Help me find this billiards article from years ago!!

dearnold

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Any chance it was one of George Fels's columns? He wrote a lot of articles about players who might not have been up to tournament speed but were interesting for other reasons. I can also see George using the "throwing rocks at rabbits" phrase. George's columns were typically a full page.

This article would have been like a 3-5 page spread in your typical magazine. It was pretty long. The throwing rocks at rabbits was a direct quote by the author of the article from the subject of the article.

I had so much hope that you, Bob, would have known this one!!
 

pt109

WO double hemlock
Silver Member
I'm still digging...this thread rang a distant bell...but I can hardly hear it.

While we're waiting, here's an old story about a man who demanded a lot of himself..

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Sunday, March 12, 2017
Fox: Death by Fly or Shark?

This excerpt, below, from an old edition of the New York Times describes the discovery in 1866 of the body of pool player Louis Fox in a Rochester, New York river. But how did Fox's body get there?


According to one very colorful (and perhaps apocryphal) story by sports historian Frank Menke, Fox, shortly before his death, had played a challenge match with John Deery to determine the 1865 world billiards champion. "Fox, far in the lead and on his way to winning, found himself bothered by a fly, which, despite 'shooing,' continued to light on the cue ball," wrote Menke in his 1939 Encyclopedia of Sport. "Fox, excitingly trying to chase the fly, miscued, and it was Deery's shot. Deery ran out the string to win the championship. The heart broken Fox rushed out of the hall to a river, leaped in, and was drowned."
Deery, left and Fox

In a slightly different account from the Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester (by William Farley Peck and published in 1884), Fox killed himself because he was distraught over the "loss of his championship cue." Meanwhile on page 103 of the 1898 edition of Championship Billiards, Old and New, the author claimed that Fox, "some time after his defeat, was found dead in the river, and it has always been claimed that, crazed by grief, he committed suicide."

So, the question at hand -- as put forth by billiards writer J.D. Dolan -- is whether Fox was killed by a fly or a shark.

-- R.A. Dyer
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Pushout

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
No, Crazy Frank Piasecki died of cancer.
...a lot of people would be surprised to find he played chess at a high level....
...he looked more like a weightlifter.

I didn't know Frank had died. Saw him play a HELL of a game of One Pocket against Jerry "Bugsy" Feihl from Endicott at Cap's one day. Literally banked balls from just about anywhere. Friend of mine was backing Jerry and pulled up after two games.
 

book collector

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I'm still digging...this thread rang a distant bell...but I can hardly hear it.

While we're waiting, here's an old story about a man who demanded a lot of himself..

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sunday, March 12, 2017
Fox: Death by Fly or Shark?

This excerpt, below, from an old edition of the New York Times describes the discovery in 1866 of the body of pool player Louis Fox in a Rochester, New York river. But how did Fox's body get there?


According to one very colorful (and perhaps apocryphal) story by sports historian Frank Menke, Fox, shortly before his death, had played a challenge match with John Deery to determine the 1865 world billiards champion. "Fox, far in the lead and on his way to winning, found himself bothered by a fly, which, despite 'shooing,' continued to light on the cue ball," wrote Menke in his 1939 Encyclopedia of Sport. "Fox, excitingly trying to chase the fly, miscued, and it was Deery's shot. Deery ran out the string to win the championship. The heart broken Fox rushed out of the hall to a river, leaped in, and was drowned."
Deery, left and Fox

In a slightly different account from the Semi-Centennial History of the City of Rochester (by William Farley Peck and published in 1884), Fox killed himself because he was distraught over the "loss of his championship cue." Meanwhile on page 103 of the 1898 edition of Championship Billiards, Old and New, the author claimed that Fox, "some time after his defeat, was found dead in the river, and it has always been claimed that, crazed by grief, he committed suicide."

So, the question at hand -- as put forth by billiards writer J.D. Dolan -- is whether Fox was killed by a fly or a shark.

