I know you're the pool stats guy, so to speak, but Keith's prime, meaning his highest level, was between those years, according to Keith. Keith still had a pool streak after that time, but those years were his strongest. He peaked as a teenager, mainly because he had been playing pool, hitting THOUSANDS of balls every day, as a young boy.
Keith played championship-level pool after '82, especially in gambling. In fact, this is where he may have shined the brightest, in my opinion. Nobody knows how strong he played for sure. He won the BC Open in 1985 for 25K, defeating quite a few name-brand pool stars, but tournaments, as we all know, are usually short races. They don't really illustrate a player's capabilities sometimes. With the break and rolls, 9-ball especially can come down to a game of luck. Heck, he would have won the 2003 U.S. Open if it hadn't been for getting food poisoning the morning of the finals. And he hadn't picked up a stick in a month before that tournament.
When you've hit thousands of balls every day of your life since the age of 10, you tend to live and breathe pool, and that was Keith's life, literally. He used to sleep under the tables at Bob's Billiarsd as a young boy. They would lock the pool room up at night with him in it to keep him safe. At one time, young Keith's baseball game was so strong that he had contemplated getting into baseball, but when his home life deteriorated after the death of his mother, the pool room became his home and its regulars were now his family.
Action is what separates the lions from the lambs in ahead sets and multiple races. Keith's problem when on the road in pool was he didn't know when to quit. He would stay up multiple nights in a row if there was action still available. Many players would watch Keith in this mode and wait for the third or fourth day when Keith was burned out to ask him to play some. That was the only way they had a chance at winning. A fresh Keith would have pulvarized them, and they knew it. That was the well-known secret how to trap Keith McCready. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn't, thanks to chemical warfare.
I remember reading Grady Mathews' posts on AzBilliards years ago. People, especially trolls and newbies, would sometimes pummel Grady with ugly words, and it would incense Grady to no end, often triggering a reply that was, well, over the top. I understand more today why Grady reacted the way he did back then. When you are a lifetime pool player, it is upsetting to read words written by nobodies that have no respect for your pool strengths in life. Oftentimes, this is all a pool player has to cling onto when they grow old. Grady was fortunate to have a loving wife and family; others aren't so lucky. No matter what the trolls and nobodies write, the legend of Grady Mathews lives, and so, too, does Keith McCready's. As long as I'm alive, I won't allow trolls and nobodies to denigrate Keith's legacy.
