Andre Agassi Saga Turns Very Ugly

A very, very weird Vegas feud nobody quite saw coming has exploded into court proceedings this weekend. Native son Andre Agassi has had his childhood pal Perry Rogers managing his affairs for many years. As recently as this spring when I did my big piece for The New York Times on the young moguls of Vegas, I was required to have Perry in on the roundtable along with the Fertitta brothers and Tim Poster and Tom Breightling of Golden Nugget fame. It was made clear to me by all involved that Perry was the brains behind Agassi's business endeavors.

The two had what was termed as an amicable split in October. But this weekend, Rogers filed this rather odd lawsuit against Agassi's wife, tennis great Steffi Graf, for a whopping sum of, uh, $50,000. In the very brief legal filing, Rogers says that's the sum he's owed by Graf in commissions from investments she has in an account he manages for her through Bear Stearns. She hasn't paid him since ... October.

A few things here:

* $50,000 seems like peanuts for these people. Certainly, it's a small sum to sue over if one is trying to salvage a lifelong personal friendship that made Rogers very rich.

* The lawsuit says that Graf hasn't paid Rogers his commissions since October 2008 which is only five weeks ago. It says she paid up like clockwork prior to that. Suing over chump change after such a short dereliction? Tough customer.

* I have no idea whether this is relevant, but Bear Stearns was one of the first major U.S. investment houses to collapse in the subprime mortgage disaster. It was bought for peanuts by JP Morgan Chase in March. The lawsuit said Graf had an account in excess of $20m there, thanks to Rogers. Could it be that the value of her investments fell precipitously amid this downturn and, thus, created the friction between Rogers and Agassi/Graf? If Rogers put Graf's money into bad investments that are now coming home to roost, odds are fairly good he did the same for Agassi, right?

Bottom line: Something tells me the root cause of this could very well be the horrible economy and all those risky investments. They weren't just made by CEOs like Sheldon Adelson and Gary Loveman with corporate money and they weren't just made by overly ambitious low-income people who ignored or never saw the fine print.

Could the Agassi-Graf-Rogers problem show that the risky investments that went into the toilet were also made by rich people with their own money, too?

This will be interesting to watch. Why would Graf just stop paying her fees ... unless she can't? Or unless the account balance fell below the threshold indicated in the lawsuit for Rogers to get a cut? There were already rumors that Graf didn't care for Rogers personally, but that would be easy to overlook when times were good, yeah?

My theory could be meritless. But the Bear Stearns angle here seems like a red flag.

Poker Needs A Superstar

My diagnosis of what ails professional poker as the WSOP opens today, from the Las Vegas Weekly:

The World Needs A Poker Star
Competitive-game fans want someone to admire
BY STEVE FRIESS

A few weeks ago, I was one of millions of Americans who got sucked into watching something on TV that I ordinarily would never, ever care about.

It was a Monday, I was overdue on more than one assignment—including that week’s Strip Sense entry—and I don’t usually watch sports on TV anyway. But the human drama of a hobbled Tiger Woods somehow managing one amazing comeback after another in the U.S. Open was so compelling that it even made watching privileged people using a crooked metal stick to hit a small white ball across a water-guzzlingly lush and exclusive private park worth my attention.

That said, had it not been for Tiger, such a close match with such great heroics surely wouldn’t have drawn my interest.

And that is the probably insurmountable problem that ails the World Series of Poker as its most prestigious event begins this weekend: There are no transcendent stars. What’s more, thanks to the very same factors that earlier this decade turned the WSOP into one of the fastest-growing professional competitive events— how’s that for avoiding the word “sport”?—of our time, there also never will be.

“You can’t buy your way onto an NBA court; you can’t buy your way onto an NFL field,” said Jeffrey Pollack, WSOP executive director. “You can, however, enter the World Series of Poker and potentially walk away as a world champion. We offer a brand of hope that’s more accessible than any other global sports brand.”

Well, that’s great, but where does that leave poker? Without mystique, that’s where. With nobody who has ever attained the same household-name status of a Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan or Andre Agassi. Ask any group of 55-year-old women emerging from a third viewing of Sex and the City, and they’ll all know who each is.

Ask the same people who Doyle Brunson, Phil Ivey or Johnny Chan are; very few will know. Try Joe Hachem, Jamie Gold and Jerry Yang, the most recent three multimillionaire winners of the WSOP’s $10,000 buy-in No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em tournament—aka the Main Event—and expect the blankest of stares.

Being a victim of one’s own success is a cliché, but there is no better way to explain why TV ratings have been in decline for the WSOP. The meteoric rise in the fascination with poker in general and its richest tournament in particular boiled down to the notion, borne of the boom in Internet poker that turned every Midwest frat boy and bored Silicon Valley code geek into a rounder, that everyone is equal at the table. TV poker shows became so popular even my teenage niece watched, a sure indicator of fad status.

The allure was simple: Anyone can win. Even me.

And yet here’s the problem: Anyone can win. Even whatsisname.

Read the rest HERE