Hellmuth's Legacy?

By Gary Wise

ESPN Poker Club (Archive)

It's one thing to be a star. It's another to permeate the public consciousness.

Televised poker is a genre that has typically embraced personalities. No matter the credentials that accompanied the charisma, if a likable player was captured by the camera's eye, "star" might as well have been stamped on his or her forehead. The assembly-line effect was obvious enough to draw Hollywood celebrities seeking a career boost.

Now, five years after the spawning of poker as a regularly televised entity, the flooding of the "professionals" market has deafened us to new talents.

One professional asked me recently, "Other than win the World Series, what does someone have to do to become a star in this day and age?" The answer isn't found in victories and bankrolls, but agents and multimedia.

This is Phil Hellmuth's legacy. The 11-time WSOP bracelet winner -- in case you forgot that statistic -- gave birth to the modern concept of the poker star (Amarillo Slim gave birth to the ancestral species). Before Hellmuth, there was no playing for cameras, no counting bracelets. There was winning and losing money and everything in between was so much noise.

On Tuesday night, Hellmuth will take his hard-earned place at the forefront of ESPN's broadcast of the WSOP -- just one chapter in the depiction of his deepest main event run in years. It was a run that had the entire poker world on pins and needles, considering the media circus what-ifs of four months of self-promotion by the self-promoter who taught the poker world to self-promote. … More