The golfing yogi: The man who says MJ lost $1.2 million to him
The Hocking Hills region of southeast Ohio marks a dramatic change to the state’s flat farmlands, with the Allegheny Plateau creating a sandstone topography of cliffs, gorges, caves, waterfalls, meandering creeks and endless swaths of trees.
This is where Richard Esquinas used the windfall from various business ventures — selling the lease to the San Diego Sports Arena, making six-figure bets on the golf course with Michael Jordan — to build an Aspen-style “cabin” in the middle of nowhere. Where he moved his family in the months after self-publishing a 1993 book detailing his gambling exploits with the Chicago Bulls star that were revisited last Sunday in “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 10-part documentary about Jordan. Where he escaped the public shaming for daring to sully basketball’s king.
“It was a few thousand square feet,” Esquinas says. “It had all the luxuries. It wasn’t rustic. But it was plopped down on 30 acres at the end of a 300-yard driveway, woods everywhere, overlooking a pond, rolling hills, wilderness. You felt like you were lost when you were out there.”
Lost, and found. Esquinas, now 65, still plays golf on the dozens of courses near his current home outside Palm Springs, still carries a single-digit handicap, still isn’t averse to a friendly wager. (“I’ve got guys I spar with,” he says, “but small numbers — $20 Nassaus.”) That hasn’t changed. What has in the 26 years since he left San Diego and left behind a jet-set life — booking Sinatra and U2, arranging boxing cards with Don King, trying to build a new sports arena, courting the NBA and NHL — is less who he is than what he is.
“I’m a yogi,” he says quietly, confidently, proudly. “That’s it, that’s the whole thing. What’s a yogi? Somebody dedicated to teaching and spreading the wisdom of yoga. I felt like this is natural, this is what I want to do, I think I can help people. It’s to serve and share my passion for yoga, to help people sharpen their sword.
“But I still look pretty good in a suit, brother, if I ever put one on.”
He grew up the son of a coal miner, one of eight children, in Raysal, West Virgina.
Their family eventually moved to the South Linden neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, where he caddied at Winding Hollow County Club, some days as many as 54 holes. He helped pay his way through Ohio State with college basketball bets, then moved to New York and connected with a businessman named Harry Cooper, who was looking for someone to run his publishing company in San Diego.
Then he met Jordan.
It was in August 1989, at a summer exhibition game of NBA stars hosted by the Sports Arena a few weeks after Esquinas and Cooper had acquired control of the venerable facility for $13 million. Former San Diego State basketball coach Smokey Gaines introduced them at a postgame reception. Jordan and Esquinas quickly discovered a mutual obsession for golf, and gambling.
“Gamblers have a way of honing in on each other,” Esquinas later wrote in his book. “I knew he was a player and he knew I was a player. It’s an instinctive thing.”
They played the next morning at Riverwalk Golf Club, which back then was called Stardust. Jordan shot 74 and won $2,500.
Jordan made a phone call, canceled an appearance on a late-night television show in Los Angeles and drove to since-closed Carmel Mountain Ranch Golf Course for another 18 holes. Jordan won again.
Those would be the first of, by Esquinas’ count, more than 100 rounds together over the next three years, on courses across the county and country, with steadily increasing stakes. Most days they played 36 holes. One day they played 45.
The standard wager of $1,000 per hole, with an agreement to automatically trigger side bets once someone got behind, quickly escalated. In September 1991 in North Carolina, after two rounds that day, Esquinas faced a putt where he would be down a “manageable $6,000” if he made it and $98,000 if he missed. He missed.
Their next round was at Pala Mesa Resort in Fallbrook, and Esquinas said he brought two $98,000 checks — one to cover what he owed and the other in case he lost the double-or-nothing bet that day. If Esquinas won, they’d rip up the checks. He won.
They kept golfing. Kept gambling.
“It got out of control,” Esquinas says.
Over the ensuing week, he chronicles in his book, the script flipped: Jordan owed him $93,000, then $153,000, then $313,000 ... then double that ... then double that again for $1.252 million following a round at Aviara Golf Club in Carlsbad.
According to scribbles in the margin of a scorecard from La Jolla County Club, Jordan lowered the running tab to $902,000 during the Dream Team’s training camp at UC San Diego before the 1992 Olympics. That’s when they stopped, when Esquinas tried to collect.
They ultimately agreed to $300,000, paid in installments over three years. Esquinas says he received $200,000.
Jordan admitted to that accounting in a 1993 interview with ABC’s
Connie Chung, saying: “I was in the process of finishing off all the payments, but when he pulled this stunt — we never had a written agreement, I was more or less going off my honor — I felt he dishonored me, so I don’t owe him any more honor. What’s the balance? Zero, in my book.”
The “stunt” was Esquinas’ 209page book: “Michael & Me: Our gambling addiction ... my cry for help!” It was released in June 1993, during the Bulls’ run to their third straight NBA championship, filled with details, dollar amounts, scorecards, anecdotes, pictures.
The book’s chief publicist was Rick Schloss, a longtime San Diego media relations fixture who had done work with Esquinas at the Sports Arena. A few months earlier, Esquinas invited Schloss to his Mount Soledad home and told him about his golfing adventures with the world’s greatest basketball player, how he had written a book chronicling it, how he needed help promoting it.
Schloss was skeptical: “Here’s this guy telling me Michael Jordan owed him $1.252 million from golf bets.”
Then the doorbell rang. It was a FedEx delivery for Esquinas, who opened the envelope and handed Schloss a $50,000 check from one of Jordan’s associates.
“Believe me now?” Esquinas asked.
It wasn’t Jordan’s only brush with golf and gambling. The previous year, he was a witness in a federal trial on drug and money laundering charges involving golf hustler James “Slim” Bouler, admitting under oath that a $57,000 check from him found in Bouler’s possession was not a loan, as he originally indicated, but a gambling debt. Bouler wore golf attire during the trial and entered his clubs as an exhibit.