Deke Castleman, author of Whale Hunt in the Desert, answers:
First, Cyr was practically born to be a casino superhost. While he was growing up, his family owned a Howard Johnson motel in Kansas, where he worked and learned the hospitality business. He also has a degree from UNLV’s school of hotel management. He got his first job in a casino marketing department in 1986. So he was around before casino marketing changed in Las Vegas in the early 1990s after the Mirage opened up.
Before the Mirage, hosts came up through the old school. They were operations workers -- dealers, floormen, pit bosses, casino managers. And when they reached the top of the operations ladder, they were kicked upstairs into the executive offices to host the big players, all of whom they knew personally after dealing with them in the pit for decades.
These were the cushiest jobs in the casino in the ‘70s and ‘80s, because hosts didn’t actually do much nuts-and-bolts marketing. They basically sat in their offices, taking calls from players who phoned in looking for action and comps. In fact, the old-school hosts had all kinds of taboos against doing any outreach -- they wouldn’t call players at home or at work. They wouldn’t hang out with their players on the casino floor. They’d never take them off property, to a strip club, for example. That kind of thing.
But then Steve Cyr came along. Cyr came from marketing, not operations. He started out working in the VIP Services office at the Desert Inn as a clerk. Then he graduated to slot host and floor or cash host at Caesars. He got fired from there and went back to the Desert Inn as a cash host. He got fired from there and did a stint selling vitamins over the phone for six months. Then he got hired as a slot host at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he smashed all the taboos and broke through all the old-school barriers -- introducing telemarketing to the casino, for example. He actively marketed to players, a novel idea back in the dark ages of the casino business, the early ‘90s.
Still, Cyr was also lucky to come up at a time when he could be mentored by old-school hosts, who taught him important lessons, like how not to burn out players -- how to milk a cash cow over time, rather than slaughter him on the spot for the meat on his bones.
Cyr’s one of the few hosts in southern Nevada today who has a foot in both eras, the old school and the new school. So he serves a dual purpose for my book: His personal history parallels the evolution of the casino business. This makes him an extremely compelling character for any story about casino marketing, which is what Whale Hunt is all about.
