I was about 19 yrs old and at Norwalk Family Billiards in So Cal. A friend Bob Brown and I were broke when two players asked Brown to hold their stakes 7 ahead 9 ball $50 a piece. Brown put me in action for$100 against a much weaker player. I was afraid to play because of the potential bad outcome. Well I was dogging it. The sets of the other players were coming to conclusion when Brown told me to start riding the 9 ball. I made the 9 ball three times in a row to win out just as those other sets finished up. I was so nervous that night.
Great Pool Room Stories
- Thread starter brunswick1901
- Start date
the johnston city tourny shut down in 71 or 72. the stardust tournys were going strong well back in the 60's
Makes me wonder why I never liked nor played in tournaments?!?
Look at all the fun I missed.
Aww Shucks.
Class act.
In the bar tonight playing a little barbox 8 ball and there is a loud argueing drunk at the bar. Reminded of a time in the poolhall when a guy bet a loudmouth he couldn't shut up for 30 minutes-not a word. We all were laughing at the loudmouth squirming along the rail. He did manage to win but was so embarrassed he left.
Definitely would have me sweating buckshot. Best when playing on other people's money they know about it! A friend worked at Kaiser Aluminum. He had a dirt track late model and after admiring the new paint one year I noticed a Kaiser Aluminum Decal on his car door right over the number. "Jr, what's with the Kaiser Aluminum decal?"
"They are sponsoring me this year."
The decal was small enough to go on a hardhat or smaller. "Jr, why is the decal so small?"
"They don't know they are sponsoring me!"
Hu
This runs long, might interest some dreaming of the glory days of road players. It was glory days for a few, a hard way to scratch out a living for most of us.
The song fits perfectly! I went over to Jr's one day and he was pulling pieces of a side grinder out of his lunch box! Working in the petro-chem plants sometimes it was just for the challenge!
Bobby, who I talk about on here a good bit had an open shed behind his home he did mechanic work in. He needed a chain hoist or come along to pull an engine that weekend. There was a nice pretty little chain hoist hanging in the unit a bit over sixty feet in the air, chains reaching ground level. Lots of other choices but Bobby decided this was the one he wanted. Bobby was medium sized but he had a plan. He would wrap the lift chain and running chain around his body and lay the main body of the chain hoist in the crook of his arm and drape his jacket over it.
Bobby hadn't really done the math, that was 180' of steel chain he was toting along with the block itself. The block wasn't huge, I think it was about a ton and a half lift capacity, but that was a lot of damned chain! I had walked by it many times hung permanently in a unit. I happened to be working near Bobby and he came out one day looking a little thick around the waist. He had been giving the guard a six pack of beer now and then and figured he was golden when they inspected lunch boxes and ignored the fifty pounds or so of fat he seemed to have put on overnight!
The catch was it was over a quarter mile from where the hoist hung to the gate. The temperature was in the forties that Wednesday and Bobby was soaked with sweat by the time he got to the gate! He had sweat the size of buckshot sticking out on his face! His knees were visibly wobbling too. I don't know what that little hoist and chain weighed but 100-150 pounds would be a good guess. After he got out the gate it was still a long walk, close to another quarter mile to where his truck was parked. The plant was the size of a medium sized city and the lot was long and thin! I made Bobby lean against the backside of a truck and I had to go get my truck to load Bobby and the chain hoist in to get to his truck. One thing he had overlooked was that 180' of chain wrapped around his torso didn't move and he was struggling to get enough air to survive! It was a hero move but I have seen greater efforts. Same plant, somebody stole a twenty-five ton cherry picker. Another friend. He hung a two inch valve on the cherry picker, got paperwork for the valve, and the guards ignored the six wheel picker! They changed guards at noon in a move that had to cost them millions over the years!
Back to the chain hoist. I got Bobby unwrapped and in his truck. Took about thirty minutes for him to recover enough to drive. He had damned near killed himself to steal this chain hoist. He had a V-8 engine to pull Saturday morning and figured this hoist was the ticket although it wasn't going to work too good at ground level with an extra fifty feet of lift chain and lifting chain.
Come Monday morning Bobby came to work mad enough to chew spikes and spit thumb tacks! Some son of a bitch no count no good bastard had stolen his chain hoist he had worked so hard for!
