Is this hustling?
- Thread starter deanoc
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:grin: 
Long ago I read Bobby Riggs's book...Court Hustler. He a tennis champ back in the late 1930's.
He said that the first time he laid eyes on a golf course, he knew he was looking at a big and beautiful outdoor pool hall.
Probably his biggest and best hustle was getting beaten on national TV by women's tennis champ Billie Jean King.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)
He said that the first time he laid eyes on a golf course, he knew he was looking at a big and beautiful outdoor pool hall.
Probably his biggest and best hustle was getting beaten on national TV by women's tennis champ Billie Jean King.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis)
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Riggs would drill himself for hours at a time on the most ridiculous things just to be able to perform whatever it was when the cheese was on the light. My favorite was, he would bet he could dribble a basketball, backwards, down a flight of stairs, blindfolded... now just think about that. You're hanging around the apt complex on a Saturday afternoon, enjoying a few cold ones ( or something else perhaps ) and your buddy says "Aight, boys... I got 10 dollars says I can, ummm... s**t, I dunno... dribble a basketball down a flight of stairs blindfolded... backwards? Yeah... in fact, I got *20* says I can do it twice!"
Now... who is NOT gonna take that bet?
I would...
( Even though Stan ( Goose ) McDowell told me as a kid, never bet against someone else's prop bet... so I shouldn't. But I still would. )
Or a divorce proceeding!
prop bets
The old timers used to spend a lot of time readying a prop bet then sucker somebody in for serious duckies. Get in a very bad game with a table tennis champ . . . except for one thing, "oh yeah, lets play with coke bottles." After practicing for over a year for the coke bottle gag. Another bet somebody with a set of stairs handy. "I bet I can bounce a basket ball down the stairs and hit more stairs than you." Better believe it, one more casual spur of the moment bet that had been practiced a lot.
Had somebody try to sucker me in on this bet. "I bet I can shoot a cue ball off the table, out the door, down the sidewalk, across the gutter and into the storm drain. A handful of twists and turns on the way, seemed very very unlikely. "How many tries?" "One." That set the alarm bells off, I was betting against a sure thing. Probably would have lost fifty bucks had he said five tries or more. Awhile later he got two guys to bet twenty apiece and he lost. While he had been trying to hustle somebody on the bet he didn't see that somebody out of sight from inside the pool hall had parked a car with a tire in the path of the cue ball. He whined mightily! That trick is simple. He had already sent a ball out the door so he knew where it would go to.
One I have won at a few times but a near thing, somebody throwing a coin in the slot of a pay phone. From twenty feet and ten tries I'll bet somebody that has had a few beers. From ten feet, they had better have more than a few beers in them. From six feet, no bet. The trusties in jails and county prisons spent a lot of time practicing this one! Seen some pretty wild things done with a playing card and heard of wilder things.
I stay away from the other person's prop bet!
Hu
The old timers used to spend a lot of time readying a prop bet then sucker somebody in for serious duckies. Get in a very bad game with a table tennis champ . . . except for one thing, "oh yeah, lets play with coke bottles." After practicing for over a year for the coke bottle gag. Another bet somebody with a set of stairs handy. "I bet I can bounce a basket ball down the stairs and hit more stairs than you." Better believe it, one more casual spur of the moment bet that had been practiced a lot.
Had somebody try to sucker me in on this bet. "I bet I can shoot a cue ball off the table, out the door, down the sidewalk, across the gutter and into the storm drain. A handful of twists and turns on the way, seemed very very unlikely. "How many tries?" "One." That set the alarm bells off, I was betting against a sure thing. Probably would have lost fifty bucks had he said five tries or more. Awhile later he got two guys to bet twenty apiece and he lost. While he had been trying to hustle somebody on the bet he didn't see that somebody out of sight from inside the pool hall had parked a car with a tire in the path of the cue ball. He whined mightily! That trick is simple. He had already sent a ball out the door so he knew where it would go to.
One I have won at a few times but a near thing, somebody throwing a coin in the slot of a pay phone. From twenty feet and ten tries I'll bet somebody that has had a few beers. From ten feet, they had better have more than a few beers in them. From six feet, no bet. The trusties in jails and county prisons spent a lot of time practicing this one! Seen some pretty wild things done with a playing card and heard of wilder things.
I stay away from the other person's prop bet!
Hu
I learned a lot from Stan. He used to come in our room every winter for a few months then head back up to Jersey in the Spring. More stories than you can shake a stick at. He was one of the first people I remember ever telling me about odds and how much they affect winning and losing and how to make them work for you when making games, etc... For whatever reason, as I've gotten older, I've found myself thinking more about him than I ever did as a kid. A good man, Stan was. I liked him.
