I've never seen a player dominate a ring game the way Searcy did in the famous payball ring game in Dayton in 1974. Two games after he entered, he was already up $8400 and never looked back. Every world class player took a shot with no success, with the sole exception of Jimmy Reid, who wound up slightly in the black but nowhere near to what Searcy won.
I remember that game well, because just before Searcy got in, I'd asked him to play some $50 nine ball, having once played him when he was on the stall without my realizing it. I obviously had no idea who he was. He said he might be interested "later", but that he had "a little game that I want to get in first". That was the payball game, and by the time I'd had a pit stop and gotten a hot dog and walked over to watch, he'd run two racks and had the game in his pocket.
A few years later, there was a Sports Illustrated profile of Danny D, Easy Times The Hard Way, that referred to that payball game.
The players are shooting on a snooker table, an oversized surface with small pockets. One hustler, young Jimmy Reid, is shooting barefoot. He pulls a wad of crumpled money from his jeans and asks a bystander to hold it. Danny D is on the sidelines, his eye out for a backer. Rumor has it that one of the Dayton players was recently staked to a $100,000 score. "The guy's not a good player, but he's a super lemon player," says Danny D with admiration. "He keeps winning, and players still think they can beat him." At the moment, however, all but one of the players are working a dry well. Denny Searcy, from the San Francisco Bay area, is making the most of his first trip East, a packrat emptying the other communicants' pockets and leaving groans behind. Minnesota Fats once said, "Dressing a pool player in a tuxedo is like putting whipped cream on a hot dog." There are no cummerbunds in this pool room. Searcy, a chunky fellow with the beginnings of a mezzanine under his chin, wears old blue corduroys and a T shirt with a bulging pocket into which he pauses to stuff more bills every time he pockets a payball. Between shots he slouches off to the side, looking uninterested. Joe Burns whispers that as of last night Searcy had $20,000 from the 70 or so players who had passed through the game. He knew the figure because he had counted the money and locked it in his safe. ...
In Joe Burns' office, Denny Searcy has a beer and a sandwich, enjoying a respite from the game. He has given another player $400 to shoot his stick while he rests, and with a shrug he estimates that during the surrogate's fill-in he could lose $4,000 in potential winnings. "I never figured I'd get tired of shooting pay-ball," he says wearily, "but I am. The table is mine and those guys are mine. It's my game. It's not like I worked for it. It's like free money. Maybe if I worked for it, I wouldn't go out and shoot pool with it. But I don't know. I've never worked. Sometimes I think about it, what it would be like, going to work every day, getting some security. But I don't know. How could someone like me open up a business? What do I know about running a business?" ...
