LV father-son team drives to Mississippi to assist friend

Stephen Curran

Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005 | 8:47 a.m.

Three days after Hurricane Katrina turned neighbors' houses in Gulfport, Miss., into matchsticks, Robert Scarborough knew the knock on the front door of his battered childhood home meant one of two things.

"I figured, either somebody's trying to get in here, and I've only got one shot, or I figure it's the cavalry," said Scarborough, who was armed with a shotgun.

The cavalry came in the form of best friend Scott Painter's red pickup truck, which traveled 1,800 miles from Las Vegas to what was left of the pair's hometown.

The 25-year-old golf aficionados, best friends since elementary school, grew up in the now-ravaged town and had plans to manage and possibly buy a golf course there.

Like thousands of others in that region, they now find their plans on hold. Scarborough, who worked at the Grand Bear golf course at Harrah's Grand Casino in Gulfport, is now finishing his orientation as one of the company's newest Las Vegas-based employees.

The hurricane brought a rather unceremonial reunion for the friends last week.

"The first thing I said was, 'What took you so long?' " Scarborough said.

As Scarborough watched looters roam nearby streets and crowds turn angry amid a disorganized and undersupplied relief effort. He said he knew Painter would come.

Without any way to reach the best friend he plainly refers to only as "brother," Painter began the trip certain that he would find Scarborough.

But once on the road, Painter and his father, John, didn't know what they would find when they arrived.

"At this point, we're thinking the worst," said John Painter, project management director of VEGAS.com, a Web site owned by the Greenspun family, which also owns the Sun.

The father-son team were greeted in Gulfport by armed National Guard roadblocks they were certain would keep them from reaching Scarborough's house, which sat only blocks from the water.

"We just went through 'em," said John Painter, whom Scarborough considers his adoptive father. "If someone waved, we'd wave back."

By the time they arrived, Scarborough's disabled mother and grandmother had safely made their way to a nearby shelter, he said.

The effect the storm and the flawed relief effort had on the nation was news to Scarborough. Cut off from nearly everything in Gulfport, he could only put the hurricane in perspective when he reached a motel room -- and a TV -- in Texas.

"It's ridiculous," he said of the confusion immediately following the hurricane. "It looks like a war zone."

He arrived in Las Vegas last week carrying only his Social Security card and a collectable T-shirt from an Alice in Chains concert, ready to start what he says will be a new life in Las Vegas.

On Tuesday, standing in a blue button-down shirt and loafers he borrowed from John Painter, Scarborough said the images of his former hometown still haunt him.

"The first five days I just woke up crying, thinking Ashton Kutcher was going to come out and say, 'You're punked,' " he said, referring to a popular television show based on practical jokes.

"... We used to think the bar was set with (Hurricane) Camille, but Camille just went way down the list."