-- R.A. Dyer
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a lot of money bet on these matches at that time of history, his backers may have thought he tanked and helped him commit suicide.
The match was held on September 4th and he was found missing in December, so he did'nt just go out of the Hall and dive in.
This was a challenge match, so in theory he could have challenged Deery for another 500 or 1000 and gotten the title back almost immediately , {as long as he could find a financier}! Below is an article in Life Magazine that describes the fly incident and other news from 1951.
https://books.google.com/books?id=j...MzAD#v=onepage&q=Louis Fox John Deery&f=false
I have never heard of the bat story either, but this incident has been recounted in quite a few books and magazines.
A.L. Spinks was also a great source of information about the 1800s players . He was the author of Spink Sports Stories 1000 big and little ones about many sports, written about 1921 I believe, it was a 3 book series, very hard to find nowadays.
The article also tells of a player who would knock himself out after a loss and another who ran his head into plaster walls if he lost.
 

lfigueroa

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
There was a lot of money bet on these matches at that time of history, his backers may have thought he tanked and helped him commit suicide.
The match was held on September 4th and he was found missing in December, so he did'nt just go out of the Hall and dive in.
This was a challenge match, so in theory he could have challenged Deery for another 500 or 1000 and gotten the title back almost immediately , {as long as he could find a financier}! Below is an article in Life Magazine that describes the fly incident and other news from 1951.
https://books.google.com/books?id=j...MzAD#v=onepage&q=Louis Fox John Deery&f=false
I have never heard of the bat story either, but this incident has been recounted in quite a few books and magazines.
A.L. Spinks was also a great source of information about the 1800s players . He was the author of Spink Sports Stories 1000 big and little ones about many sports, written about 1921 I believe, it was a 3 book series, very hard to find nowadays.
The article also tells of a player who would knock himself out after a loss and another who ran his head into plaster walls if he lost.


And not us not forget the old-time player who had one of the all time great sharks from the chair: he had a wooden leg and after a miss would sit in the chair, pull out a knife, and start stabbing himself in "the leg."

Lou Figueroa
 

Bob Jewett

AZB Osmium Member
Staff member
Gold Member
Silver Member
And not us not forget the old-time player who had one of the all time great sharks from the chair: he had a wooden leg and after a miss would sit in the chair, pull out a knife, and start stabbing himself in "the leg."

Lou Figueroa
Here is a quote from one of George Fels's columns in Billiards Digest (Nov. 2010) that mentions Robert Cannefax, the leg stabber:

Robin and Gilbert didn't like one another, either, and even in a game that universally attracts gentlemen, you can find outright boorish behavior here and there. Most famously, that would include one Robert Cannefax, who played decades before any of the above men were alive. The late Danny McGoorty, captured brilliantly by Robert Byrne in a book that has had five separate printings, told of the charming Cannefax' tendency to stroll around the arena before his match began, shaking his fist and promising, "Dis bum won't get 10 points." Cannefax became one of America's top players despite the challenge of a wooden leg; he bolstered his own frightful reputation by stabbing himself in that leg in frustration when opponents were at the table, possibly as a sharking technique (and I'd guess that it was an extremely effective one, especially the first time any given opponent saw it). He actually utilized that same knife to savage his table's cloth once - in a match with the patrician Willie Hoppe, yet - because he felt the balls were not rolling properly. Fortunately, the loony-tune's table-leveling procedure never did catch on elsewhere.​
After Cannefax slit the slow cloth in the match against Hoppe, he was barred from billiards for life.
 

dearnold

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Found it Part 1

Table Scratch;
Gene Nagy of Queens was a pool legend, then a legendary burnout. He won't go near this week's U.S. Open: 'Everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong.'
Newsday (New York)

August 19, 1992, Wednesday, CITY EDITION


Copyright 1992 Newsday, Inc.


Section: PART II; Pg. 52

Length: 2826 words

Byline: By Michael Geffner. Michael Geffner is a free-lance writer


Body
LA CUE BILLIARDS, on Grand Avenue in Maspeth, Queens, is one of those new-fangled upscale poolrooms, with brass-domed lights, a CD jukebox, video games, bottled water, and plenty of well-dressed teenagers. The place is all wrong for Gene Nagy. Possibly the most gifted pool player this city has ever produced, Nagy came from dust-filled rooms with clouded-over windows and coffee-stained floors. In the pristine La Cue, he looks too much like an aging war veteran crashing a high school prom.

Even at 4 in the afternoon, Nagy walks into the room looking like he just woke up on a park bench, his graying beard untrimmed and springing wildly, his thick hair uncombed and his eyes watery and hugely puffed. He wears a sagging, wrinkled gray sweatshirt and faded black jeans, carrying a worn leather cue case under his arm. "Where'd you find me?" he says quickly in a guttural Queens accent squeezed from the side of his mouth. "I'm a freakin' dinosaur. I've been dead for almost twenty years."

It was 20 years ago that Gene Nagy, the whiz kid who quit Juilliard to become a top-flight pool player, competed among the 20 best in the country for the title of No.1 straight pool player in the United States. But as players gather for the same reason at the Roosevelt Hotel this week at the U.S. Open Pocket Billiards Championship, Nagy will be nowhere to be found, remaining in hiding after all these years, in a strange, self-imposed exile, continuing to keep his distance from the hardcore pool community.

