Did you mean WGAF?.....such talkapparently it means no one gives a airborn copulation.
Pool and Race
- Thread starter Biloxi Boy
- Start date
I mean unless you are new to #merica you gotta understand many people are not equipped to answer such questions involving race
I remember white pool halls and black pool halls. Somehow black guys that could play well got much whiter than bangers! When I had worn out my welcome at most of the white pool halls around town I went to the black pool halls with a black friend who had been making laps of the white places with me. Apparently the main reason white men came was to chase black poon. Once they found out I was there to play pool I was welcome most places, not all. A few too many times the black gamblers gave me a voluntary guard out to my vehicle after playing because they heard somebody planned to cut me when I left. Had to give those places on the dark side of Baton Rouge up!
These days things seem pretty evenly mixed in southeast Louisiana with the local population being mainly what decides the make-up of people in the pool hall. I don't care if the crowd is mostly light or mostly dark.
Better tournaments are mostly white but the black players of appropriate skill level are usually there. I notice midlevel gamblers have little issue with race, green is green! All in all, race seems to be a nonissue unless somebody cares to make it one.
As a general rule, people go where they feel welcome. After a forced move after a storm I am still looking for a pool hall in Hammond, Ponchatoula, Amite, or points west Decent tables, nonsmoking. I have became highly allergic to cigarette smoke so that part is a rub sometimes.
Hu
These days things seem pretty evenly mixed in southeast Louisiana with the local population being mainly what decides the make-up of people in the pool hall. I don't care if the crowd is mostly light or mostly dark.
Better tournaments are mostly white but the black players of appropriate skill level are usually there. I notice midlevel gamblers have little issue with race, green is green! All in all, race seems to be a nonissue unless somebody cares to make it one.
As a general rule, people go where they feel welcome. After a forced move after a storm I am still looking for a pool hall in Hammond, Ponchatoula, Amite, or points west Decent tables, nonsmoking. I have became highly allergic to cigarette smoke so that part is a rub sometimes.
Hu
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Biloxi Boy
Man With A Golden Arm
We live in the same place. I was always welcome on the black side of town, but I seldom stayed late unless with a black friend. Folks crossed over both ways -- if a person was "known" he had no problems. Strangers, black and white, were usually welcome, although not necessarily with open arms -- until they hung around long enough to be "known" and then one became part of the "family". Assholes, black or white, did not seem to stick nowhere.
The town which keeps kicking around in my head is Chicago. I never lived there, but my understanding is that rooms there were routinely labeled as "black" or "white".
What about all this makes you white boys squirm?
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It's funny. A good friend of mine was one of the leading computer network specialists and instructors in the nation. His wife was the local State Farm agent. Between the two they were probably knocking down over a quarter million in nineties dollars. They lived in small town Mississippi by choice. The occasional open racism didn't bother him. What angered him was the closet racism on the east coast and some other areas he traveled to.
I don't pretend I wasn't brought up in fifties and sixties farm society but even then things were often quietly integrated. Come time to butcher a few pigs or harvest crops there would always be more folks invited than needed to do the work. Neighbors up and down the bayou, black and white. Nobody expected to be paid for doing a favor, everyone did expect to bring some of the harvest or animal home and nobody left disappointed!
Summertime and I was sitting on a friend's side porch one evening. Work done, sun setting, time to chill and rest a little. Naturally all the doors and windows were open trying to catch the first of the evening's cool air. A girl in the house was spun up about something and was cursing white people mightily. Somebody pointed out I was just a few feet off. She didn't even draw a breath, "Aw Hu knows I am not talking about him." A small community of a few thousand and most of the time when I was there I was the only white person in town! I had made my bones and nobody local would say a bad word about me.
I was maybe three years old when I rode with dad about ten miles up the road to buy something he needed to make repairs around the farm. The store owner tried to gouge in dad's opinion and he spent half the trip home bashing Italians, bunch of money hungry crooks! After five minutes of nonstop rant I pointed out that mom was Italian. He didn't realize I was old enough to make the connection with mom and shut up immediately. I have found that a lot of the "hate" of groups was about like dad's I don't think there was a single group he thought was any good, yet he had friends in every group imaginable.
