For those of you who were following my previous thread about finding an old billiard article about a guy who went mad playing pool. . .I found it and here it is. Hopefully I'm not breaking some law copying it here.
OK, it might not be clinical insanity, but Nagy's pain is one that many fellow pool players feel from time to time.
Enjoy!
Table Scratch;
Gene Nagy of Queens was a pool legend, then a legendary burnout. He won't go near this week's U.S. Open: 'Everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong.'
Newsday (New York)
August 19, 1992, Wednesday, CITY EDITION
Copyright 1992 Newsday, Inc.
Section: PART II; Pg. 52
Length: 2826 words
Byline: By Michael Geffner. Michael Geffner is a free-lance writer
Body
LA CUE BILLIARDS, on Grand Avenue in Maspeth, Queens, is one of those new-fangled upscale poolrooms, with brass-domed lights, a CD jukebox, video games, bottled water, and plenty of well-dressed teenagers. The place is all wrong for Gene Nagy. Possibly the most gifted pool player this city has ever produced, Nagy came from dust-filled rooms with clouded-over windows and coffee-stained floors. In the pristine La Cue, he looks too much like an aging war veteran crashing a high school prom.
Even at 4 in the afternoon, Nagy walks into the room looking like he just woke up on a park bench, his graying beard untrimmed and springing wildly, his thick hair uncombed and his eyes watery and hugely puffed. He wears a sagging, wrinkled gray sweatshirt and faded black jeans, carrying a worn leather cue case under his arm. "Where'd you find me?" he says quickly in a guttural Queens accent squeezed from the side of his mouth. "I'm a freakin' dinosaur. I've been dead for almost twenty years."
It was 20 years ago that Gene Nagy, the whiz kid who quit Juilliard to become a top-flight pool player, competed among the 20 best in the country for the title of No.1 straight pool player in the United States. But as players gather for the same reason at the Roosevelt Hotel this week at the U.S. Open Pocket Billiards Championship, Nagy will be nowhere to be found, remaining in hiding after all these years, in a strange, self-imposed exile, continuing to keep his distance from the hardcore pool community.
"I don't have any fond memories about those days," he says, removing tobacco from a small pouch around his waist to roll a cigarette. "So I don't wanna reminisce. I don't wanna have to explain away the last fifteen years. I know everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong. And, the truth is, nothing went wrong. I just didn't wanna torture myself anymore. I nearly drove myself insane."
Unable to cope with the pressures of the game, a 27-year-old Nagy, addicted to drugs and alcohol as well as battling the demons of his own temperament, suddenly, at the top of his game, quit pool in 1974 and never returned. You won't find him in any record books, but his name is legendary in pool circles coast-to-coast; at his best, Gene Nagy was the vision of perfect pool. Now 45, Nagy says he's thoroughly "eaten up," a self-admitted pool burnout who's broke and jobless and on the verge of separating from his wife of 19 years.
"I've lost ego, ambition, and desire," he says. "I don't care about anything anymore. All I wanna do now is hit some balls around and play out the rest of my life."
He was born on Oct. 6, 1946, the only child of Gene and Theresa Nagy, a hyperactive Queens kid who was a quick learner and had a natural bent toward music. He played the piano at six, the trumpet at 13, and seemed on his way to a career as a classical musician when he was accepted to Juilliard at 16. But, halfway through his senior year in high school, something happened that changed Nagy's life forever: In the basement of his friend's house, he played pool for the first time. The trumpet instantly took a back seat.
"The turning point," he says, "was when I had this big concert coming up and rather than going to rehearsals, I played pool for two weeks solid and didn't pick up the trumpet once. It was Beethoven's 'Egmont' and it had some tricky trumpet parts, parts that if you missed the whole hall would know it. Well, the thing was held at Carnegie Hall, and the moment I saw the audience, my whole body shook. I was so scared I needed to wrap my legs around the chair to lock in. We ended up getting a standing ovation but after that I put down my trumpet and never played again."
