Jason didn’t—still doesn’t—know what changed, but something sent him spinning. Was it marrying Liana? Herb getting sick? Was some team dynamic bringing him down? The way his body had begun to creak? None seemed an obvious cause, but for whatever reason last season he started finding more casinos on the road, driving his rental as far as ninety minutes to play. He’d go for several hours before crawling back to the team hotel at sunrise. Sometimes he stuck to fifty a night, but sometimes he edged it up. Doubled it. He pulled out half a million a couple of times, just because he had a good feeling. It felt mostly fine when that kind of night was followed by a 7:00 p.m. start, but then he started hitting the tables with day games right behind. Running on fumes, operating on three hours of sleep, he always played well—but he also recognized that he was sinking.

He knew he was sunk when he started playing during a game. Even if it was a practice game against Milwaukee’s B squad. Dorsey made it clear that they were a team—you were supposed to be there, suited up—and Jason felt the same, though not the same enough to keep him from making the excuse of a run, of actually running but then also jogging over to the casino. Greg Carver was there, trailing him like a wide-eyed puppy—harmless, or at least inconsequential, by Jason’s assessment. He knew Carver would say nothing. At the time it didn’t feel awful (afterward, it did). At the time, it was just an itch that had to be scratched.

And it was an impossible itch, never satisfied. He couldn’t help it if he pushed past when his ATM stopped spitting out cash, past when his checks were no longer accepted at the cage. One of the guards was watching this, Jason chewing out some square-jawed cashier who kept a stern expression on her face, the woman too old to care about his flirting or his ire. As Jason walked away from the cashier, that guard passed him a slip of paper with a phone number.

He dialed it, of course he did. On his cell, right there in the casino. Gave his real name, too, because as slick as he sometimes felt sitting at the big stakes table and being in magazines and standing at the plate, he was still a bighearted midwestern boy at his middle. The guy gave him fifty grand on the spot—not quite on the spot, but within thirty seconds of hanging up, a pretty waitress was pressing five $10,000 chips into his palm. He couldn’t figure how they’d found him so quickly, but also didn’t ask: there was a good table going in the VIP room.