"I don't have any fond memories about those days," he says, removing tobacco from a small pouch around his waist to roll a cigarette. "So I don't wanna reminisce. I don't wanna have to explain away the last fifteen years. I know everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong. And, the truth is, nothing went wrong. I just didn't wanna torture myself anymore. I nearly drove myself insane."

Unable to cope with the pressures of the game, a 27-year-old Nagy, addicted to drugs and alcohol as well as battling the demons of his own temperament, suddenly, at the top of his game, quit pool in 1974 and never returned. You won't find him in any record books, but his name is legendary in pool circles coast-to-coast; at his best, Gene Nagy was the vision of perfect pool. Now 45, Nagy says he's thoroughly "eaten up," a self-admitted pool burnout who's broke and jobless and on the verge of separating from his wife of 19 years.

"I've lost ego, ambition, and desire," he says. "I don't care about anything anymore. All I wanna do now is hit some balls around and play out the rest of my life."

He was born on Oct. 6, 1946, the only child of Gene and Theresa Nagy, a hyperactive Queens kid who was a quick learner and had a natural bent toward music. He played the piano at six, the trumpet at 13, and seemed on his way to a career as a classical musician when he was accepted to Juilliard at 16. But, halfway through his senior year in high school, something happened that changed Nagy's life forever: In the basement of his friend's house, he played pool for the first time. The trumpet instantly took a back seat.

"The turning point," he says, "was when I had this big concert coming up and rather than going to rehearsals, I played pool for two weeks solid and didn't pick up the trumpet once. It was Beethoven's 'Egmont' and it had some tricky trumpet parts, parts that if you missed the whole hall would know it. Well, the thing was held at Carnegie Hall, and the moment I saw the audience, my whole body shook. I was so scared I needed to wrap my legs around the chair to lock in. We ended up getting a standing ovation but after that I put down my trumpet and never played again."

Nagy chucked Juilliard three-quarters of the way through his first year and announced to anyone who'd listen that he was becoming a pool player. "Little did I know that I was going from one pressure cooker to another," he says. His parents were naturally disappointed but there was nothing they could do. Possessed by a full-blown case of pool fever, Nagy went from playing two days a week to nearly living in Arcade Billiards in Jackson Heights. The Arcade was managed by Joe Balsis, a former world champion.

Nagy practiced alone for 10 hours a day, sometimes as long as 20, and often spent the entire time on a single shot. People who knew him back then thought he was going mad. "I was driven in those days," he says, "like there was an evil spirit inside me. I thought I could train myself to be a machine and play perfect pool all the time. I wanted to do the impossible, to never miss. I know now that that was crazy."

But that was Nagy. They called him Crazy Gene, and during his heyday, in the late '60s and early '70s, he was known as much for his brilliant play as for his frighteningly erratic, self-destructive behavior. He was a relentless perfectionist with bizarre, uncontrollable tirades. "He'd shoot like God one moment and act like a maniac the next," says Pete Margo, a former top player from Staten Island who's now an executive for Palmer Videos. "When things didn't go Gene's way, he was capable of almost anything. Playing for money, he'd quit in the middle of a game he was leading."

Allen Hopkins, a current pro from New Jersey, first played against Nagy 25 years ago. "The things I remember most about Gene are his absolutely beautiful stroke and his consistent long-range shotmaking. But Gene would take every loss and every missed shot to heart. He just wouldn't allow himself to fail. It's too bad, I wish he were still playing, because Gene had a lot of greatness in him."

Nagy was strung so tightly, the slightest misplay would make him go haywire. He smashed custom-made cue sticks into pieces, tore up money, threw balls across the room, extinguished cigarettes on the back of his hand, and once even charged a wall headfirst at full speed. "I can laugh at it now," he says. "But at the time, it wasn't so funny. The stress caused by my own imperfection was killing me. I just couldn't accept being imperfect."

He eventually dealt with the pressures of the game by drinking and taking drugs, drugs to rev up his game and drink, if not to punish himself, to wind himself down. He was drug-specific, too: speed for the furious action of nine-ball and tranquilizers for the slower pace of straight pool.
 

dearnold

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Found it Part 2

"I had my first amphetamine when I was 22. I was playing in Georgia and missing everything in sight. So afterwards this guy came over and said, 'You want some heart, kid. Here.' And he handed me two Christmas Trees. I had them for breakfast the next day, got to the pool room and didn't miss a ball.

