Posted on: December 31, 2024, 07:55h.
Last updated on: December 28, 2024, 08:17h.
Before the stroke of midnight delivers us into yet another calendar year, Casino.org stops to remember the Las Vegas icons we left behind in this one.
Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart died on July 18, after a series of brief illnesses, at 94.
He’s best remembered as the star of two hit sitcoms, “The Bob Newhart Show” (1972-78) and “Newhart” (1982-1990), a rare feat in the ficklest mass medium. In both series, he played an everyman reacting stoically to the insanity surrounding him — making expert use of a trademark deadpan stare and stammer.
But this was an extension of the standup with which Newhart commanded the stage during his Las Vegas debut in 1963 at the Sahara. Newhart talked into a prop phone on which he pretended to hold one-sided conversations with historical figures and assorted unreasonable people.
In one, he advised Abraham Lincoln: “Say 87 years ago instead of fourscore and seven.”
Newhart performed his unique, oblique live act throughout the ‘60s and early ’70s up and down the Strip, appearing at the Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera, Frontier, and Caesars Palace, as well as the Golden Nugget downtown.
Steve Lawrence
Singer Steve Lawrence died on March 7 at age 88. When the former Sidney Liebowitz married Eydie Gormé at El Rancho Vegas in 1957, it was not only a personal union but the beginning of a professional one that helped shape the sound of Las Vegas in the 1960s and ’70s.
Steve & Eydie were a trop draw at the Sands and Caesars Palace, enchanting pre-rock n’ rollers with their wholesome jokes and smooth interpretations of American standards and pop hits. And the native New Yorkers were fortunate enough to get to promote those appearances on their own TV specials and the national talk-show circuit that couldn’t get enough of them.
After Eydie’s passing in 2013, Lawrence continued to perform solo until revealing his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2019.
Archie Karas
Karas, who died on Sept. 7 at age 73, is legendary in Las Vegas for an extraordinary winning streak known as “The Run.” It goes like this…
In 1992, he drove to Vegas with just $50 in his pocket. He convinced a friend to loan him $10K, then sat down at a $200/$400 Razz table at The Mirage, quickly tripling the money. He then moved to pool, playing high-stakes games at the Run Runner on Tropicana Avenue.
Over several days, he reportedly won $1.2 million from an unnamed opponent rumored to be 1978 World Series of Poker player Bobby Baldwin. They then transitioned to poker, where Karas won another $3 million, bringing his total to around $4 million within just a few months of arriving in Vegas.
When word of Karas’s success spread, Las Vegas’s most accomplished poker pros formed a line. Karas take down almost all of them — Stu Ungar, Doyle Brunson, Puggy Pearson, Chip Reese and Johnny Moss. Only Johnny Chan was able to beat him, but the $900K he won barely dented the streak that turned his initial $50 into over $40 million.
Karas couldn’t quit while he was ahead, though. His luck nosedived when he proceeded to lose $30 million in roughly three weeks. By 1995, he had lost his entire fortune. And his bad luck didn’t end there…
He was arrested multiple times for cheating at cards, which led to his placement on Nevada’s Black Book in 2015, for “ongoing and grievous offenses against the casino industry.
Karas reportedly died broke, but he lived a full life.
Pete Rose
Pete Rose, the baseball legend who did for sports betting what Edward Snowden did for whistleblowing, died of natural causes at his Las Vegas home on Sept. 30. He was 83.
Few players were more of a shoo-in for the Baseball Hall of Fame than Charlie Hustle (the nickname Rose earned for sprinting to first base even on a walk). But it was not to be.
In 1989, Rose was at the center of a betting scandal second in infamy only to the Chicago Black Sox brouhaha of 1919. As the manager of the Reds, Rose was discovered to have bet on games in which his team played.
Though he denied all wrongdoing, the testimony of witnesses, together with the documentary evidence and telephone records, reveal extensive betting activity on his own team from 1985-87. By all accounts, Rose never bet against his team, like the Black Sox members did. However, that didn’t matter because MLB rules don’t discern between betting on your team to win or lose.
