Okay....how did this monster come into being? Many years ago when the pool boom took off, McDermott was the only American manufacturer that could meet the growing demand for pool cues at the time. They put on 2-3 shifts of workers and delivered product way ahead of all the others that were not prepared to spend the $$$ it would take to rebuild their inventories.
Jim McDermott's timing could not have been better. He had just built a manufacturing plant that would be a cue makers wet dream.
He had master machinists, computer programmers, and an artist or two that were always coming up with new design concepts. One particular artist was Roy Nehs....who had his own studio in the plant where he was in charge of most of the ad copy, monthly news letters and magazines that came pouring out of the facility.
There were stacks and stacks of cue renderings that Roy would bring to Jim's desk for approval or rejection. That is why in the 80's and 90's you could recognize a McD from across the room. If Jim had seen a particular design that he had seen before by another maker, it was almost always
rejected.
I used to take several trips a year to the factory to pick out some nice pieces and would have free access to 5 thousand or so cues that would be in stock. During one of these trips, Roy gave us a tour of his studio and the story of the Intimadator cue.
In one stack of rejected cue designs, some of which were quite beautiful and innovative, was a pencil sketch of the afformentioned cue. Jim asked Roy what it was, and his reply was......Oh it is just a fantasy that I dreamed up....but we could never build anything like that. BAM....the gauntlet was thrown. Never tell Jim that he couldn't build something.
And the rest is history.....a famous knife maker was brought in and the cue became reality.