Mike Carella
Mike Carella
- Thread starter Michael Andros
- Start date
Mike Carella
I read the entire thread yesterday. Very entertaining. Even the whole gun and drug running, which obviously had a CIA connection. I'm still amazed that son of Carella's partner in crime that got killed too is trying to find who killed his father. When an intelligence agency is involved, I'm not sure it really matters. It's not like the son is going to get any kind of vengeance.
I didn't read the entire thread but I did read a lot of it. Carella was a lot like Earl, in that he had many detractors, many who couldn't stand him, for myriad reasons. Some of it was deserved, but I think much of it was not. But, like him or not, as with Earl, nearly every person who saw him play felt he was a genius. I saw him play a LOT. And, yeah, I think as far as pool went, he was a stone cold genius. He made a lot of mistakes and, for his worst ones, he paid the ultimate price. And I think that's sad. Watching him play was like seeing a Kubrick film or hearing Mozart. He really was that special. But, he's long gone... c'est la vie.
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The first time I saw Mike Carella was at Joe Farhat’s place in Lansing....1977
I was just coming to have a look after 7 years of not owning a cue.
It was a great tournament....Carella won it.
(First time I saw the Bushwhacker, also...he took off Mataya getting the wild 8)
Next time i saw Carella was at the Rack....about a year later...he had beaten Airplane
for a fortune giving him the 5-6-7-8....he was betting a lot of college foot ball....
...watched him one day bet 5Gs across the board...and laughed at them for not accepting
10Gs a game...I remember the bookie saying “You wanna get paid, don’t you?”
That’s what started his downfall...give a pool player a monster bankroll and he thinks he’ll
never go broke.....
....so he wakes up one day, owes a 100Gs more than what he has....
...I watched him lose a game of one pocket for $50...and broke his Szamboti.
...and that’s how he got involved in the operation that cost him his life.
He never got to see the 80s....I was at Geri’s Palace in Blue Ash OH....Geraldine called
me over to give me the news that Mike was gone....it was either late ‘78 or early ‘79.
I was just coming to have a look after 7 years of not owning a cue.
It was a great tournament....Carella won it.
(First time I saw the Bushwhacker, also...he took off Mataya getting the wild 8)
Next time i saw Carella was at the Rack....about a year later...he had beaten Airplane
for a fortune giving him the 5-6-7-8....he was betting a lot of college foot ball....
...watched him one day bet 5Gs across the board...and laughed at them for not accepting
10Gs a game...I remember the bookie saying “You wanna get paid, don’t you?”
That’s what started his downfall...give a pool player a monster bankroll and he thinks he’ll
never go broke.....
....so he wakes up one day, owes a 100Gs more than what he has....
...I watched him lose a game of one pocket for $50...and broke his Szamboti.
...and that’s how he got involved in the operation that cost him his life.
He never got to see the 80s....I was at Geri’s Palace in Blue Ash OH....Geraldine called
me over to give me the news that Mike was gone....it was either late ‘78 or early ‘79.
Wow... I haven't thought of Geraldine Titcomb in... decades. She was quite a player back in the day. And didn't brook fools well either...
The brothers who owed Pastime Billiards in Tallahassee had an small engraved plate mounted on the game table after he died. But, Howard Barrett ( GREAT older player of some fame ), who ran the room and had mentored Carella to some degree, was so angry with him over how he was killed and the causes involved that he refused to go to his funeral. And they were pretty tight. From what I heard, Howard almost quit the room over the inscribed plate. Just very unfortunate all the way around.
Talent overload, apparently.
He ran 100 balls probably hundreds of times. No idea what his high run was but I'm guessing somewhere in the 300s. DiLiberto basically taught hm how to play as a kid ( Danny and Mike's parents were close friends ) and as most here know, Danny's strongest game was 14.1. So have no doubt, Carella could flat out RUN balls.