I was tiny when I listened to the conversations about black people being lazy and a bunch of thieves. Soon somebody would have to speak up for a black friend, then one after another would proclaim their black friend as good as gold. I wasn't walking good before I realized these cracker barrel conversations didn't hold together in a logical manner! No black any good except for one after another the people present testified for! Of course all of the black people mentioned raised their children right so pretty soon the original premise about black people in general didn't hold water!
Hu
Posting this separately, just a silly off topic story that became a national incident. I think I have posted it before but it is a chuckle I think.
My great uncle was nicknamed Tee, for obvious reasons, he didn't top five feet by much. He owned a good sized farm and a country store all on Hwy 1, the main highway north and south through Louisiana before the interstate system, the time period this happened in. Blutch was damned near a giant, taller than many basketball players and a powerful man. Sometime between midafternoon and evening Uncle Tee would decide it was time and reach behind the counter for a pint of whiskey, sometimes a quart if it had been that kind of a day. He and Blutch would pass the bottle back and forth and if that one went dry too quickly Uncle Tee would break out another bottle. However they never started off with separate bottles. Even if stocks were running low and they were drinking out of a half-pint, they shared. The ceremony of friendship was important.
One afternoon a pint or more had vanished and just in casual conversation Tee was bemoaning no garden this year, the engine was bad in his little tractor. All he had were big field tractors that the garden equipment wouldn't fit on. Uncle Tee did have all the equipment for a mule but no mule. Blutch proclaimed, "Hell, I can pull a plow!" Enough whiskey had flowed that this seemed a good idea to both of them in about 1970!
Uncle Tee's garden spot was next to Hwy 1 with only a wide shallow ditch and barbed wire fence between the highway and garden. Next thing you know, this huge black man is pulling a plow with Uncle Tee back there guiding the plow. Soon somebody stopped to take a picture. Wasn't long before cars were lining the highway!
Not sure how the wire service picked it up but it was in major papers all over the nation about a white man using a black man to plow with, naturally taking place in Louisiana! This was front page news. It wasn't until media started sending their own reporters to run down follow-ups for the story that the truth came out, no racism to be a hot story just two drinking buddies had gotten in their cups one afternoon and decided this was a good idea!
Not the follow-up that the big newspapers and TV media wanted so the few disclaimers posted were buried in back pages of the paper under small single column headers where the original article had been on the front page across many columns! Uncle Tee did get his garden in and neither he or Blutch was too impressed with their brief fame! Uncle Tee wasn't one of the great thinkers of this world and this was just one more incident in life to him! It did almost involve a lynching, Uncle Tee's by my aunt! She was a great deal less than pleased for them to be laughing stocks. Sweet lady, easily proven by putting up with Uncle Tee for a lifetime. Of course divorce was something they only did in the big city.
By the by, there was an old nine footer in Uncle Tee's store. A nickel a game or you got an extra game or two for a quarter. Like the store, the pool table and jukebox gladly took anybody's money! That table was one of the first I ever hit a pool ball on, maybe the first.
I miss the good ol' days. They weren't perfect but they were good!
Hu
My great uncle was nicknamed Tee, for obvious reasons, he didn't top five feet by much. He owned a good sized farm and a country store all on Hwy 1, the main highway north and south through Louisiana before the interstate system, the time period this happened in. Blutch was damned near a giant, taller than many basketball players and a powerful man. Sometime between midafternoon and evening Uncle Tee would decide it was time and reach behind the counter for a pint of whiskey, sometimes a quart if it had been that kind of a day. He and Blutch would pass the bottle back and forth and if that one went dry too quickly Uncle Tee would break out another bottle. However they never started off with separate bottles. Even if stocks were running low and they were drinking out of a half-pint, they shared. The ceremony of friendship was important.
One afternoon a pint or more had vanished and just in casual conversation Tee was bemoaning no garden this year, the engine was bad in his little tractor. All he had were big field tractors that the garden equipment wouldn't fit on. Uncle Tee did have all the equipment for a mule but no mule. Blutch proclaimed, "Hell, I can pull a plow!" Enough whiskey had flowed that this seemed a good idea to both of them in about 1970!
Uncle Tee's garden spot was next to Hwy 1 with only a wide shallow ditch and barbed wire fence between the highway and garden. Next thing you know, this huge black man is pulling a plow with Uncle Tee back there guiding the plow. Soon somebody stopped to take a picture. Wasn't long before cars were lining the highway!
