Ooh! Happy memories! What a road trip that was. I remember Earl coming up to me in Vegas saying, "I cannot believe you drove all the way out here."
At the Cue-something pool room, we gave Marcus Chamat a ride back to the Venetian. He was so impressed with my Volvo, saying that's all they drive back where he lives. He asked if he could drive mine, but I politely declined. As a lawyer's daughter, I'm pretty careful about everything I do. Heck, to this day, even my daughter has never driven my car.
What has always been curious to me is the bad words written about the IPT and Kevin Trudeau. Yes, he sold a book that was deemed by the Feds to be snake oil, a book about natural cures. If you look around the pool world over the years, though, nobody says a damn thing about anyone making money by bookmaking, selling pills to stake players at Derby City Classic, selling girls at the pool venues, selling "credit" to people with bad credit, each one of them making a lot of cheese-nips, and the list goes on and on and on.
Heck, everybody has a little larceny in them in this pool world. When you want to engage in a game of stakes with another, you match up with them, hoping you got the best of it and that they're going to drop their wallet in your pockets. How many pool players gamble and think they matched up evenly? You all know the answer to this question.
I do not agree with the bad words written about the IPT by virtual railbirds and most who did not experience the IPT festivities. If you were to talk to the players, 99 percent of them loved every single minute of it. It gave pool players hope, something that was missing then and is missing today in professional pool.
You want to bad-mouth somebody in the pool world, look at the BCA organization. They ditched professional pool to fatten the pockets of industry members. This entity is supposed to be the governing body of professional pool in North America, and they suck a big weenie, as far as I'm concerned. Blame them why professional pool in America continues to circle the drain.
You see all these fresh young players around the world, everywhere except USA. I can count on one hand how many great players USA has today. Heck, if Brexit happens, the Mosconi Cup can be Team USA v. Team England because Great Britain has more players than we do today.
Kevin Trudeau tried to make something good happen for pool. His only mistake was the business platform started too high at the beginning. Did he hope to make money on it? Sure, he did. Why would anyone invest 4- to $5 million in a business, only to see it fail? Let's not forget the BCA Hall of Famers pocketing $30,000 each and got a bye in the King of the Hill Shootout in Orlando, December 2005. Efren won it, with his Hall of Famer buy, as if he needed it, and pocketed $100,000 for first place and an additional $30,000 for being a BCA Hall of Famer. Not bad for a few days' work. Bustamante told me it was the most money he ever won in his life at a tournament. I think, if memory serves me right, he came in second or third, either him or Marlin Manalo.
Trudeau is incarcerated at a minimum security prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama. He is eligible for release in July 2022. In fact, a friend of ours who got caught selling pot, who is out now, was also incarcerated at the same prison camp. He never ran into KT, though.
I'm not here to argue about KT or the IPT, but I'm just presenting a different view. And here's a few more photos taken at the December 2005 IPT King of the Hill Shootout.