Good morning to you SpiderMan,:thumbup2:
The first time I saw Lassiter, he and another road agent came through Atlanta in either 1954 or 1955 and took on Danny Jones and then Joe Cosgrove at Big Town Billiards downtown. Lassiter busted everyone giving out terrific spots too.
A group of us kids (you could get into pool rooms back then at 16, if you had a signed notarized statement from your parents giving it the ok, otherwise you had to be 18) surrounded Lassiter and he showed us the line he had drawn on his ferrule.
Back then magic markers hadn't even been invented, so the lines was done using a fountain pen filled with black India ink so it would stick.
He used the line to point clearer at at the fractions and then would give the cue a very, very, slight rotation in the proper direction for a touch of outside English to offset throw. Then he pulled the trigger. For reverse English he aimed the line at the fraction and then used a backhand pivot to produce the angle.
It caught on for a while around town and then faded away. I kept using it, all my life, and still use it today.
The beauty of using it today is with ProOne it more efficiently defines the shotline from the original perception (the bozos here in the "Dan White Posse" won't understand the difference in the aiming line and the shotline, since they don't use the edge of the cueball, but you will). Using ProOne, we don't have to worry about throw or cling....the system takes care of all that.
In Basic Manual CTE, another use: A 30 degree hit, for example. Setup on the edge of the OB with the line rotated to one tip of outside English, then rotate back to center cue ball and you're dead on the money.
The line guarantees that when you do need English on a shot, you only use one tip maximum, and are provided a very definitive visual reference. Again just another 'edge' to up the percentages.
You can imagine how that line helps today when shooting at those 45 and 60 perceptions where you're "shooting out into blank space". Vastly superior to some goofy fractional method, you know.
Attached picture shows the room where it all started for me. I saw some of the greatest walk up those stairs....and a lot of them walked back down flat broke too.
Regards,
P.L.
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