In late December, I drove to Club Westside, a 17-odd-acre athletic facility in west Houston, to see the giraffes. I grew up coming here with family friends who were members back when it was mostly just tennis courts. Today, the club has expanded its offerings, including a lazy river and water park, a gym, an indoor driving range, a solid maple basketball court, saunas, steam rooms, something called “HydroMassage beds,” pickleball, a tiki bar, and—the main attraction—a collection of more than 40 exotic animals.

This club is a lesser-known endeavor of one prominent local family, the McIngvales, founding owners of the regional retail chain Gallery Furniture. The family’s 73-year-old patriarch, James McIngvale, is better known as “Mattress Mack,” the Crazy Eddie–style persona he’s donned for local TV ads since 1983. His wife, Linda, is the animal lover: In 2021, when a Bengal tiger escaped from a residential property, prompting a weeklong neighborhood search mission, she helped facilitate its safe transfer to authorities. (She had also previously given the rogue tiger owner a couple of her Capuchin monkeys.) Together, the McIngvales leaped into the national spotlight in 2022, when Mack won what is believed to be the largest sports bet in history—an estimated $75 million—after the Astros won the World Series.

Many were taken with this eccentric multimillionaire, slight yet boisterous, a seeming everyman whose existence recalled the ’80s-era Sun Belt boom. Few outlets reported that he was one of the region’s most influential right-wing figureheads. Indeed, for nearly 40 years now, Mack and Linda have been Houston royalty, less endowed than some of the oil-rich financiers who prefer to burnish their names on Houston’s museums and think tanks, but far more prominent in the public imagination. One recent mural depicts Mack next to Beyoncé, another Houston native. He claims to be one of few men to have fought both Muhammad Ali (at a promotional event) and the WWE’s “Stone Cold” Steve Austin (for charity). After 9/11, he gifted George W. Bush an American flag–themed couch; more recently, he stocked Mar-a-Lago with mattresses at Trump’s request. He’s today’s front man for the city’s right-wing—more immediately palatable than, say, his longtime friend Senator Ted Cruz—but equally haunted by “the radical left.”

Harris County, the most populous county in Texas and home to the city of Houston, is newly solid blue, and, as such, a major battleground in the state. Leading up to the 2022 midterms, Mack appeared on local TV to talk up rising crime. He threw nearly $900,000—his largest ever local........

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