"Uppers steadied me, made me alert. Everything would be so crystal clear. I could even see the fibers of the cloth." The word was, if Nagy went to the bathroom, you couldn't beat him. He'd come out like a superman and wouldn't miss a ball for hours. "I popped pills like popcorn," he says. "I'd get so that I'd foam at the mouth and wouldn't know where I was." And, according to Pete Margo, "Gene wasn't shy about telling the whole world about it. He'd say, 'I'm just gonna pop these Black Beauties and run out all night.' We'd just look at each other cross-eyed in disbelief."

"On the juice," as Nagy refers to it, he became one of the most feared players in New York City. He began running a hundred balls without missing almost daily, and in 1974 recorded an astounding high run of 430, a feat equaled by only a handful of players in the history of the game.

One memorable night in 1971, at the old Golden Cue on Queens Boulevard, Nagy bet his last $ 50 on a straight pool match against Cisero Murphy, the 1965 World Champion.

Nagy broke the balls, Murphy ran 86 and scratched, and Nagy proceeded to make 150 straight to close out the game. "The thing that set Gene apart was that he controlled his cue ball like an old master at a very young age," says Margo. "Young guys usually are shotmakers. But Gene was both. He was a great shotmaker and a great position player. He could be beat anybody in the world when he was on."

Nagy took his high-speed game on the road five times, for a total of a year and half, playing the best players around the country for high stakes, at least in 1960s dollars (Nagy says the most he ever played for was $ 500 a game). "I did it to escape working," he says, "and it ended up being even harder than work."

On the road, he says, he was threatened with guns, stiffed on bets, played matches for 3 1/2 days without sleep, had sleeping pills dropped in his drinks, and was attacked by wild animals. "I was in this dingy room in Lorain, Ohio," he says. "It was August and this room had no air conditioning, just the front and back door open to let the air through. Well, I'm down on this shot and all of a sudden, there's this bat flying right at me. It goes just over my head and out the front door. I nearly fainted. I was shivering for days after that."

Nagy's first shot at the big time came in 1972, when, at 25, with no legitimate professional experience, he was invited to the World Invitational for straight pool on his rep alone. The move was unprecedented, but Nagy made a decent showing, coming in 13th out of 20. The tournament promoter, Fred Whalen, afterward likened Nagy to Ralph Greenleaf, considered by many to be the greatest straight pool player of all time. Legendary Willie Mosconi said of one of Nagy's runs, "That's the best I've ever seen the balls taken off the table."

In the same tournament in 1973, he improved to eighth and carded the only perfect score (a run of 150 straight balls from the break shot in a 150-point game) in the three-week event. But then, in 1974, playing the best pool of his life, he mysteriously walked out of the tournament and forfeited his final seven matches. "I was playing super in '74, but about two weeks before the tournament I started experimenting with a different stroke, " he says. "I decided to try it in a game against this Japanese guy I was much better than and I lost. I just couldn't make a ball with the new stroke.

"Later, I found out that this guy Jersey Red [a top player] bet a lot of money on me in that game and was tracking me down. He wanted to kill me. The whole thing made me sick. I became disgusted with whole idea of competing. So I said, 'That's it. I'm sorry I ever played this game.' And I packed my stuff, went home, and never played competively again."

After retiring, Nagy worked at four different pool halls, was a dishwasher, and a carpet-layer's assistant. But today, jobless for over a year, he has no intention of working again. "I hate work, always did. If I never had to go back to work again for the rest of my life, I'd be happy. That's why I chose pool. It was exciting. As a pool player, you'll have days that you play so bad you'll wanna hang yourself. But there are other days, when your hands'll be like magic and you'll get that rush that a working man could never get."

Supported by his parents, Nagy lives a child's life now, calling it the "perfect lifestyle." He wakes up whenever he wants, flies his stunt kites and model airplanes in the park, watches TV (his favorite programs are "Hawaii Five-O" and "Married With Children"), takes a nap in the afternoon, plays pool, and goes to sleep.

Nagy rides his bicycle (he doesn't drive a car) five minutes from his home in Elmhurst to La Cue nearly every day, arriving at 4 and leaving at 10. He plays only an hour, then spends the remaining time watching others, hanging out to talk, and occasionally coaching some aspiring players (he's become somewhat of a eccentric guru to a handful of up-and-coming local players). He plays mostly by himself, never keeping score and preferring that no one watch him. "The nerves are still there," he says. "I still can't handle the stress of having to perform. And all those drugs blew out my nerves even worse. If I get too much of a crowd around me, I [lose it]."

