Column: Mashantucket leader missing in action

Friday, May 16, 2008  

"Something is missing from the big casino celebration on the reservation.

Yes, Foxwoods' new 30-story MGM Grand Hotel, opening this weekend and pushing Connecticut gambling to new and unknown Seinfeldian heights, is absolutely Vegas-worthy.

But where is Skip, the Indian who foresaw the world's largest casino in a swamp, the one who brought us to this uncertain place?

What has happened to Richard "Skip" Hayward — the pipefitter, the failed hog farmer, the brash, boozing, arm-twisting, visionary savant of Indian Country, the native who has done more to change Connecticut than any other figure from the last half-century?

He is both nowhere and everywhere.

The tribal chairman who made Foxwoods an everyday word — still singing that casino theme song, are you? — is gone. Wandering around Foxwoods the other day, I couldn't find so much as a Skip Hayward portrait in the lobby of the Grand Pequot Hotel.

Why even at the big-as-an-airport-hangar bingo hall at Foxwoods, where the rebirth of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation unfolded 22 lucrative years ago, there is nary a sign of Skip.

"Do you know who Skip Hayward is?" I asked, approaching an older man lingering near the long line of people late one recent afternoon. The $15 game was due to start in a few minutes."

Get the Story:
Rick Green: Grand Occasion, But Where's Skip? (The Harford Courant 5/16)
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