He hasn't played pool professionally since about 1985, but several days a week, he can be found beating balls around a table in the lower level of his home, which is equipped with custom lighting and 10 theater seats on a raised platform for spectators to watch the action.
Gee, in the words of Sammy Sosa, "pool has been good" to this professional pocket billiards player. :wink:
When he was 25, Terry Bell was a vagabond pool player, traveling the country in his souped-up 1968 metallic green Dodge Charger.
Bell learned to play the game when he was stationed in South Korea in the Army, and when he finished his stint in 1967, he kept playing.
"I was always very much into math and physics, and the game just really appealed to me," he said.
I have noticed that good pool players are usually quite intelligent, with a high I.Q. It doesn't mean they are book smart; it means that they have the capability to learn quicker.
"You'd go into a town, and look in the Yellow Pages; right next to bicycles is where billiards would always be," he said. "You'd walk into a pool room, and you'd ask the guy, 'Is this where the action is?' "
Bell would tell the proprietor he liked to play for money, then he'd go read a book in the corner while he waited for the best player in town to show up.
This is *exactly* the same method we used when I used to go on the road and shoot pool down South. I can't tell you how many "B" pages I have ripped out of the Yellow Pages telephone books that would be in the public phone booths when we'd get to a strange town.
Bell is correct that being a road player, you had to play the cream of the crop, never knowing how good or who the local champion may be. Many times, it could come back to sting you, resulting in a Western Union transaction, so you could gas up again to continue the road trip. Been there and done that. :grin-square:
He played in a lot of tough places — like the Black Panther headquarters in Connecticut — and in a lot of ordinary small towns.
He'd run into other players doing the same thing, and he struck up a friendship with one of them, Larry Hubbart, who hailed from Rochester, N.Y. The players all had nicknames: Bell was known as "Texas Terry" because that's where he lived when he started out, and Hubbart was the "Iceman."
"Larry didn't get the nickname because he brought you ice for your drinks, he got it because you sat in your chair, and you got cold waiting for him to miss," Bell said.
Yikes, that took a lot of balls to walk into the Black Panthers headquarters in the '60s and '70s to play pool, but the one thing I have always noticed about pool, at least in my experience, is that there did not seem to be racial divides in pool rooms like there were in mainstream society during this era.
The rest of the article is about how Larry Hubbart and Terry Bell's desire to help professional pool. They were able to score a huge sponsor, Anheuser-Busch, to finance their vision. Amateur pool and leagues are financially profitable in the pool world, and though they did hope it would promote professional pool, I don't think it had the effect on professional pool as it did on pool played recreationally as a game. And that's okay. It is still a great achievement. The more leagues and pool entities out there in America, the better.
For a good read, click here: Pool Players Can Take Their Cue from Lake St. Louis Partners. [Retrieved 7 February 2011]
Terry Bell below performing trick shots.
Gee, in the words of Sammy Sosa, "pool has been good" to this professional pocket billiards player. :wink:
When he was 25, Terry Bell was a vagabond pool player, traveling the country in his souped-up 1968 metallic green Dodge Charger.
Bell learned to play the game when he was stationed in South Korea in the Army, and when he finished his stint in 1967, he kept playing.
"I was always very much into math and physics, and the game just really appealed to me," he said.
I have noticed that good pool players are usually quite intelligent, with a high I.Q. It doesn't mean they are book smart; it means that they have the capability to learn quicker.
"You'd go into a town, and look in the Yellow Pages; right next to bicycles is where billiards would always be," he said. "You'd walk into a pool room, and you'd ask the guy, 'Is this where the action is?' "
Bell would tell the proprietor he liked to play for money, then he'd go read a book in the corner while he waited for the best player in town to show up.
This is *exactly* the same method we used when I used to go on the road and shoot pool down South. I can't tell you how many "B" pages I have ripped out of the Yellow Pages telephone books that would be in the public phone booths when we'd get to a strange town.
Bell is correct that being a road player, you had to play the cream of the crop, never knowing how good or who the local champion may be. Many times, it could come back to sting you, resulting in a Western Union transaction, so you could gas up again to continue the road trip. Been there and done that. :grin-square:
He played in a lot of tough places — like the Black Panther headquarters in Connecticut — and in a lot of ordinary small towns.
He'd run into other players doing the same thing, and he struck up a friendship with one of them, Larry Hubbart, who hailed from Rochester, N.Y. The players all had nicknames: Bell was known as "Texas Terry" because that's where he lived when he started out, and Hubbart was the "Iceman."
"Larry didn't get the nickname because he brought you ice for your drinks, he got it because you sat in your chair, and you got cold waiting for him to miss," Bell said.
Yikes, that took a lot of balls to walk into the Black Panthers headquarters in the '60s and '70s to play pool, but the one thing I have always noticed about pool, at least in my experience, is that there did not seem to be racial divides in pool rooms like there were in mainstream society during this era.
The rest of the article is about how Larry Hubbart and Terry Bell's desire to help professional pool. They were able to score a huge sponsor, Anheuser-Busch, to finance their vision. Amateur pool and leagues are financially profitable in the pool world, and though they did hope it would promote professional pool, I don't think it had the effect on professional pool as it did on pool played recreationally as a game. And that's okay. It is still a great achievement. The more leagues and pool entities out there in America, the better.
For a good read, click here: Pool Players Can Take Their Cue from Lake St. Louis Partners. [Retrieved 7 February 2011]
Terry Bell below performing trick shots.
![4d2cd1f45dbb4.image[1].jpg](/data/attachments/126/126335-d2b5af2573451a605244743df4b3a2b9.jpg?hash=0rWvJXNFGm)
