a strange night
I love you Hu but 160 games! C'mon man, that's a stretch. I have held the table in bars playing Eight Ball from 9 PM to 2 AM closing time on a couple of occasions. And this was on a 7' table against mostly weak opposition. I may have won fifty to sixty games each time. You just can't play that many more games in that period of time.
My partner and I went in a place one evening, still daylight. As usually I let him lead about five minutes. When I went in he was on the only table playing somebody. A couple ladies sitting alone, the only females in the place. It was a cowboy honky-tonk on a weeknight. Hundreds in there on the weekends, maybe a dozen or so now, still early.
I ambled over to the ladies and offered to buy them a drink. They asked for little Millers. Cool, cheap dates! I sat and watched Bobby pocketing fives most regular for awhile, then decided I had better get a challenge up. Bobby didn't always remember the split!
Bobby held the table until my challenge came up, then missed a ball. If he missed a ball playing me I always considered it the signal to take over so I did. I was a long haired bearded stranger, in denim and cowboy boots of the semi-round toe variety. All I wore for a decade or two. No ballcap or I would have looked like most except that beard. Anything but a gray beard screamed hippie back then!
Bobby was known there and was known to scuffle and fight even though he wasn't big. Did a little whittling on occasion too. It was soon obvious that we were together since Bobby and the girls came over to watch and I was flipping him a five to get all four of us a beer when needed. Normally somebody would have picked a fight or even a cutting but taking on the pair of me and Bobby both didn't have much appeal.
Even on that bucket pocketed table only a handful of the guys were a threat to run out. I backed off playing the absolute bangers, made the few that could run three balls think they might get a chance. At the peak I had fifteen or twenty guys challenging the table and with it being fifty cents a game some were putting up five or ten dollars at a time. Nobody really thought they could beat me by then but they all wanted to be the one on the table when I beat myself! How they kept up with challenges was curious to me even that night. A few quick discussions but mostly things stayed very orderly.
Nine foot table, no quarters on the pocket irons. At one time there were one quarter wide challenges covering one long rail and three-quarters of the way up the other long rail. That was roughly 120 challenges on the table at one time! This isn't counting the hour or so before it built up to that or after it started tapering down. People were quitting the game to go straight to work the next morning.
After being the only one buying beer for four all night, and I went through a lot of beer playing pool back then, I stepped out into the bright sunlight the next morning with over eight hundred in fives, two lounge lizards, and a short parade(everybody left in the place) escorting me, Bobby, and the girls to the truck! A warmed over 454 under my hood, once in my truck nobody was catching me.
Being out of work in the seventies those challenges represented a lot of money to me and I knew if I lost a game I was going to be frozen out for a long time so I had to win every game.
This was an area I raced cars in and drank buckets of beer in the stands when I wasn't racing but without Bobby to steer not a direction I had played pool in although not much over an hour from home. I had let the ponies run that first night, a dumb move. Showed up about a month later, I put my money up and won two or three games before the rest of the challenges were pulled off the table. Another month or two I tried again. I put my money up, everyone pulled their challenges. Shoulda milked the cow for years instead of butchering it.
Hu