Knew someone who knew him very well, claimed that he made an awful lot of money betting against himself on that one. Riggs was an excellent player winning three single majors, along with a few doubles and mixed doubles titles as well. "Riggs was famous as a hustler and gambler,[21][22] when in his 1949 autobiography he wrote that he had made $105,000 ($1,850,000 today) in 1939 by betting, in England, on himself to win all three Wimbledon championships: the singles, doubles and mixed doubles. At the time, most betting was illegal in England. From an initial $500 bet on his chances of winning the singles competition, he eventually won the equivalent of $1.5 million in 2010 dollars." He also beat Margaret Court in a previous battle of the sexes, no one who knew his game believes that he was actually beat. I believe that the match is on youtube...I probably could him beat him in that match...well, maybe not me. :wink:
videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7vqSm4yIZc&list=PLK4RyYrFlFgp-_weijK-kKP86BJxwtfxA
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a handful of small time hustlers
I knew a handful of small time hustlers, hustling anything and everything, not primarily pool. Since they were focused on hustling instead of pool I could beat them drunk or sober so they pretty much left me alone. I wouldn't play cards or dice since they were all adept cheaters and I wouldn't buy anything from them.
All of these guys would and did hustle their own brothers! Lowlifes in my book but no doubt entertaining to be around. Somebody want to buy an Appaloosa horse? An egg and some white shoe dye would make one! Peewee was looking at a tall gangly colt he had bought at the stockyard one day. "That looks like a thoroughbred to me. Whatcha think, look like a thoroughbred?"
"I don't know Peewee, it is ugly enough to be one I guess." Two days later he was selling it to some brothers, "papers burned up in a barn fire." That barn must have been crammed full of papers judging by all the horses I heard that story about!" Bought for about a hundred sold two days later for seven-fifty. Not bad profit!
Peewee in a weak moment had skinned the three guys he rode to a mutual friends bar with. Now he had over eight hundred dollars and no interest in getting in a car with them. I was there drinking beer with a six-five oilfield roughneck that was a friend of mine. I'm not that big but I'm not tiny. Peewee asked for a ride to a bar a few miles away. I kept quiet until we got to the bar. As I pulled up and stopped I let out a yell, "Damn it Mike!"
Mike was clueless of course. "What?"
"We forgot to roll him!" Peewee was never alone with me or just me and a friend of mine again. I never rolled anybody in my life but Peewee was capable of it and figured anybody else was too.
I can't help missing those days and people sometimes. They had less morals than an alley cat but they sure were entertaining!
Hu
I knew a handful of small time hustlers, hustling anything and everything, not primarily pool. Since they were focused on hustling instead of pool I could beat them drunk or sober so they pretty much left me alone. I wouldn't play cards or dice since they were all adept cheaters and I wouldn't buy anything from them.
All of these guys would and did hustle their own brothers! Lowlifes in my book but no doubt entertaining to be around. Somebody want to buy an Appaloosa horse? An egg and some white shoe dye would make one! Peewee was looking at a tall gangly colt he had bought at the stockyard one day. "That looks like a thoroughbred to me. Whatcha think, look like a thoroughbred?"
"I don't know Peewee, it is ugly enough to be one I guess." Two days later he was selling it to some brothers, "papers burned up in a barn fire." That barn must have been crammed full of papers judging by all the horses I heard that story about!" Bought for about a hundred sold two days later for seven-fifty. Not bad profit!
Peewee in a weak moment had skinned the three guys he rode to a mutual friends bar with. Now he had over eight hundred dollars and no interest in getting in a car with them. I was there drinking beer with a six-five oilfield roughneck that was a friend of mine. I'm not that big but I'm not tiny. Peewee asked for a ride to a bar a few miles away. I kept quiet until we got to the bar. As I pulled up and stopped I let out a yell, "Damn it Mike!"
Mike was clueless of course. "What?"
"We forgot to roll him!" Peewee was never alone with me or just me and a friend of mine again. I never rolled anybody in my life but Peewee was capable of it and figured anybody else was too.
I can't help missing those days and people sometimes. They had less morals than an alley cat but they sure were entertaining!
