I asked his permission to post them via my blog, and he graciously said yes.
What is TRULY amazing about these two stories (today's will be about Vegas and the previous was about Johnson City), Michael wrote these only TEN years ago - yet he made the trips in 1965!! He was around 21 years old and even 50 years later, he was able to recall all of these amazing details!
Enjoy!
THE STARDUST
OPEN – Las Vegas, 1965
This time,
Jay and I drove to Las Vegas in his Caddy, and along for the trip also was our
mutual friend Kurt Fankhouser, a good nine-ball and snooker player who was very
good at “golf” played on a snooker table.
He was also a drummer in rock and jazz bands.
We got a
room for something like thirty dollars a week that we took turns sleeping in
when we couldn’t stay awake to watch pool anymore. We could go to Sambo’s and have an economical
pancake breakfast. Yes, there was Sambo’s. Vegas was different then. We hung out together and also went in
different directions sometimes to watch different games, so we all had somewhat
different memories of the trip.
Inside the
Stardust there were tables located in a big ballroom and more tables in a
couple of smaller rooms close by. We
were able to move around and watch all the action, which was incredible. There were people playing five hundred dollar
one pocket just to see if they liked the game.
I saw two guys playing one pocket with a blackboard pointer. One guy got to use the rubber tip, and the
other guy had to use the bare wooden end.
That was the spot. I saw two
other guys playing using just the shaft of their cue.
I saw Irving
Crane, Eddie Taylor, Eddie Kelly, Ronnie Allen, Boston Shorty, Cowboy Jimmy
Moore, U.J. Puckett, Harry Pietros, Greg Stevens, Ritchie Florence, Johnny Ervolino,
Handsome Danny Jones, Jack Perkins, Lou Butera, Cornbread Red, Harold Worst, Hubert
Cokes, Cicero Murphy, Detroit Whitey and so on.
What a list.
We got to
see 9-ball, one-pocket, and straight pool tournament matches, as well as the
incredible, non-stop action everywhere.
Ronnie Allen made a one-pocket game where he played one-handed, and won
so easily that the guy he beat broke his expensive cue over his knee, threw it
down, and left. Some kid in the audience
ran out and picked it up, but didn’t get to keep it. Hubert Cokes came over and asked for the cue
– he wanted to return it to the losing player, who he figured would want it
back when he cooled off. The kid wisely
didn’t give Hubert any problem. That
would have been a mistake.
Eddie Taylor
was beautiful to watch. I saw him curve
around one ball to hit a cross-table bank in 9-ball one game. Danny Jones, playing Eddie in tournament
one-pocket, made a shot where he banked into the side rail, came off and hit a
ball, that ball hit another ball, that
ball hit the rack and made a ball into his pocket, and he proceeded to run out
from there. Taylor was pounding his cue
on the floor in tribute to Danny’s shooting.
It was just some of the best pool I have ever seen.
Cowboy Jimmy
Moore was showing off a little one time and executed the circular draw shot –
the first time I had ever seen it done.
I was halfway across the room when I saw him shoot and the cue ball did
this amazing thing. I literally ran up
to the table to see what was going on.
He did it three or four more times as I watched, absolutely astounded. This was the shot that nobody back at OU
would believe was possible when I told them about it. I turned to a guy who was standing there
watching and asked him what Jimmy was putting on the cue ball. He said, “A ittle bit of left. A lot of low. It’s just that stroke”. Jimmy had a heck of a slip stroke. As a
matter of fact, I started watching closely and a surprising, to me, number of
players used the same type of stroke – some more than others.
I saw Jack
Perkins get down to break 9-ball, straighten up, move the cue ball about an
inch, get down again, fire, 9-ball on the break. What did he know? Just luck?
I watched
Greg Stevens running out some 9-ball. He
hit everything with authority and straight into the heart of the pocket. He had a shot down the rail where the object
ball was in the middle of the side rail – it looked almost frozen - with the
cue ball out toward the center of the table.
He smoked it in, down the rail, past the side pocket. I don’t remember seeing him miss. Later on he was shooting one-pocket, and I
heard someone say, “Greg Stevens’ way to play one pocket is to run 8 and
out”. It looked like it to me. After all these years, he is still one of the
two or three straightest shooters I ever saw.
It’s easy to believe the stories I have heard about him.
Evidently,
this was also the dawn of the new one-shot-ball-in-hand rule in 9-ball. I listened to the players talking about the
rules, and U.J. Puckett was complaining
about it some and played around with it a bit.
This was in a tournament match in the back room. He was playing a local player whose name I
don’t remember. What he did was break
9-ball safe. I have never seen it
since. He just scraped the side of the
one and hardly disturbed the pack. This
was before the rule about 4 balls hitting the rail. His cue ball hit the side
rail, then stopped right behind the pack.
Only about half of the one was sticking out to be hit. His opponent missed, and U.J. had ball in
hand. He froze the cue ball to the one,
shot through it – maybe or maybe not a foul – smashed the rack, and made the
9. An interesting sidelight of that
afternoon was that Sonny Liston came walking in with a couple of people. He evidently liked pool. I saw U.J. go over to meet him and shake his
hand. Sonny was very well dressed in a
suit and looked good.
