Con't
He played his first pro event in Fort Worth in 1968. Anxiety-ridden, he won only one match and finished out of the money. But the following year, he ran more than one hundred balls for the first time—a milestone for pool players—and two years after that was running in excess of two hundred regularly. In 1973, competing in the U.S. 14.1 Open, a prestigious straight-pool tournament, he toppled two top rivals, Ray Martin and Danny DiLiberto. Based on that performance, he was asked to play in the inaugural Pabst Brunswick 14.1 Invitational Tournament in 1974. He was one of six competitiors, and the other five were all future Billiard Congress of America Hall of Famers. Lane finished first, defeating Luther "Wimpy" Lassiter in the finals—to this day, a major highlight of his career.
In 1975, after graduating with a degree in business administration and completing a stint in the Army, Lane moved to Dallas to be near his stepbrother France (another stepbrother, Ken, lives in Maine). At first he lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment—though still managing to fit in a regulation pool table—and worked in Richardson as the store manager for Bowling and Billiards, a retail supply store. But he itched to play some serious pool and eventually cut his hours to weekends only.
Then, in 1979, his boss introduced him to Nick Alexander, a corporate lawyer who was ready to start a chain of pool halls. Alexander took an immediate liking to Lane, and both were intrigued by the possibility of teaming up—of combining Alexander's business sense with Lane's billiard expertise. Lane wanted not only a position in the company but a financial stake as well. So, along with Alexander and his Southern Methodist University cronies and a few lawyer friends, Lane became an investor. The group initially invested $66,000, with Lane's outlay being $10,000. "I was broke at the time," Lane admits. "I had some surrender value from a life insurance policy my grandfather took out on me when I was five. Later I borrowed some money from my mother, which I paid back with fifteen percent interest. I nearly borrowed some money from a character in a poolroom but thought better of it. Besides, the guy told me he didn't think the thing would fly." The guy was wrong. In August of that year, the first Clicks opened in the European Crossroads Shopping Center, on Northwest Highway in Dallas, and within six months the money was rolling in. By 1982, he was seeing, like clockwork, on the fifteenth of every month, a five-figure dividend check.
By 1984, at age 35, he had enough money to retire. The Clicks chain was expanding aggressively, with Lane investing liberally in all the new locations; the dividend checks, even bigger by that point, kept coming and coming. So, just as he'd always wished he could, like some kind of lottery winner, he up and quit blue-collar life for good and, from that point on, started "enjoying life on my own terms." Which, in Lanespeak, means he finally had the financial freedom to play pool at will—every single day, for hour upon hour, the rest of his life.
Lane says his strength at the table is "managing the risk-reward percentages well," and that his trick for running hundreds of balls is nothing more than an inevitable outgrowth of his supreme love for the game and his ability to concetrate well for long periods. "I'm not talented so much as someone who's logged a lot of hours," he says. Indeed, Lane has always been considered by his peers as something of an eccentric practice freak. "I don't know anybody in the world who has that kind of discipline," says Bob Vanover. And Lane's practice sessions have often extended beyond the pool hall. "I had a friend who lived in the same building as Dick," says Dannie Holt, "and sometimes we'd pass Dick's apartment at four in the morning, and we'd hear him in there still hitting balls."
Even with absolutely nothing on the line, his friends say, Lane is always dead serious about his play. "We were playing in my game room one night," Bob Vanover recalls, "and I turned on some soft music just to kill the quietness. Well, we hadn't been playing but ten minutes before Dick says to me, 'You mind if we turn the music off?'" And after every match, Lane will unfailingly jot the results and a detailed self-critique in his "pool journal," a ritual he's performed for 32 years. It's his somewhat anal attention to detail, in fact, that once helped him recover his stolen cue stick: He spotted it in a poolroom one night, recognizing, of all things, the barely visible grain of wood along the shaft.
So tightly controlled, so technically flawless, so subtly brilliant, Lane's play ultimately produces in his opponent the unnerving feeling of slow suffocation. "He just never does anything silly to hand over games," says 28-year-old top pro Jeremy Jones, formerly of Baytown, who now resides in Jacksonville, Florida. Says Dannie Holt: "He'll run a hundred and twenty-five balls on you, then stick you frozen behind the rack without anything to shoot at. I mean, you sit around waiting for two hours to shoot and he leaves you absolutely nothing."
Last April, in his comeback tournament appearance, Lane exhibited a new, faster pace and placed at the National Straight Pool Championship in New York, entering the finals undefeated before eventually losing to 28-year-old George San Souci. Earlier in the event, San Souci had lost to Lane by a wide margin, after which the up-and-comer described the experience as totally weird. "The guy doesn't do anything spectacular," he said. "No one thing impresses you. But somehow the balls keep going in the pocket, he keeps tearing apart the racks, and before you know it, you're in a deep, deep hole. He's definitely a great player, but great in a way I've never really seen before."