The guy that stole the cherry picker had stolen three of the old style huge 300AMP Lincoln welders before that, just set them over the fence for a man, for seventy-five dollars total! Ten thousand dollars or so worth of equipment, I would have at least got one for myself when talking that kind of jail time. This couldn't go on forever and it didn't. Fortunately for the heavy equipment thieves their compadres in crime were heavily involved in a political killing, killed the man that had just ran a state governor's race. The authorities wanted the killers a lot worse and used the lesser charges of heavy equipment theft to hold them until the murder charges could be lined up. The thieves had stolen huge bulldozers and such. They would just pull up to a construction site, load a machine on the weekend, drive straight to Mexico, swap for dope, and sell the dope for profit. I think they did this for several years with millions of dollars worth of equipment stolen! My dirt tracking friends walked by turning state's evidence. A bold move since one man in the conspiracy had been killed for drinking and talking too much!
Bobby and I were doing some brutally hard work for low pay when we stopped for a beer one afternoon. Two guys wanted to play partners for a beer. Bobby casually ran eight racks on a bar table when he first picked up a cue, for a beer! As we walked out the door toting most of the beer, we had won thirteen beers each in about forty-five minutes with me shooting twice, I threw an arm around his shoulders as we walked out the door and pulled him to me, "Bobby, we have to talk!" I had some loose ends to tie up in town but two days later he and I hit the road for the first few week trip. My plan was simple, let Bobby do the heavy lifting and I would clean up around the edges. Bobby never ran three racks again in the time we spent on the road off and on over the next several years. We made some money but much to my surprise I did all the heavy lifting! It was still nice to have a crazy bastard who was ready to go with knuckle, skull, or knife to cover my back and the road is a thousand times more fun with a partner so it all worked out.
Bobby was playing pool one afternoon with a man that was murdered by morning. Took the law awhile to realize Bobby hadn't been involved but they still figured he knew more than he should. He had to leave the state, he couldn't work for being hauled in for questioning eight or ten hours at a time. Gave me a good look at the bottom side of playing pool in rough places and while I occasionally hit the road for a few days or few weeks when I needed money I never took a partner on the road again realizing how easily things could turn deadly even in self defense. The stranger is automatically assumed to be the guilty party.
For those that bet cheap and figure the risk is low, in ten or twelve years gambling near nightly I got in a few ultra dangerous situations. Every time was over amounts no bigger than hourly wages, not even good hourly wages. The people gambling for larger amounts were seasoned gamblers and it never got past words, rarely words. I had smoothed out my act after the first couple years and things went pretty smooth while I was by myself. I never was a Scotty Townsend that could go into a place, take a few thousand, and leave with people loving him and begging him to come back but I could at least leave with a handshake and be welcome back in a few weeks or months most of the time. What little time I spent on the road I always traveled in loops so it was usually years before I hit an out of town place again anyway.
Life in the not so fast lane! I learned to mostly stay out of trouble and not bring trouble with me. The right road partner would have been nice but I never did find one I was happy with after I got more cautious myself. Mostly I stayed in country I knew and liked and just spent one or two nights on the road. Never really a road player. Even when I made a living at pool a few months or so at a time, I based out of home and was never gone more than a few weeks. I was in the oil patch and somebody was getting paid almost every evening, cashing checks, drinking and gambling. Reading about the shale oil boom a few year back I was thinking that as a young man I would have at least taken a ride less than a thousand miles.
Hu
Rusty in Montana
Well-known member
As always Hu great story ! We went to Minot nd for a funeral and on the way there we stopped in Williston ND which was the hot spot in the Bakken oil boom . Granted its not as crazy as it was a few years ago there's still signs of truck drivers wanted and help wanted all over as you drive through the vacant shops and warehouses and yards with parked semi trucks and trailers .
It was an eye opening experience just driving past and wondering what it was like when there were more trucks on the road than cars or pickups and to drive past farm and ranches with all new equipment and vehicles parked in the driveway.
Sadly I didn't bring a pool cue on this trip but didn't have any time for it .
It was an eye opening experience just driving past and wondering what it was like when there were more trucks on the road than cars or pickups and to drive past farm and ranches with all new equipment and vehicles parked in the driveway.
Sadly I didn't bring a pool cue on this trip but didn't have any time for it .
Lee Trevino famously said that pressure wasn't a 3' putt for $50,000. Pressure was a 3' putt for $5, when you only have $3 in your pocket...
I'll tell a story sad but true. The Tuscaloosa trend was found running through here a few years back. I had over fifteen acres. Not much but I know people that became wealthy on smaller pieces. There were nice producing wells all around my family piece of low hundreds of acres. There was oil under our land too, a huge lake. The problem was there was a chunk of rock holding the oil deeper than they could drill! After doing my research and watching drilling companies damned near go over that land inch by inch trying to find where they could sneak a well through that rock I finally sold that land for surface value!