Not sure how the wire service picked it up but it was in major papers all over the nation about a white man using a black man to plow with, naturally taking place in Louisiana! This was front page news. It wasn't until media started sending their own reporters to run down follow-ups for the story that the truth came out, no racism to be a hot story just two drinking buddies had gotten in their cups one afternoon and decided this was a good idea!
Not the follow-up that the big newspapers and TV media wanted so the few disclaimers posted were buried in back pages of the paper under small single column headers where the original article had been on the front page across many columns! Uncle Tee did get his garden in and neither he or Blutch was too impressed with their brief fame! Uncle Tee wasn't one of the great thinkers of this world and this was just one more incident in life to him! It did almost involve a lynching, Uncle Tee's by my aunt! She was a great deal less than pleased for them to be laughing stocks. Sweet lady, easily proven by putting up with Uncle Tee for a lifetime. Of course divorce was something they only did in the big city.
By the by, there was an old nine footer in Uncle Tee's store. A nickel a game or you got an extra game or two for a quarter. Like the store, the pool table and jukebox gladly took anybody's money! That table was one of the first I ever hit a pool ball on, maybe the first.
I miss the good ol' days. They weren't perfect but they were good!
Hu
When I first started playing in the mid-60's, most of the pool rooms in Durham NC and Washington DC were all White or all Black (well, not when I was there). The biggest exception was Guys and Dolls outside of Washington in PG County, which prior to the opening of Weenie Beanie's Jack 'n' Jill in Arlington VA was one of the leading action rooms in the country, with regulars including the likes of Eddie Taylor, Joey Spaeth and Strawberry. Now all the rooms I go to are thoroughly mixed. Triple NInes in Elkridge MD is like a UN General Assembly, with its weekly tournament a near even mix of Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians.
FTR when Jack 'n' Jill first opened they had an informal rule against mixed race matches. I know this because when I tried to rent a table to play a Black friend I was turned down for this very reason. It was the best action room in the country, but in its early years it had a distinct redneck aura to it. Fortunately by around 1972 this pretty much changed. If the world at large paid as little attention to race as pool players, the world would be an infinitely better place.
Biloxi Boy
Man With A Golden Arm
Now the world just needs to learn to deal with assholes in the same manner as pool players have for many years. I am convinced the reason pool hall culture developed and existed as it did was because bad behavior was just not tolerated. One might have some real shit between his ears, but it best not come out his mouth. Pool hall websites should run so well.
Biloxi Boy
Man With A Golden Arm
SOME folks here maintain pool is in a transition period -- from pool rooms to tournaments -- and that pool is infinitely better off for the change as it is being freed from all of the negative elements, gambling, etc., which have attended it for years. I don't get around a lot anymore, but the tournaments I attended did not have many blacks playing. I can now see that AZB is not the place to suss anything like this out. What I need to do is find a group of black players and see what they say.
I think the pro tournament level is different from the local level. To play on the pro circuit these days requires a considerable amount of up front money, and while the very top players can get sponsors, below their level it's not that easy. But in outlying blue collar areas you'll still see a fair number of Black players.
What you also have to take into account is the rent factor. When I started playing in the 60's, there were literally dozens of pool rooms, nearly all Black, within the city limits of Washington alone. Drive by many of these former pool room locations today and you're likely to find luxury condos in their place, or destination restaurants. There's simply no way that pool rooms can survive in inner cities in this hyperinflated real estate market.
I read the original post (#1) and jumped right here without reading anyone else’s comments. This is a a tar baby issue but here’s my take. In Fresno, Black, Hispanic, Asian pool players abound and on many nights are the predominant patrons. I believe, and I want to, that local demographics are a primary contributing factor and the population of the pool room changes with the time of day, day of the week and month in the year. It does in Fresno because employment hours on your job can vary with the season that can affect your availability, discretionary funds, other recreational activities and family involvement.
Interesting you mention the time of day factor. In one of the first pool rooms in Washington I ever went to on a regular basis, the midday crowd was made up largely of salesmen from the nearby Pontiac dealership, along with former neighborhood residents who'd since moved out to the suburbs. That would have been mostly White folks. But then as soon as the sun went down, the players were 99% Black, because that's what the neighborhood had become. Since then the neighborhood's become mostly White (and very pricey) once again, but the pool rooms have never returned.
