I was 5. Dad put two old wooden coke bottle crates together by bracketing them on the inside and put plywood on the bottom and then he put 4 small lockable wheels off of an old-timey hand ringer for clothes on the bottom. I kept 3 of the 4 locked so I could pick it up and roll it around the table and shoot. I learned the basics on a 9' table in Icard, NC.
My parents owned a poolroom by the time I was 7. I didn't need the pool stool by that time. I mostly played 9-ball and some 8-ball.
When I was about 20, I started going to the poolroom in Morganton, NC and they played 6-ball on the snooker table. I got a taste of 10-ball snooker from that place and they played a lot of golf there too. It wasn't long before I got barred from playing with them.
I was 26-27 when I moved to Oklahoma City and got introduced to serious 1 Pocket. It was in OK that people started calling me Hillbilly because of the accent and because of what my grandpa and dad did for a living (moonshine and chicken fighting).
I moved from OK to Houston about 5 years ago and started playing pro events around June 2004.