He still plays near-perfect pool, but there's not even a hint of his old temperament when he misses. He plays fast and with no emotion. "I went from playing like a rocket scientist, from thinking way too much, to playing like a caveman throwing rocks at rabbits," he says. "And I actually think I'm a better player now than I was as a kid."

What you notice immediately is Nagy's trademark stroke, the purity of it, the elegant smoothness. Nothing flashy. Just a simple unwavering back-to-front movement, as if his cue stick were held on a beam. But there are no practice strokes now; he just gets down and pops. "I got that from archery," he says. "In archery, you pull back and release, your first aim being your best. Pool is so mental. The longer you stroke, the more negative thoughts come into your head. I shoot too fast now to think about missing."

Whether or not he's shooting better, he's definitely healthier. He's been drug-free for the last 15 years and sober for the last year, he says. He avoids sugar, coffee, meat and eggs, becoming a vegetarian who occasionally dabbles in herbal tea. The only habit he's not able to kick is pool.

He's gone periods without playing, once for as long as eight months, and constantly threatens to hang it up for good. But he always comes back. "The bug to play will likely stay with me until the day I die," he says. "I'll always be a pool bum. I can watch two people who can't play and still enjoy myself. Just to hear the click of the balls makes me feel good."

He says, though, if he had it to do all over again, he would've loved to have been the first trumpet in the New York Philharmonic. "If I could've handled the stress," he adds. Nagy pauses, then blurts quietly, "Pool was definitely a mistake for me. I know that now. So many people tried to warn me about becoming a pool player. The great Onofrio Lauri, who always wore a suit and tie to the pool room, once pulled me over and showed me two holes in the crotch of his pants. He said, 'I've been playing forty-five years and I've got nothing. Understand what I'm saying, kid?' "Yet, with everybody telling me I was making a mistake, I still walked into the gunfire."

Cues For The U.S. Open

MARK TWAIN took up pocket billiards in his later years, playing up to 10 hours a day. The humorist once said that the most distinct sound in the world was the click of billiard balls.

Beginning today, some serious clicking will be heard in the Roosevelt Hotel Grand Ballroom at 45th and Madison, site of the U.S. Open Pocket Billiards Championship.

Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to midnight, four Brunswick Gold Crown tables will be in action at the same time. (Semifinals and finals are from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday.) The top 48 players - 32 men and 16 women - will compete for pool's most prestigious prize: straight pool champion. The competition will be fierce because, unlike Dan and Dave, pool players must win to make money; there's roughly $ 50,000 at stake here.

Nine ball is a volatile Nintendo-generation, wind-aided sprint; straight pool, a circuitous, thinking person's marathon. It requires that players call every shot, with the first player to pocket 150 balls winning. Says Brunswick President Jim Bakula, "In straight pool, there's always the chance you'll see a perfect game - a run of 150 from the opening break."

Admission of $ 10 to $ 25 (less for mid-week games, more for weekend) buys three sets of matches, day (11 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or evening (6:30 p.m. to midnight). Spectators can move about to watch any of the four simultaneously played games. VIP seating ($ 20-$ 35 a session) affords better depth perception. (All tickets available at hotel.)

Both women's and men's semifinals will be held Sunday, at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., respectively. The finals are scheduled for 7 and 9 p.m. Prior to the men's finals, trick shot exhibitionist Mike Massey will perform.

Defending U.S. Open women's champion is New Jersey's Loree Jon Jones, a good bet to repeat. Contender Ewa Matayais is ranked No.1 and Robin Bell, ranked second, has been international champ two years running. In the men's field, Steve Mizerak has won a combined six world championships and U.S. Opens. Three-time world champions Mike Sigel and Ray Martin are threats, as are two-time champions Nick Varner and Dallas West. Defending champion is Oliver Ortmann of West Germany.

New York stories abound. Billie Billing, ranked 11th, is from Brooklyn, as is former world champion Cisero Murphy. And there's fourth-ranked Joann Mason-Parker from Monticello, a dark horse to win the Open who recently had her high run: 77 consecutive balls.

When New Yorkers hear the words "U.S. Open" they think tennis. The etiquette in pool is identical: Audiences remain quiet while players shoot, applauding only after shots. And despite Minnesota Fats' crack that putting a tuxedo on a pool shooter is like putting ice cream on a hot dog, players will be in formal wear.
 

garczar

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Gene was like Rainman combined with chemical-warfare. Take talent, mix in some anal-retentive tendencies and top it off with pharmaceuticals. The outcome is fairly predictable. He was only 2yrs older than my current age when he passed. RIP Gene.
 
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