Hu
Ha! That reminds me of when I was at Ft Polk in 73 and the tiny town outside the gates, Leesville, was, of course, a "GI" trap, ready, willing and more than able to separate a trainee from his money in any and every way imaginable. So, having hung out in pool rooms since I was 13 or so and being 18 now, I was pretty accustomed to having curveballs tossed my way on a regular basis. So unlike a lot of other guys, it didn't surprise me that every other storefront on Main St would have a barker out front, loudly proclaiming the house wares, be it girls, jewelry, clothes or whatever. One guy, at a jewelry store, was particularly aggressive and, frankly, really really annoying. So after the 5th or 6th time he screamed at me to "Come right in, there General Patton! Come right in and get your girlfriend a ring!" I beat him to the punch.... I waked right up to him, leaned up close and said in a low voice with a totally straight face "Buy some hot rocks? Cheap." The guy looked at me like I'd f**ked his wife, stole his car and shot his dog... all at the same time. He waved me away, saying, "Don't ever come round here no more." He must've told some of his buddies as well, cause at least a third of the barkers never said anything to me after that. :grin:
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Leesville.... correction. Diseaseville. 1967...I remember playing at a poolroom there. Youch.
Yup, "Disease-ville". I played in probably the same room, right on Main St. Won some in there, too. Got LOTS of weight! "Who, me? I'm just a kid. Whaddyagonnagimme?" :grin-square:
tough town!
I had a few friends from that neck of the woods. Those country boys were rough enough they wore their clothes out from the inside first! Some of the girls too. I passed through Leesville and Deridder a few times in my gambling days but it was a long ways from my home territory and not as much fun as below I-10. Later I bought a business between the airbase and Alexandria. One of the few places I loved to come to work monday mornings. It was worth it just to hear what everyone had gotten into over the weekend.
One of the guys working for me asked me to give him a ride by Deedee's, a former employee. He was holding a hundred sixty dollars for him and didn't want to keep it longer than he had to. Deedee had gotten drunk and was playing for two dollars a game. He lost to a cowboy about six foot six. Rather than pay him two dollars Deedee took a swing at the guy with a house cue, and missed! Naturally the guy was a wee bit annoyed. Deedee was almost a foot and a half shorter and drunk, it wasn't much of a contest!
When I saw Deedee he had a broken nose and looked like he had been ran through a sausage grinder, twicet! "Damn Deedee, that was over a two dollar game? You need to go get some change, that is at least a twenty dollar ass whipping!"
Hu
I had a few friends from that neck of the woods. Those country boys were rough enough they wore their clothes out from the inside first! Some of the girls too. I passed through Leesville and Deridder a few times in my gambling days but it was a long ways from my home territory and not as much fun as below I-10. Later I bought a business between the airbase and Alexandria. One of the few places I loved to come to work monday mornings. It was worth it just to hear what everyone had gotten into over the weekend.
One of the guys working for me asked me to give him a ride by Deedee's, a former employee. He was holding a hundred sixty dollars for him and didn't want to keep it longer than he had to. Deedee had gotten drunk and was playing for two dollars a game. He lost to a cowboy about six foot six. Rather than pay him two dollars Deedee took a swing at the guy with a house cue, and missed! Naturally the guy was a wee bit annoyed. Deedee was almost a foot and a half shorter and drunk, it wasn't much of a contest!
When I saw Deedee he had a broken nose and looked like he had been ran through a sausage grinder, twicet! "Damn Deedee, that was over a two dollar game? You need to go get some change, that is at least a twenty dollar ass whipping!"
Hu
to the original poster
you have sinned a GREAT sin.
please, do your penance:
after midnight go to the poolroom,
tell at least 2
"ya'll ain't gon'a b'lieve dis" stories
and at least 2
"it cost me $100 to find out that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ can happen in a poolroom" stories
your ONLY redemption lies in that;
you obeyed the rule--
It is a SIN to let an idiot keep his money
you have sinned a GREAT sin.
please, do your penance:
after midnight go to the poolroom,
tell at least 2
"ya'll ain't gon'a b'lieve dis" stories
and at least 2
"it cost me $100 to find out that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ can happen in a poolroom" stories
your ONLY redemption lies in that;
you obeyed the rule--
It is a SIN to let an idiot keep his money
Ft. Polk/DeRidder/Leesville/Kinder/Basile
( I still remember a place down there that the hinges on the door were rusted OPEN!! )
U.S. 190=great $ lane, all the locals gave me weight.
food was GREAT, beer was cold, music was Cranking
hell, half the places we played
after you had ALL their $,
you may end up with their girl, too
( I still remember a place down there that the hinges on the door were rusted OPEN!! )
U.S. 190=great $ lane, all the locals gave me weight.
food was GREAT, beer was cold, music was Cranking
hell, half the places we played
after you had ALL their $,
you may end up with their girl, too
I would pay good money to watch Dean explain to his wife. Why he came home shoeless.
Larry
We referred to it as Sleezeville lol. Laid quite a bit of asphalt for the gubment when i was in college....unlike wine time has made the place shittier lol