Nagy chucked Juilliard three-quarters of the way through his first year and announced to anyone who'd listen that he was becoming a pool player. "Little did I know that I was going from one pressure cooker to another," he says. His parents were naturally disappointed but there was nothing they could do. Possessed by a full-blown case of pool fever, Nagy went from playing two days a week to nearly living in Arcade Billiards in Jackson Heights. The Arcade was managed by Joe Balsis, a former world champion.
Nagy practiced alone for 10 hours a day, sometimes as long as 20, and often spent the entire time on a single shot. People who knew him back then thought he was going mad. "I was driven in those days," he says, "like there was an evil spirit inside me. I thought I could train myself to be a machine and play perfect pool all the time. I wanted to do the impossible, to never miss. I know now that that was crazy."
But that was Nagy. They called him Crazy Gene, and during his heyday, in the late '60s and early '70s, he was known as much for his brilliant play as for his frighteningly erratic, self-destructive behavior. He was a relentless perfectionist with bizarre, uncontrollable tirades. "He'd shoot like God one moment and act like a maniac the next," says Pete Margo, a former top player from Staten Island who's now an executive for Palmer Videos. "When things didn't go Gene's way, he was capable of almost anything. Playing for money, he'd quit in the middle of a game he was leading."
Allen Hopkins, a current pro from New Jersey, first played against Nagy 25 years ago. "The things I remember most about Gene are his absolutely beautiful stroke and his consistent long-range shotmaking. But Gene would take every loss and every missed shot to heart. He just wouldn't allow himself to fail. It's too bad, I wish he were still playing, because Gene had a lot of greatness in him."
Nagy was strung so tightly, the slightest misplay would make him go haywire. He smashed custom-made cue sticks into pieces, tore up money, threw balls across the room, extinguished cigarettes on the back of his hand, and once even charged a wall headfirst at full speed. "I can laugh at it now," he says. "But at the time, it wasn't so funny. The stress caused by my own imperfection was killing me. I just couldn't accept being imperfect."
He eventually dealt with the pressures of the game by drinking and taking drugs, drugs to rev up his game and drink, if not to punish himself, to wind himself down. He was drug-specific, too: speed for the furious action of nine-ball and tranquilizers for the slower pace of straight pool.
OK, it might not be clinical insanity, but Nagy's pain is one that many fellow pool players feel from time to time.
Enjoy!
Table Scratch;
Gene Nagy of Queens was a pool legend, then a legendary burnout. He won't go near this week's U.S. Open: 'Everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong.'
Newsday (New York)
August 19, 1992, Wednesday, CITY EDITION
Copyright 1992 Newsday, Inc.
Section: PART II; Pg. 52
Length: 2826 words
Byline: By Michael Geffner. Michael Geffner is a free-lance writer
Body
LA CUE BILLIARDS, on Grand Avenue in Maspeth, Queens, is one of those new-fangled upscale poolrooms, with brass-domed lights, a CD jukebox, video games, bottled water, and plenty of well-dressed teenagers. The place is all wrong for Gene Nagy. Possibly the most gifted pool player this city has ever produced, Nagy came from dust-filled rooms with clouded-over windows and coffee-stained floors. In the pristine La Cue, he looks too much like an aging war veteran crashing a high school prom.
Even at 4 in the afternoon, Nagy walks into the room looking like he just woke up on a park bench, his graying beard untrimmed and springing wildly, his thick hair uncombed and his eyes watery and hugely puffed. He wears a sagging, wrinkled gray sweatshirt and faded black jeans, carrying a worn leather cue case under his arm. "Where'd you find me?" he says quickly in a guttural Queens accent squeezed from the side of his mouth. "I'm a freakin' dinosaur. I've been dead for almost twenty years."
It was 20 years ago that Gene Nagy, the whiz kid who quit Juilliard to become a top-flight pool player, competed among the 20 best in the country for the title of No.1 straight pool player in the United States. But as players gather for the same reason at the Roosevelt Hotel this week at the U.S. Open Pocket Billiards Championship, Nagy will be nowhere to be found, remaining in hiding after all these years, in a strange, self-imposed exile, continuing to keep his distance from the hardcore pool community.
