I grew up during the mass transition from Mali style to Simonis felt. From memory the old felt seemed to get very slow with humid conditions. So rooms without A/C wear tough.
I have told this story a few times but it fits here. I found an old pool hall on the Mississippi River in Port Allen or West Baton Rouge as it was also called back in the seventies. The place had no AC and a big fan four feet or bigger, maybe six feet, in a hole in the wall. The tables were ten footers with deep cloth and the balls were clay. The cue sticks filled your hand like the big end of a softball bat. After being embarrassed within the first few games with balls stopping feet short of the hole I was shooting at, I learned it took a stroke to move balls around. I had one when needed but the falseness of my friend's strokes that weren't obsessed with pool were quickly revealed.
There was also an area near one corner pocket on the table I favored that was like the top of an old cigar box dropping marbles. You didn't have to aim at the pocket, you came at a shallow angle from the far end of the table and if the ball was rolling very slowly it would curve into this pocket, partially due to the bed of the table, partially due to directional felt.
Most of the object balls played fine but the seven ball rolled off badly and the four about halfway between the seven and the other balls. I would try to get the seven off early with a hard hit, didn't want to have to do much with shape off of the seven . One thing, each table had it's own set of balls there so you always got the same balls with the same table and you learned the eccentricities of both!
I didn't play there as much as I would have liked as the area was extremely corrupt and could be dangerous to outsiders. I stopped by a friend's house one afternoon and he had gotten a ticket in Port Allen. To show him just how corrupt the town was I called the sheriff's office with the most ridiculous story I could think of. "A friend of mine has a first cousin who has a brother that is a deputy there. Could you do something with this ticket?"
"Sure, tear it up." and it was gone. I told my friend that had gotten the ticket to never pay one in Port Allen, just make a phone call.
Late night memories of a time and place, and people long gone. I moved away and only found out recently that my friend who got the ticket died before he made fifty. Didn't see what he died of but it felt strange to know he had been gone all of these years. We met over a pool table and had been pretty tight for years back when. I had known his whole family. Funny how pool and pool tables were so woven into my life for ten years or a bit longer then I moved on to raising a family and didn't pick up a stick but maybe a couple times a year for decades.
Hu
