Billiards Digest: The Hustler and Minnesota Fats

lfigueroa said:

Not so sure about that.

What most of us are familiar with would be the later edition of Fats. But back in his heyday I think he might have been closer to the Gleeson portrayal.

Lou Figueroa

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Cool pic, very suave, Gleason looking. Tevis would've never seen this Fats, as he was less than 10 years old in those days, and living in CA. Twenty years later, by the time Tevis started writing pool stories, he inevitably based characters off of players he either knew, met, or simply heard about. So rumors about a cool fat hustler up in New York from back in the 1930's could easily of seeped into his writing.

BC21 said:

Cool pic, very suave, Gleason looking. Tevis would've never seen this Fats, as he was less than 10 years old in those days, and living in CA. Twenty years later, by the time Tevis started writing pool stories, he inevitably based characters off of players he either knew, met, or simply heard about. So rumors about a cool fat hustler up in New York from back in the 1930's could easily of seeped into his writing.

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Yes, I agree.

There are many players in the world which I have never seen in person and only know from anecdotal accounts -- I suspect you have had the same experience. So it's not much of a stretch for a young Tevis to have heard of "The Fat Man" -- a pool hustler who dressed to the 9's, drove Duesenbergs, and gambled high.

As a side note, regardless of what Tevis had in mind, a young RW is not too far off from Jackie Gleason in the movie, and a young Eddie Kelly is pretty close to Paul Newman's Felson. Much closer than Ronnie Allen, IMO.

Lou Figueroa

lfigueroa said:

lol, I think you're being more than little hard on R.A.

Besides the cop who found it, who had any idea that an original manuscript still existed? And, if every author in the world felt compelled to search out and travel to visit original manuscripts for their research nothing would ever get published.

Lou Figueroa

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Googled it and EKU archives listing of it showed up on the first page - now, were those archives available 2008 and before? - no idea and maybe not. He sure may not have even thought about such a manuscript existing, and no problem there. Having said that, most authors writing about history will check relevant original manuscripts any chance they get, that's the rule not the exception. Not saying his book was meant to be a "scholarly" work and again, he may have had no thought about it.

Not being hard on him, just asking some questions, I love his book and have read it a couple of times which is why the article got me thinking.

As I said, maybe he didn't want to steal any thunder from the other guy's discovery, and that very well may have been the case.

But that issue and the new assertion that Tevis may have traveled much more widely than he suggested in his own book I just thought would have been an interesting addition to the piece - average Joe reading it wouldn't necessarily know about Dyer's book, even pool folks.

Here's an interesting link to a nice piece by Tevis' wife. Sounds like when he was young he did get out to some nearby towns in Kentucky anyway for a little pool playing.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75c3/2b739c5849934ce9082af6720303809974ee.pdf

Again, just musing a bit and thinking through some questions and by raising them, maybe some additional insights from some people on here will turn up.

lfigueroa said:

Yes, I agree.

There are many players in the world which I have never seen in person and only know from anecdotal accounts -- I suspect you have had the same experience. So it's not much of a stretch for a young Tevis to have heard of "The Fat Man" -- a pool hustler who dressed to the 9's, drove Duesenbergs, and gambled high.

As a side note, regardless of what Tevis had in mind, a young RW is not too far off from Jackie Gleason in the movie, and a young Eddie Kelly is pretty close to Paul Newman's Felson. Much closer than Ronnie Allen, IMO.

Lou Figueroa

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Tevis even mentioned "New York Fats" in his first published short story, "The Best in the Country". But Fats wasn't a main character in that story.

I think Fast Eddie and other upcoming young pool hustling characters Tevis created were partially based on players he'd seen or heard about, but also based on the type of players he could imagine himself being, or wanted to be back when he was hustling little places with his buddy Toby, the owner of the poolhall where Tevis worked.

Even if a writer has a certain person in mind when building a character, most of the time that character also represents (in some way or another) attributes that the writer has or has aways wanted to have. Tevis was about 25 or 26 when he created Fast Eddie Felson, and that's how old Eddie was in the book.

Do any of you players that actually knew Wanderone know if he had a twitch, a little head head jerk on occasion? Just curious.