Randall Holland with trophy.

Grad leaves law for poker

By John S. Cole
FSU Communications Group
High-stakes poker may not be the most secure way to make a living, but it has its advantages.
Ask Randall Holland.
Three years ago, Holland, a 1980 graduate of Florida State University's College of Law, gave up his more-than-$65,000-a-year job with the state Comptroller's Office to pursue a career as - you guessed it - a professional poker player.
Don't laugh. For Holland, 44, the choice paid off hands down.
Now, instead of being stuck behind a desk crunching numbers from 8 to 5, Holland travels around the globe, setting his own hours, living in posh hotels and winning - or losing - outrageously large sums of money.
"I've had quite a few days where I've won or lost $10,000 in a game," he said. "Luckily, I've had more winning days than I've had losing."
In April, Holland won $84,000 and a first-place trophy in the "World Series of Poker" in Las Vegas. He earned $16,000 in another tournament for a seventh-place finish. Another FSU graduate, John Cernutto, class of 1966, also won a first place trophy in the "World Series" competitions.
The "World Series of Poker," more like the Olympic games than baseball, pits hundreds of poker players against one another in several competitions. The groups play elimination games until one person in each category walks away with the pot. Holland's earnings over the past three years have allowed him to invest in real estate and start a construction business in Mississippi with his brother.
"Even though I gamble for a living, I am conservative and careful what I do with that money," he said.
A former assistant attorney general, Holland went to work for the state Comptroller's office in 1983 as assistant director of the Division of Finance. He was soon promoted to director.
Holland's reputation for level-headed thinking was such that his parents said they barely flinched when their son quit his job to become a professional gambler.
"He seems to make good decisions," Rose Holland. "We would rather have a happy Randy than an unhappy Randy. He seemed to be ready for a change."
Holland is the first to admit that playing poker for a living isn't the wisest choice for everyone.
"You have to be a person who can stand the misfortunes that come with any game of chance," he said.
But good poker players are not controlled solely by the hands dealt them.
"If you're just lucky, you won't last very long," Holland said. "You've also got to play well.
"It takes an analytical mind. It's not that the decisions are complicated. You just have to make a lot of decisions at once. "
Making those right decisions takes skill and a certain je ne sais quoi.
"You have to have an instinct for the game," Holland said. "That can't be learned. You either have it or you don't."


Jim Towey Speaking to Louise Potocki, 83
during a tour at Colonial Care Center in St. Petersburg.

Towey applies
missionary's zeal to problems of aging

By Larry Keough
FSU Communications Group

In 2010, when the first batch of the post-war babies turns 65, if Florida is ready, it might be because of Jim Towey.
Towey, 39, has founded and is leading the Florida Commission on Aging with Dignity, which has raised nearly $600,000 to find health-care solutions for the 76 million Baby Boomers expected to retire by 2029.
"I liken it to the time when we were in Miami watching Hurricane Andrew form off the west coast of Africa," says Towey, who graduated from FSU with an accounting degree (magna cum laude) and a law degree. "Some people prepared, some did a little bit, and most did nothing."
Towey, who was appointed by Gov. Lawton Chiles in 1993 to head the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, began looking for his next big challenge last year when the Republican-controlled Senate removed him from the job.
Chiles called Towey's ouster the "lynching" of a good man.
"There is a fair amount of anger and hurt from being thrown out of a job that you have done well," Towey says. To overcome the negative feelings, "I had to enroll in the school of mercy."
Towey wanted to help people, but as a father of two preschool children, he couldn't return to missionary work. In the 1980s, he had helped Mother Teresa comfort lepers in Calcutta, tend to AIDS patients in Washington, D.C., and serve the needy in Tijuana, Mexico.
Towey found his new mission through his own family. A year ago last summer, his father, Edward, died of a heart attack. Towey had observed his father's final days and concluded that some of the worst suffering is in comfortable nursing homes.
"Nursing home patients are cut off from light, and they are very lonely," Towey says.
He says government can't do it all.
"I'm basically a salesman," Towey says. "I'm using my contacts to bring people together so we can show people how important this problem is to all of us." Towey announced in May that the commission would bring political, religious and business leaders together to identify health-care problems and offer solutions.
The commission's advisory board includes Chiles; Jeb Bush, chairman of the Foundation for Florida's Future, a conservative, grass roots policy institute; Archbishop John Favalora; Rabbi Solomon Schiff; and others. Towey says the commission's success depends on raising the public consciousness about health care.
"I believe with all my heart that if people speak up, politicians listen," Towey says. "If that happens, I believe our democratic process will work very well."
The commission is financed by $398,690 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, $85,000 from the Claude and Mildred Pepper Foundation and $87,926 from the Weinberg Foundation.



New regent Phil Lewis and FSU's Jon Dalton see Wendy Provenzano's
housing in Reynolds Hall in September, when Lewis toured the campus.