Pool rooms still harbor a Music Man Movie like stigma in the minds of a certain segment of our population.
There were 3 poolrooms in the small 50s midwest town where I grew up, and the one with the best equipment/players had a decidedly racist management. I usually laughed along with my teenage peers at the racial humor bandied about there, but had to confront a disturbing awakening when the black school friend I was hanging with then refused my invitation to go play pool with me. He was reluctant to explain, but finally admitted that he wouldn’t be allowed in. It never occurred to me before then how the former evil would naturally lead to the latter (go figure).
A couple pool halls I played at were segregated well past when the law allowed them to be. I don't remember if it was the city or the state that declared that bars and pool halls, maybe restaurants too, had to be integrated. I owned a business too so while I didn't care one way or another about integration I did care about the gubment telling business owners what they had to do!
The pool halls were both designed by the same man and were classic pool halls. A couple tables wide, the counter about seventy-five feet from the front door, the whole thing maybe 125' deep or so. Often a lady worked the counter one place and we were especially protective of her. We had one of the largest black universities in the nation in town, maybe five miles from the pool halls, more or less. The lady had made it plain she wasn't comfortable serving black customers.
One Saturday afternoon about a half dozen largish young black men walked in and walked up to the counter, ordering beer. As usual Ms Sue didn't refuse service, she was just very slow giving it. Before the beer was in front of them there were about twenty pool players surrounding them. Most of the players had brought house cues with them. There was a minute or two of silence and the young men decided they weren't all that thirsty after all!
Not many months later with a few days notice four of the front line of that university football team decided they were going to go in there and get served. I'm here to say those young men were big! The usual shuffle of feet and over a dozen pool players circled them, house cues in hand for the most part. Same thing, they departed quietly.
It was partly being outnumbered and out armed that decided these incidents, I think a lot had to do with the silent menace of the players and their obvious willingness to do violence. I didn't weigh the racial issue too much, it was more defiance of government overreach. Looking back I can't say I am or was proud, I wasn't sorry either. Our reaction would have been the same had the government tried to cram any other group down the room owner's throats.
I accidentally stopped at a black place on the road and the reaction was much the same when I think about it. No violence but a very solid show of force. I was dry so I got some beer in cans and went down the road with the beer unopened until I was back on the highway!
The late sixties and early seventies were times of great turmoil but great promise too. I really thought I would see the end of racism. Now I have to think it ebbs and flows but never dies.
Hu
Biloxi Boy
Man With A Golden Arm
Nearly the same story, except young white men with long ass hair, having to stop at the Red Neck Inn (the last chance before a dry county). "Oh yeah, you can get your beers, but you can get your damn asses out, too." Nothing like a near frozen Bud on an un-air conditioned July night.
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I know what you mean! Both being a furriner and cold beer. I knew I was in a foreign land when I stopped in West Texas. Really got in deep crap on the back side of the main island of Hawaii.
Any time you have worked hard and are dry a very cold beer is special. Maybe the best ever was the beer at the dirt track on Wednesday afternoon. The track would open for practice and testing. Generally dry as a popcorn fart and the inside of my mouth would cake with dust and dirt. Didn't help any that I was often laughing out loud as I drove, even in actual races! Anyway, the track owner would open up the beer box where the beer had been chilling for days, since the last weekend. The first mouthful turned to mud and hit the ground. The second mouthful with flecks of ice in it went down with the rest of that can to follow. The second can I slowed down enough to taste it. One more and I was wet enough to take the race car out again!
I used to help people move and do all kinds of chores. I priced out my services by how many cases of beer it was gonna cost!
Hu
All the black players I know are too smart. They look at the white boy who doesn't have a chance at a national level event and aren't about to throw their money away doing the same thing.
At the local player, white/black/brown/yellow/purple/ players fill the pool rooms as bangers, tournament players, and gamblers, in about the same ratio as whatever that neighborhood is.
At the local player, white/black/brown/yellow/purple/ players fill the pool rooms as bangers, tournament players, and gamblers, in about the same ratio as whatever that neighborhood is.
Biloxi Boy
Man With A Golden Arm
Critical mix on iced down beers being: Buds + Ice + Rock Salt, liberally applied.
Makes me shiver just thinking about -- so cold retrieving burned my hand.
Makes me shiver just thinking about -- so cold retrieving burned my hand.