With nothing left to lose, Rose continued betting on baseball in casinos in Nevada, the only state where that was legal until 2018.
Signing merchandise for his forgiving fans wasn’t just a living that Rose made. It seemed to heal his troubled psyche to listen to opinions that regarded the good he did for baseball as more important than the bad.
Crandell Addington
Poker Hall of Famer Crandell Addington died on April 14 at age 85. Known as “the Dandy” because of his love of well-tailored suits (he sometimes changed clothes three times a day), Addington was considered one of the best No-Limit Hold ‘em players in the world.
Addington made the final table of the World Series of Poker’s Main Event almost every year from 1972 to 1979. To this day, he holds the record for the most final table appearances — seven — though it must be said that the fields were smaller in his heyday.
Addington was missed long before his death. He retired from poker in the 1980s to devote his time to the oil and biotech industries.
Toby Keith
This country music legend and Las Vegas mainstay died on Feb. 5 of stomach cancer. He was 62.
Keith — born Toby Keith Covel in Clinton, Okla. — first played Las Vegas at Arizona Charlie’s in 1993. He did two shows a night with a $10 cover charge. That was before his breakout hit, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” that same year. For the next three decades, Keith enjoyed country superstardom, and playing Las Vegas.
Less than two months before he passed, the three shows he performed at Park MGM became his final public appearances.
Tito Jackson
Michael’s older brother and co-founder of the Jackson 5, Tito Jackson died of complications from heart disease on Sept. 15. He was 70.
Born Toriano Adaryll Jackson, Tito was the third of nine Jackson siblings born to Indiana natives Joe and Katherine Jackson. Two of those siblings, Michael and Janet, became global pop superstars.
The Jackson 5 were Vegas mainstays, performing a 1974 residency (before they were called that) at the original MGM Grand Hotel (today’s Horseshoe) from April 9–24, August 20-September 3, and November 20-December 3 that was extended to include April 1-18, 1975.
After Michael Jackson died at age 50 in 2009, Tito told the Associated Press that his younger brother’s death brought the family closer.
“To recognize that the love we have for each other when one of us is not here, what a great loss,” he said, adding that he would personally never “be at peace with it.”
Janet Jackson’s current residency at Resorts World, which began on Dec. 30, includes tributes to both her late brothers.
OJ Simpson
Last and least, we lost O.J. Simpson, the disgraced former NFL Hall-of-Famer and exonerated double murderer whose name came to be associated with Las Vegas casinos in the worst possible way.
The Juice died in Las Vegas on April 10 following a cancer battle at age 76.
As a professional football player, Simpson scored 63 rushing touchdowns over his 10-year career and became the first player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season.
However, he will primarily be remembered for a fall from grace further than any other celebrity’s in modern times.
After Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was stabbed to death along with waiter Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994 in front of her home in LA’s Brentwood, “the trial of the century” commenced. It featured the best defense attorneys Simpson’s millions could buy him.
Simpson was acquitted of both murders. But he was never acquitted in the court of public opinion — nor in civil court, where he was successfully sued by the families of his victims for their wrongful deaths.
In 1997, Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million to the families of Nicole and Ron, after being found liable for their wrongful deaths by the Superior Court of California. (According to reports, he only paid Goldman’s family, and then only around $133K.)
What finally put Simpson behind bars was a crime he was convicted of committing on Sept. 13, 2007 in Las Vegas — a crime that, to this day, causes tourists to stop and ogle when they first view the signage for the Palace Station.
According to prosecutors, with whom a jury unanimously agreed, Simpson broke into room 1203 in the Palace Station’s courtyard complex, armed goons in tow. His intention was to recover sports memorabilia he believed had been stolen from him.
Simpson was convicted and sentenced by a Las Vegas judge to 9-33 years for kidnapping, armed robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. He served the minimum time at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center before being released on parole in October 2017.
As a free man, Simpson settled in Las Vegas, where he lived out a relatively quiet but awkward retirement, punctuated by rambling videos he posted to social media conveying his thoughts about sports, politics and other topics that interested him — as angry detractors filled the comments beneath the videos with accusatory references to Ron and Nicole.
