About the dinner a little. The first dinner was at the Derby City Classic in January 2005. The way that came about was kind of funny. Originally, I had assumed the One Pocket HOF would just be something online, but I did have a plaque made for Grady, who was the top vote-getter in our first online poll for the fledgling One Pocket HOF, and I had brought it to his tournament in Gulfport in November 2004. In a short break in the tournament action I gave him the plaque and figured that was that. But afterwords, he said something like, "That was great, but we ought to have a dinner and I'll spearhead that."
Well the DCC was coming up in a couple months at that point, but I checked with Greg Sullivan and with the Executive West and found out there was in fact a small meeting room available if I was willing to commit. Grady volunteered to be the MC, but all of the organizing, the financial commitments, etc, fell on me. God bless Grady for his enthusiasm, but the grunt work all fell to me, and no, I did not have ANY experience organizing and publicizing anything like that. I did not then nor do I now work in the pool industry -- my wife and I are in the kitchen cabinet business, lol. Even my website, onepocket.org was less than a year old so basically no one in the national pool world knew me.
Anyway, with my wife's support I committed to the E West for something like 24-30 dinner seats in that room and started to look for people to fill the seats, and I started work on creating printed program for the event. To be honest, I did not even know if the other inductees we had slated to induct would even show up. However, as it got closer, Weenie Beenie said he would come, and someone said they would bring Bugs Rucker down from Chicago, and even Efren said he "would stop by." Rumor was that Ronnie Allen might come too. But still very few people had committed the $50 for the dinner prior to DCC.
This is from that first dinner:
Even when I got to DCC myself the Saturday before the Tuesday night dinner, there was not much buzz and I thought the dinner would be a complete and costly failure. Then RA showed up, and Beenie, and Bugs and people started to get excited, and suddenly 30 was not enough, so I went back to the E West, and they had no larger rooms but they said they could squeeze up to 45 people in. And much to my amazement, we sold out and had to turn away people!
And the dinner went great! It turned out that, which I certainly did not anticipate, it was a pretty amazing mix of funny stories, and real heartfelt sadness and appreciation all rolled into one night. I mean, the idea that hardened pool hustlers like RA and Beenie would come to tears blew me away. And Efren not only stopped by, he stayed the whole night and had a great time. Freddy the Beard was just a guest there, but he got cajoled into speaking a bit, and it was obvious from that little bit that he was a natural and from the next year, he was co-MC with Grady.
One other thing happened just the week after I returned home from the DCC. I ended up winning a football pool for something like $4500. I took that as a sign that it was the good Karma from that dinner, and my wife agreed with me to use that money to help make sure the One Pocket HOF dinner would continue -- at least until the money ran out.
The next year the dinner grew to around a hundred, and it actually grew to over a 120 for the peak years. We had 11 HOF dinners at DCC in all, between the E West and the Horseshoe. Every year I had to commit ahead of time to how many seats, and sometimes we had more but over the last few years with the recession and all, the numbers declined to 80-90.
Let me also say, I have never been very good at promoting the dinner. And relative to the press that the BCA HOF gets, partly as a result of that, I have never gotten much support from the established pool/billiard print media either, with the exceptions of the late Conrad Burkman, Professor Q-Ball, and to a certain degree Dave Thompson and a couple of others. If someone is good at that kind of thing and would like to help, PLEASE step forward, lol.
The $4500 disappeared long ago, and during the last few declining attendance years, my wife and I made up the difference in costs/revenues for the dinner. Over the years we have had a number of very loyal and generous individuals who have steadfastedly supported the dinner, but never any corporate support. If anyone is good at generating that, again, PLEASE step forward if you are interested. The bottom line as far as why there was no dinner last DCC is that I was seeing even less pre-commitments to that dinner, yet I was faced with having to guarantee a number to the Horseshoe. Remember the part about my wife and I being in the kitchen business? Well our line of business fell exactly in one of the segments of the economy most hard hit by the last recession ("housing collapse" they called it, lol). We could not take the risk of another loss at that time.
Oh, and I neglected to mention that both of our co-MC's, who had played such key roles helping me make the HOF what it was, died within a year or two of each other. That hurt in many ways, and still does.
So there were 11 great years that I am very proud of, and the thing that I feel best about is how these great players and their family, friends and fans were so appreciative of being honored -- many of whom were totally overlooked by the BCA HOF because of gambling, the fact their game wasn't 9-ball or 14.1, or whatever. And more than a dozen of our honorees have since died, but they got to revel in their honor while they were living. I'm proud of that.
Whoever wants to help bring the dinner back can contact me. It will be back in 2018, although the dinner itself might change, because of the cost of the kind of spread we were providing.