I have
always been a fan of players who could draw the ball well and here was Harry
Pietros, supposed to be the best in the
country. I heard more than one player
comment about his draw shot as he played in tournament matches. He was showing off in one of the back rooms
and this is what he did: He put a ball
right in the far corner pocket, and the cue ball one inch off the far back
rail. He said, “How far back do you
think I can get the cue ball from there?”
He wasn’t allowed to hit the rail by the object ball – the cue ball had
to come straight back from that position.
He started shooting it and said, “I’m bettin’ that I can reach the end
rail! ”. Unbelievable. He was shooting basically a table-length
jump/masse shot. Once the cue ball flew
off the table and hit the big drapes over the window. That would have done some damage. That’s how hard he was hitting the ball. Finally he jacked up and caught it just right
and the cue ball rocketed back to the center of the table. It didn’t get all the way back to the end
rail, but I could see then that he could actually do what he was willing to bet
on. Wow.
There was
another guy who liked to kick 3 rails around the table. He would spot one, two, three balls on the
spot, keep the cue ball in the “kitchen area” on the same end of the table,
then kick three rails around and try to make all the balls in a corner pocket
in a given time frame, number of shots or something. The balls would spread a little on the first
shot then he would keep kicking 3 rails around, nudging them here and there
until he made them all. He really knew
what he was doing – I saw one of the balls get pretty far up the rail away from
the corner pocket and he was able to bank 3 rails around and cut it back down
towards the corner. I didn’t see him get
very much action, though. I saw him
trying to get Eddie Taylor to bet. HE
said, “Come on, Eddie, kick the balls with me.”
Taylor, with a drink in his hand and a grin on his face, kicked his leg
up a little ways and said, “Kick the balls?” But he didn’t want to play. Guys like the 3-rail man don’t set up games
where they lose, and Eddie knew that. He
probably knew the guy already.
We got to
see one of the biggest money games ever while we were there. I didn’t know at the time that it was
practically historic – I just knew it was by far the biggest game I had ever
seen. One guy was called Sutton and was from
St. Louis. He was playing Larry Perkins,
who I just knew as Larry while we were watching. They were going at it, playing one-pocket for
five and 6 thousand a game. After one
game Sutton said, “OK, we’re covering everything up to seven thousand this
game.” They played all night and as I
understood it, Sutton won about twenty thousand that night. Later on I heard that Sutton actually got
cleaned out after days and days of playing, but I thought he won the night that
I watched. I noticed that he was good at
making a ball right in the pocket and leaving you corner-hooked. He was partners with a dark-haired young
player he kept calling Vernon. I heard
Vernon was a very good player also, which was no surprise. Sutton kept calling himself, “Sutt the
Sucker”.
Once, when Larry was taking a break, one of
the spectators, a tall, lanky man, stepped up and offered to play a quick one
for a thousand. They played, Sutton won,
and the guy paid his thousand and went back to his seat. That was Amarillo Slim Preston. He played pretty good, too.
I watched
Irving Crane, who was classic in every way, play beautiful straight pool,
running 84 before a scratch. He made
some great shots out of the pack. He
played super 9-ball, too. Funny thing,
the tables being used had pockets that would sometimes reject a ball that was
hit perfectly in the center of the pocket with some pace. It would just come right back out on the
table. Crane had to hit one shot pretty hard
to get position, hit it perfectly, and the ball came out on him, costing him
the game and match. He didn’t talk like
a Deacon in the restroom after the match.
I saw Lou
Butera run sixty balls in about a minute or two, it seemed. He was something to watch – very
entertaining. Eddie Kelly, with his
great left-handed stroke, was, like the rest of them, great to watch and
admire. I saw Eddie hit a break shot in
straight pool where the cue ball was very close to the rack. He jacked up, hit it, and the cue ball
powered its way through the rack, all the way to the end rail. There was a gasp from the audience as he did
this.
I was watching
Cowboy Jimmy Moore practice straight pool and of course he was great to
watch. When he finished a rack, he just
gathered the 14 balls together on the end rail, frozen together, and then with
a quick, deft movement pushed them all together up towards the spot, where he
would stop them in exactly the right place.
He was racking perfectly without a rack.
I never saw anybody else do it.
Once when he drew the cue ball back and kicked a ball over into perfect
position for a break shot, he glanced over at me and gave me a little sly
smile. Jimmy was cool.
We returned
to Norman and told everybody who would listen about what we had seen. Within a year or so, Jay was in the Army and
I was in the Air Force. Kurt was still
in school and also working as a drummer.
Jay went on to become well-known and have a career in the pool world,
and I managed to have a career as a computer programmer/analyst and part-time
amateur player. Tragically, Kurt died in
the summer of 1968 in a motorcycle accident, and we both lost a friend. The music world lost a fine drummer.
But we will always have our memories of those
good times and great players. Thanks
again, Jay.
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