The Pit Boss: On Sammy Davis Jr.

In today’s installment of our weekly Pit Boss series of articles, Ed Walters talks about Sammy Davis Jr. and what he meant to Las Vegas.

My dealings with Sammy were mainly on swing shift. 8pm to 4am. Sammy would usually stay up in the morning hours. If Frank was in, then they would always be together. If Sammy was in alone, he would do his midnight show get out around 1:20 or later (with him you never knew) then he would go around town visiting other shows and lounges. He loved the “show kids” especially the dancers and would go visit them. He wanted to support them in any way he could.

Can you imagine the thrill for a lounge act to have Sammy show up and be in the audience and then stay and greet everybody and tell everybody how great the show was. He loved doing it.

He’d come back to the Sands in the early morning and tell me about it. As we would talk, I would usually be shuffling some chips or cutting them down. A stack of 20, cut them to stacks of 5 in a row. Sammy loved that and wanted to learn it. So in the early mornings (If he was sober and straight,) we would play around with it. He learned very fast. And he always wanted to make sure it looked right. Like Dean, he had “good hands.”

This progressed to dealing a bit of 21. We’d start with him and only one player and nobody else around. He wouldn’t want more until he had it down right. He did very well. We didn’t get a lot of time to practice because with Frank out of town, he would be on his own and spend his time running all over town.

So finally he feels he is good enough to deal to casino players. We plan to let him try it out after his last show of the night.

So he does his shows and comes into the Pit to see me. It was interesting to see Sammy so nervous over this. Only he and I knew he would be going on a live game with live players in the casino.

Around 2am I put him on a game. Of course the players are astounded. They can’t believe this. Some are wondering if this is a TV show or something.

Sammy starts out very well and settles down and does even better. He is so courteous to the players. He treats them with respect and handles their money (and ours) properly. He deals for about an hour and does very well for the first time. I was very proud of him. To be truthful I was relieved and so pleased it came off well. Remember this is a long time ago and there were some, no many, who didn’t like seeing a black man being in the casino and here he is, not only in the pit but actually dealing 21. If I didn’t think Sinatra would back me up, I wouldn’t have done it.

Sammy through the years really won everybody over. Sometime I’ll tell about some of the amazing things he did on stage and off.

When he died, this town really felt it. There was a swelling up of emotion about him. I never saw anything like it. All the “show kids” who got to know him, broke down and cried. Many couldn’t do their shows. Some shows had to shut down till the dancers and all the Vegas show people recovered. That week, many would come to The Sands and go through their grief. The dealers and even the hardened Pit Bosses became very sad. Everyone felt it.

The town had just not been prepared for how much it loved him. Las Vegas eventually built a outside theater and center in memory of him.

Many of us in the Casino industry here in Vegas, consider him to be the greatest all around entertainer that has ever played here.

He is surely missed.