I love all the pictures of the tournaments, especially before the popularity of The Color of Money. Can you tell us more about Mike Haines and yourself?
I'll let Mike speak for himself if he wants (I just sent him a link to this thread). As for me, I'm an old, retired college professor. Back in the 1960s I spent all night, every night at Cotton Bowling Palace in Dallas, TX. Cotton Palace, at that time, was the late night gathering place for many of the hustlers, hoodlums, and gamblers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. While I was a "wanna be" pool hustler, I came to realize that my pool skills would never allow me to make a living at the game, so I returned to college and eventually earned my Ph.D. in experimental psychology. But as you probably know, once a pool player, always a pool player. I followed the game through the years and when I took up photography as a hobby, taking photos at pool tournaments was a natural development. In the 1980s I took a lot of pics at tournaments, sometimes accompanied by my buddy Mike Haines.
Around 2005 I got the idea of putting the images we had recorded online. I asked Mike, who lives in Dallas, to send me all the negatives and slides he had and I spent a couple of months editing those images, along with the ones I had taken myself. I put about 700 images on the Smugmug site and let people on AZ and other pool forums know about the galleries of photos. Through the years since I have come to realize that our galleries represent a nice little slice of pool history, so I have tried to maintain and enhance them, even putting together a couple of "videos" that use the still images with a music background.
We used to sell a DVD with all the images and a few audio interviews, but now all of the photos can be downloaded from the Website for free. I hope you enjoyed browsing through them.
By the way, one of the pool players I knew back in the Cotton Palace days was Alfie Taylor. Alfie and I put together a book from the journal he kept in his days as a road player. I'm biased, but I think it's a great read. Check it out at
http://alftaylor.com/
