'look Up And He's Got Your Money'

Four years ago, Billy phoned home to say he was into a game that he couldn't up and leave and would be a little late for an elaborate birthday celebration planned for Julie that evening. The party went off on schedule the night of Feb. 19. Billy called regularly to say the game was almost over and arrived home the morning of the 21st. "But although I was two days late for Julie's birthday party, I was right on time for our anniversary, which is February 22," he says brightly.

And though poker may be his first love, Baxter owes much of his affluence to skillful exploitation of the various "lines" on football, basketball and baseball games—"sports betting," it's called in Nevada, where it was legalized 22 years ago. Baxter's phone lines are open to the betting houses that specialize in sports. He bets millions every year on football, he says, "but it's not win-or-lose money, it's money that keeps moving around. I might, for example, bet eight or nine college games at $20,000 to $30,000 apiece, but all I really hope for is to win one more than I lose. But if I lose one more than I win, that's still only $20,000. You see what I mean?"

Baxter salvaged a so-so 1983 season (his expanding boxing interests "distracted" him, and he was in the red for the first time in football) by winning $130,000 on Miami's upset of Nebraska in the Orange Bowl last Jan. 2. How could he possibly bet against unbeaten Nebraska, a prohibitive 11½-point favorite, celebrated as the most awesome force in college football? First, he said, he "took the points for $90,000. That was the lock of the year. Miami has a great coach and was too good at the skill positions." (He says he gets this kind of information by "makin' phone calls" to people who know more football than he does.) Then, as the game drew nearer, he had an even brighter vision. "I figured Miami would win. I got 4-to-1 odds and bet $10,000." Miami batted away a two-point conversion pass in the last minute to preserve its 31-30 victory. "I never had a doubt," says Baxter.

And those are the words Baxter lives and bets by. He'll wager on anything: the sex of unborn babies, for example (he won $18,000 betting that Tiffany would be a girl; six months later Brunson, one of the losers, asked if it wasn't "about time you took the dress off the boy?"), and the life-span of old men. When Major Riddle, the legendary Las Vegas hotelman, failed to reach 80, Baxter lost $10,000. "I thought he had more stamina than that," Baxter says sorrowfully. Baxter took Brunson for another $5,000 by betting he would lose at least 35 pounds while being "corrected" in Georgia; he lost 38. He shrank from 200 to 162 pounds, then regained most of it after he collected.

Baxter hasn't been loath to wager on his limited athletic skills, either. He wielded the cue stick, in fact, for profit before he was much into his teens, primarily during trips he took with his mother, Ann, on her statewide rounds as an insurance agent. (Mr. Baxter, William, who ran a supply center at Fort Gordon, Ga. army base, died in 1982.)

When Ann gave little Billy movie money in Vidalia or Wrightsville or Waycross to pass the time away, he hustled to the nearest pool hall, and kept on hustling. Billy's improvement at the game escaped notice until his grandmother found his bankbook under his bed, with a four-figure balance in it. He was advised to stop it right this instant. He was 15 then. He became more discreet and didn't get discovered again until his picture appeared in the Augusta papers publicizing his exhibition match with Willie Mosconi. At the time, Baxter was 16.

But back to the matter of how Baxter found a new life, or at least half of one, in boxing—the part where he came/to manage two eventual world champions, WBC junior welterweight Bruce Curry and WBA junior lightweight Roger Mayweather, both of whom have since lost their crowns. He now talks about "making one last stand...a bet everybody will feel," before going home to Augusta to live quietly ever after. (Quietly, but of course never more than a few hours removed from the poker tables. "That's what they made the jet airplane for," he says.)

Here was Baxter in February, leading the conversation of a small but influential group of boxing people over the debris of a seafood dinner in a Beaumont, Texas restaurant three nights before Mayweather was to defend his title against Rocky Lockridge. Mayweather was there, and so were his trainer, Jesse Reid, and a few of promoter Don King's functionaries. Baxter was the one man in the group who didn't look as if he belonged.

Around fight people—gamblers, too, for that matter—Baxter blends in like a 300-pound Rockette. From under the generous overhang of his tailored brown hair, his pale blue eyes neither shift, dart nor narrow, but shine with warm good humor. If there was ever a man born to be named Billy, Baxter is clearly it. His affluent paunch and the two or three chins that fold into his neck give him a comfortable, sedentary look, and his face is so handsomely youthful you doubt it was ever crossed by a five o'clock shadow. When he smiles, he doesn't just smile, he smiiiiles. Sitting there in his lobster bib and matching beige Fila sweats and Pony shoes, he looked more like a country club tennis hustler than a fight manager.

But as boxing people have found—something gambling people already knew—appearances are for people who judge football teams by the bustlines of the cheerleaders. Many cynical observers of boxing (which may be a redundancy) were impressed when Baxter took May-weather, a 21-year-old who was so tough that no one wanted to fight him, to the top in 15 fights. But his handling of the faded 25-year-old Curry was a tour de force. Curry was used up from trying to fight welterweights, so Baxter moved him down seven pounds to the junior welters, boosted his confidence, and Curry won the title. In a business known for 103° bravado, "Billy pees ice cubes," says Mel Greb, a former pit boss at Caesars Palace who now works for boxing promoter Bob Arum.