'Great peacemaker' knows the system

By John S. Cole
FSU Communications Group

When the Board of Regents divvies up the money among 10 growing state universities, decides the volatile question of tenure and struggles to balance all the other interests that divide higher education, it can't hurt to have a peacemaker on board.
That would be former state Senate President Phil Lewis, 67, a cigar-chomping (but not smoking) South Florida real-estate broker appointed in May by Gov. Lawton Chiles.
Lewis led the Senate in 1978-80, an era of such legislative backbiting and grandstanding that, one observer says, little would have been accomplished without his cool head and skilled leadership.
"He was the great peacemaker," said Virginia Ellis, who covered state government for the St. Petersburg Times during the 1970s, when Lewis was in the Senate.
"He wasn't the mastermind (behind most bills) but, boy, without him things couldn't get passed," said Ellis, now an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times.
Lewis has made a reputation as a friend of education even though he says himself he "wasn't much of a student."
He left Georgetown University after one year to work on his father's ranch near Lake Worth.
But life was simpler then, he says, and a high school diploma went a lot further than it does now, when college dropouts can scarcely survive, much less thrive, in a high-tech workforce.
Lewis' decision to drop out of school is not one he would be willing to make today, for himself or anyone else.
"The more sophisticated we get (as a society), the more education is needed," Lewis said. "It's something that everybody needs."
But he's not sure everybody will have it.
"What I see long range is a huge group of young people coming up through the system and not having room," Lewis said.
Besides working for access, Lewis hopes to do something about standards.
"We have sort of dumbed down the system somehow," he said. "(It was) all very well intentioned, but it hasn't done the kids any good."
Lewis has been a major proponent of education reform and has worked on countless boards and committees dealing with issues affecting kindergarten through college.
"Education was always sort of a thing with me," he said.
In the Senate, Lewis served on the subcommittee that created the summer semester and helped pass the Common Course Numbering System, which paved the way for articulation agreements between community colleges and universities.
"We were having kids who were accepted into the university and having to take courses all over again," Lewis said. "I thought that was outrageous."
When he retired from the Senate in 1980 - though he was, and remains, extremely popular - some said his refusal to resort to ruthless politicking was a weakness.
"Each person has his own personality, his own way of doing things," Lewis said at the time. "I never believed in putting the arm on anybody, and I never believed in taking senators for a walk over glass when I knew plain well ahead of time what the results were going to be."



J.R. Harding, left, and Dave Briscoe water skiing.

Doctoral student won't be stopped

By Claire Sand
Special to the Florida State Times

James Raymond Harding is studying to be a university president. He skis and scuba dives. He follows politics. He has taught school. He dates a lot ("I'm single, like to mingle"). And now he's a member of the Florida Board of Regents.
The most striking Harding trait is his zest for life. If it's out there, and he can do it, he will.
Without that eagerness to embrace life, Harding, who is paralyzed from the chest down, might be in trouble. More than 10 years ago, a fellow high-school student attacked him from behind and threw him to the ground, breaking his neck and leaving him in a wheelchair for life.
"I tried to do something right and walk away from a fist fight," he explains, but he doesn't dwell on it.
"You move forward," he said. "You have to see how far you can go instead of wondering how it might have been."
So far, at age 29, he's gone a long way. He's a doctoral student in higher education at FSU. Until recently he was a substitute teacher. Last year he interned at the state House and in the Governor's office.
And he plans to compete as a water skier. Because he has limited use of his hands, Harding sits on a kind of snow-board with a parasail harness attaching him to a boat.
"There's no classification for my level of injury," he says "The authorities are going to have to work on that and figure out how I can compete with persons with more ability than myself."
In the meantime, he's just taken the student seat on the Board of Regents, which governs Florida's 10 state universities.
When Harding learned the regents include one student member, he thought serving "would be cool." He actively campaigned for the position and, "to my general surprise, I had an interview with the Governor. ... Speaking with the Governor was a privilege and I tried to do my best."
Harding is used to challenges. He was born in Chicago and went to military school in Indiana when he was in third grade. A self-proclaimed "military brat," he has traveled all over the world, and the walls of his campus apartment display masks from many of the places he's visited.
He spent six months of his high school senior year in the hospital but graduated on schedule and immediately went to Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where he studied English. He earned a master's degree in curriculum and instruction at the University of West Florida.
Dr. David Leslie, Harding's lead professor at FSU, who is now teaching at William and Mary College, says that initially he was a little concerned about the university's ability to meet Harding's needs. But Leslie says there was never a problem.
"He won't let you be intimidated," Leslie said. "He comes right at you and says, 'Take me as a full-blooded human being, respect me and don't pity me. Give me as much help as you can and I'll make it on my own.' "
He hopes to receive his doctorate in December 1997. After that, "Dr. J.R.," as he wants to be called, plans to pursue teaching and research at a university or community college.
What would be his dream job? Running a public institution. "President of a university ­p; West Florida or (Pensacola Community College) would be great!"


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