LITTLE BIG SCREEN - FROM "MAVERICK" TO THE DIERKOP COPPER

As with yesterday's entry, here's another theory of relateeveety for one of the riverboat poker players that looks back to the Future.....

Detective Pete Royster worked alongside 'Police Woman' Pepper Anderson in the LAPD during the 1970s and 1980s.  But his life might have been so much different had his great grandfather won the Big Game on board the Lauren Belle riverboat as it sailed up the Mississippi.

We don't know much from the movie "Maverick" as to who his great grandpappy was, only that he had a simmering hair-trigger temper when he lost.  (The way he shot daggers at Bret for beating him?  If looks could kill....)

He was so angry he even turned down one of the "hostesses".
He would find no comfort there......

There was just something about him that spoke volumes about his past life - that it was hard, dirty, and dangerous.  In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had been a gunslinger at some point in the past.

A possible identity for this angry, broken-nosed gambler?  I think he was a cowboy by the name of Shields.

Shields crossed paths with the famous outlaws Kid Curry and Hannibal Heyes soon after they had decided to go straight in order to win a pardon from the governor of Wyoming.  Although working as a drover for a cattle herd, he probably was not above making fast money in one crooked scheme or another.

Such a life led him to finally gain enough money (most likely from illicit means) to enter the greatest of all poker championships.

Had he not lost, perhaps Shields might have strived for respectability himself and eventually his great grandson, Pete Royster, might have been left in charge of a vast financial empire instead of being a detective working the Major Crimes squad.  But it was not to be.......

BCnU!