"I don't have any fond memories about those days," he says, removing tobacco from a small pouch around his waist to roll a cigarette. "So I don't wanna reminisce. I don't wanna have to explain away the last fifteen years. I know everybody's gonna wanna know what happened to me, what went wrong. And, the truth is, nothing went wrong. I just didn't wanna torture myself anymore. I nearly drove myself insane."
Unable to cope with the pressures of the game, a 27-year-old Nagy, addicted to drugs and alcohol as well as battling the demons of his own temperament, suddenly, at the top of his game, quit pool in 1974 and never returned. You won't find him in any record books, but his name is legendary in pool circles coast-to-coast; at his best, Gene Nagy was the vision of perfect pool. Now 45, Nagy says he's thoroughly "eaten up," a self-admitted pool burnout who's broke and jobless and on the verge of separating from his wife of 19 years.
"I've lost ego, ambition, and desire," he says. "I don't care about anything anymore. All I wanna do now is hit some balls around and play out the rest of my life."
He was born on Oct. 6, 1946, the only child of Gene and Theresa Nagy, a hyperactive Queens kid who was a quick learner and had a natural bent toward music. He played the piano at six, the trumpet at 13, and seemed on his way to a career as a classical musician when he was accepted to Juilliard at 16. But, halfway through his senior year in high school, something happened that changed Nagy's life forever: In the basement of his friend's house, he played pool for the first time. The trumpet instantly took a back seat.
"The turning point," he says, "was when I had this big concert coming up and rather than going to rehearsals, I played pool for two weeks solid and didn't pick up the trumpet once. It was Beethoven's 'Egmont' and it had some tricky trumpet parts, parts that if you missed the whole hall would know it. Well, the thing was held at Carnegie Hall, and the moment I saw the audience, my whole body shook. I was so scared I needed to wrap my legs around the chair to lock in. We ended up getting a standing ovation but after that I put down my trumpet and never played again."
Nagy chucked Juilliard three-quarters of the way through his first year and announced to anyone who'd listen that he was becoming a pool player. "Little did I know that I was going from one pressure cooker to another," he says. His parents were naturally disappointed but there was nothing they could do. Possessed by a full-blown case of pool fever, Nagy went from playing two days a week to nearly living in Arcade Billiards in Jackson Heights. The Arcade was managed by Joe Balsis, a former world champion.
Nagy practiced alone for 10 hours a day, sometimes as long as 20, and often spent the entire time on a single shot. People who knew him back then thought he was going mad. "I was driven in those days," he says, "like there was an evil spirit inside me. I thought I could train myself to be a machine and play perfect pool all the time. I wanted to do the impossible, to never miss. I know now that that was crazy."
But that was Nagy. They called him Crazy Gene, and during his heyday, in the late '60s and early '70s, he was known as much for his brilliant play as for his frighteningly erratic, self-destructive behavior. He was a relentless perfectionist with bizarre, uncontrollable tirades. "He'd shoot like God one moment and act like a maniac the next," says Pete Margo, a former top player from Staten Island who's now an executive for Palmer Videos. "When things didn't go Gene's way, he was capable of almost anything. Playing for money, he'd quit in the middle of a game he was leading."
Allen Hopkins, a current pro from New Jersey, first played against Nagy 25 years ago. "The things I remember most about Gene are his absolutely beautiful stroke and his consistent long-range shotmaking. But Gene would take every loss and every missed shot to heart. He just wouldn't allow himself to fail. It's too bad, I wish he were still playing, because Gene had a lot of greatness in him."
Nagy was strung so tightly, the slightest misplay would make him go haywire. He smashed custom-made cue sticks into pieces, tore up money, threw balls across the room, extinguished cigarettes on the back of his hand, and once even charged a wall headfirst at full speed. "I can laugh at it now," he says. "But at the time, it wasn't so funny. The stress caused by my own imperfection was killing me. I just couldn't accept being imperfect."
He eventually dealt with the pressures of the game by drinking and taking drugs, drugs to rev up his game and drink, if not to punish himself, to wind himself down. He was drug-specific, too: speed for the furious action of nine-ball and tranquilizers for the slower pace of straight pool.
