worth pharmacist. She survives him, along with their son, Todd; their daughter, Pamela Brunson; a stepdaughter, Cheryl Carter; a grandson; a step-grandson; four step-great-grandchildren; and one step-great-great-grandson. His first child, Doyla Brunson, died in 1982. Mr. Brunson died at a hospital in Las Vegas and had lived in the city for several decades.
Mr. Brunson was among the three dozen players invited in 1970 to the inaugural World Series of Poker, a name that belied its modest beginnings. The tournament was the brainchild of the casino owner Benny Binion and Jimmy Snyder, then a public relations agent better known as Jimmy the Greek.
Advertisement
The World Series expanded its roster of poker contests to include several variants of the game, but Texas hold ’em remained the most publicized and lucrative event. Mr. Snyder called Mr. Brunson “Texas Doy-lee,” which reporters mistook for Dolly, and the nickname Texas Dolly stuck, though it seemed incongruous for someone who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed well over 250 pounds.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1973 for steadier gambling opportunities, Mr. Brunson won the tournament’s main event in 1976 and 1977, widely viewed as the world championship, earning $560,000 in a winner-take-all format. His 10 World Series bracelets are tied for second behind Phil Hellmuth’s 16.
In 1978, he self-published his book “How I Made Over $1,000,000 Playing Poker,” which included chapters by other top pros. Later renamed “Super System: A Course in Power Poker” when it was picked up by B & G Publishing in 2002, the book and its follow-up, “Super System 2,” remain top-selling poker manuals.
“As a postgraduate guide to the intricacies of high-level, high-stakes poker the work has no equal,” wrote the English poet Al Alvarez, who covered the 1981 World Series of Poker for The New Yorker. “The grammar may be shaky in places, the punctuation baroque, but the voice is distinct and the message is clear: aggression, constant aggression.”
Mr. Brunson was inducted into the World Series of Poker Hall of Fame in 1988.
After steady growth, poker had its cultural moment in 1998 with the release of the film “Rounders,” in which Matt Damon’s poker-playing character recites Brunson maxims while wielding a copy of “Super System.” That same year, poker became a late-night and cable television staple, and Mr. Brunson became a familiar figure.
Advertisement
Competitive into his later years, Mr. Brunson won a 2004 legends event on the World Poker Tour and $1.2 million. In 2005, he won a hold ’em event for his 10th World Series title.
A few days earlier, his son Todd, also a professional player, had captured an event, making them the first father and son to each win at the World Series. Mr. Brunson reached the fourth day of the 2013 Poker Players Championship, though he confessed that the game was taking its toll.
“Sometimes, when I’ve been playing for a couple of days, I get into a position where I’m uncomfortable,” he said. “My leg, say, starts hurting a little bit. But I don’t change position. I’ll sit there and let it hurt, just as a reminder to make myself play good.”
He was still playing poker in Las Vegas in 2022. “Watching Doyle Brunson play poker at the Bellagio is like watching Tiger Woods play Augusta,” Joe Levin wrote in a profile in Texas Monthly last July.
Mr. Brunson thought that his legacy would be “the fact that I’ve played longer at the high levels than anybody else ever did,” he said in 2003. “I mean, I’ve been playing at the high levels — the biggest games I could find — ever since I was 23 years old.”
But he would not milk his age for sympathy.
“Would I like to win the World Series again for the old guys?” he said in 2002. “Nah, I’d like to win it for ol’ Doyle.”
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