Everybody laughed at my cousin. They bought twenty acres 99 feet wide for the frontage to build a business on. In a few years the news of the trend became known and they had full mineral rights. Two gas wells pulling off that spot now. They didn't have time to build a house so when somebody built apartments joining onto their land they just bought the back building. Four nice four bedroom apartments, four kitchens, eight bathrooms. The hop scotching might have gotten confusing but I liked the idea of a kitchen get dirty you just left it for housekeeping and moved over. Holiday cooking was a treat with four kitchens too!
Hu
I have fired an air barrel twice. Once I was broke and two days without eating. That was a carefully played game. Another time I walked into a low dive over towards White Castle. It's six in the morning, I have been out all night, so have the two guys playing a hundred a game on the challenge table. This doesn't happen often. Two friends with me, time to form a corporation! I had almost forty dollars alone. After pooling our money I had almost forty-five dollars.
I told my two friends to watch the table. I was getting in. If something weird happened, bolt for the front door and we wouldn't look back until we had ten miles of highway behind us.
I got away with both air barrels. I never fired a third one.
Hu
I admired the folks that lived in an old wood frame house for decades. When the Tuscaloosa Trend came through they didn't build a faux antebellum home like some although they were almost across the highway from Cherie Place, a tastefully done home that just looked over a hundred years old.
Naah, they just put a fresh coat of paint on the old house and called it good. The new tennis court in the side yard and Ferrari under the open carport were hints that they probably weren't too dependent on the commercial fishnets still hanging in a shed on the side. Never thought about it but JE Jumonville, the owner of Cherie Place, might have bailed his neighbor out too. Once we elect somebody they tend to stay elected and JE had been in Federal office for decades. First place in the area that they drilled was on his plantation. It was a dry hole.
The drilling company started taking down the rig to move it. JE asked what the hell they were doing. They explained that they had drilled as deep as the permits allowed, they had to move somewhere else and try again. JE told them if they moved the rig, keep moving until they got to Texas a couple hundred miles west, they would be done in Louisiana. I suppose an asshole power move by a politician but JE was widely admired and I have to admit I was impressed. They drilled deeper and hit. A few years later they drilled a couple more holes on the plantation. All were producers!
Years later JE paid $680,000 for a Louisiana bred gelding to run in the Kentucky Derby. Outraged his son and wife, especially after the horse had a bad day at the derby. He ran well under his speed and was tailed off so badly the only picture of the finish with him in it came from the blimp! Not much stud value in a slow gelding.
His wife and son had him hauled in for a competency hearing. One of the main hinge pins of the hearing was blowing all that money on the pony. After months of investigation they said they couldn't nail down his income. However, just looking at the oil he was making almost $300,000 a day. He had spent less than three calendar days income on the pony. The hearings were a circus I would have paid good money to watch. JE Sr. walked away laughing!
Hu
Nothing to do with a pool game, but it happened in a pool hall where I worked as a kid.
There was a real old guy called Hack who used to stop in and maybe have a beer and play a game of snooker every once in a while.
He was a truck driver and always wore a trucker cap.
He was bald on top and he never took his cap off. I don't think it was because he was ashamed of being bald, I think that is just the way he was.
He had one front tooth on top and it was loose and he would reach up and wiggle it sometimes and then start laughing like hell which would make everyone else laugh.
One day, he was playing snooker and some young guy was joking around with him and said, "Hack, I've known you for years and I have never seen you with your cap off. If I ever see you lay it down, I am going to shit in it."
Hack looked up and smiled with his one tooth prominently showing and said, "Boy, I'll tell you what. You may shit in my cap, but if you ever do, the undertaker will wipe your ass."
Everybody in the pool hall, including Hack, died laughing.
There was a real old guy called Hack who used to stop in and maybe have a beer and play a game of snooker every once in a while.
He was a truck driver and always wore a trucker cap.
He was bald on top and he never took his cap off. I don't think it was because he was ashamed of being bald, I think that is just the way he was.
He had one front tooth on top and it was loose and he would reach up and wiggle it sometimes and then start laughing like hell which would make everyone else laugh.
One day, he was playing snooker and some young guy was joking around with him and said, "Hack, I've known you for years and I have never seen you with your cap off. If I ever see you lay it down, I am going to shit in it."
Hack looked up and smiled with his one tooth prominently showing and said, "Boy, I'll tell you what. You may shit in my cap, but if you ever do, the undertaker will wipe your ass."
Everybody in the pool hall, including Hack, died laughing.