I haven't posted anything here for three or four years, but the different views of Jay Helfert, for whom I have much respect, and "Bavafongoul," whom I do not know, prompt me to reach into my memory bank. I can only tell you what I saw in Ames.
In September or October of 1965 I was a new graduate student at a school in New Jersey. Over dinner one evening an Indian student who enjoyed billiards mentioned to me that the pool room where "The Hustler" had been filmed was in NYC, only about an hour from where we were sitting by bus. We decided that when we had finished dinner we would board the bus and ride into the city. I had never been anywhere outside the Midwest. I still remember when the bus turned a corner in New Jersey and suddenly all of lighted Manhattan appeared before me. I will never forget the image. People on this forum may be able to identify what tunnel or turn or whatever it was that we came through or out of, but we had no preparation for what we saw, just all at once that spectacular vision.
At the Port Authority Terminal, I suppose we found a phone book and looked up Ames. I think we may have asked a policeman where Forty-Seven Street was. I mean, I represented the twenty-two-year-old experience of Cincinnati and my friend represented Bombay by way of London and the School of Economics there and probably thought, "Oh, look! A Bobbie. We can ask him where the pool room is.". All I can say is that I don't remember any rudeness or discourtesy from whomever it was we asked for directions.
Now, as green as I am about the Big City, I am not green about pool and billiards. Joey Spaeth, who was not an unkind man, once described me as "the kid with the million dollar stroke and the five-and-dime pair of eyes." I had seen Clem Metz in social interaction but never had seen him stroke a cue ball. (Look him up.) I had spent eight weeks one summer around Detroit Whitey when he had come to Cincinnati and had watched from a medium distance what that performance was like. I knew Tom Smith quite well. He was a Croatian gentleman who was what we would now call a "pool detective." He is immortalized in Walter Tevis's "The Hustler" in the scene after Fast Eddie has his thumbs broken and they heal. Eddie goes looking for someone who can play well so that he, Eddie, can see if he can potentially still play pool against a skilled player. The scene is in the novel but not in the movie. Tevis would have known Tom. So, when my friend and I found Ames and went upstairs, I knew what we were looking at from the billiards aspect.
The room was not a dump, but it was completely dark except for one billiard table. On two sides of that table were risers with people sitting on them. I would say that there were about forty gentlemen occupying those risers. There was no light on anywhere in the room except for that one billiard table. There were no other people in the room playing. The match was three-cushion billiards in sets of fifteen or twenty points. The contestants were as different from one another as could be. The one was a young man, in his early twenties, dressed in presentable golf clothes: slacks and a dark red Lacoste golf shirt. Younger people will have to understand that in those days, before the "Sixties," people showed self-respect in the way they presented themselves. He was very handsome. I learned later that his name was...well, I'll do the eighteenth century thing and give a false name with the same number of syllables. Let's say his name was "Jimmy Carruthers." That will be the same number of syllables for each name and the same pattern of accented syllables. I learned fifty-five years later that he is still alive and in Florida. His opponent was a man in his sixties. He was in businessman slacks and a dress shirt that was dazzlingly white --and so heavily starched and stiff-looking that you felt that you could hear it crackle when he stroked.
This little scene that my friend and I had walked in on lasted about three hours. During that time no one spoke above a whisper, and then only when one game had ended and another was about to begin. There was no interaction among the spectators during games. When a game came to an end, whichever player was to break in the next would go the head of the table and stand there waiting. On the risers during that interval a few people would move about and speak very quietly to one another. Sometimes you would see an envelope change hands. After a few moments of this activity, the player about to break would look around the risers at a few people . When he had received whatever nods or whatever signs he was looking for, he would bend over and play the break shot.
After three hours this all broke up. Everyone rose from the risers and started to talk to one another. Apparently they all knew one another, which one might not have guessed from the formality during the match.
I will leave you to judge whether there was any action at Ames.
