Here's a story I posted in 1999 about a game I watched in 1994 at JOB:
On Mon, 10 May 1999 01:37:29 -0800, "Yukon Ed" <ak9b...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>I've seen numerous players play one-handed to handicap their game when
>"matching-up" with a weaker player. Does anyone have a story to relate or a
>player to nominate as the best "one-handed" player they've seen? My vote is
>for Efren.
>
I was in JOB Billiards at the Music City Open in '94. Two young guys
were matched up on a bar box playing 8-ball for $300 a rack. One of
them, the guy winning, was playing one-handed. Just to have the nuts
to play for $300 a rack was hot enough, but to play one-handed?
Thrilling. After an hour or so, some guy taps me on the shoulder and
asks "is that guy playing one-handed? I'll play him." I told him
that they were playing for 3 bills, to which he immediately backed
off. As he walked away, I couldn't help but notice that he only had
one hand!
Later on I saw the same one-handed guy playing. Every shot, he took
out this short weighted bridge head that he laid on the table. It had
a string run across the top so he could lift the bridge with his stick
after he shot, like some of the new bridge heads. He was an easy "A"
player.
Dave Matlock must have been catching the "one-handed fever", as he was
making propositions that he could execute a one-handed full-ball jump
shot! I didn't see anyone take up the bet, but I did see Dave make
the shot a couple of times.
-------------------------------------------
Back to today (15 April 2013), if anyone cares...
The guy playing one-handed... he was running around with Big Arm John. I don't know who he is, but I have a feeling that he's someone everyone knows and I just haven't pieced it together. He is (was??) left-handed. He is causasian. That's all I got.
The "kid" he was playing against? Well one thing about this young African American kid was that he was no professional but he had the cash in his pocket to play. He was mostly quiet throughout the whole set I watched. But... when he got things back to even and then some, he flashed the bills ... well he threw the bills on the table... and announced he'd playing anyone 9-ball with these crazy rules (a player gets the breaks and the rainbow world except for the one ball which the opponent gets.. or some such nutty thing)
He called the game Death Ball....
Freddie <~~~ and that's the rest of story