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Today I got to the 7-ll store and buy Arizona diet green tea. I pour the tea out, it sucks, but the bottle is beautiful with oriental designs. The glass is thick and beer bottles now not being reusable are very thin. Both the Tea and bud are the same height which was critical for me, 9” tall. The base of the tea is 2 ¾”, bud 2 l/4, and tea tips over less. The cap on the bud is l”, tea, l l/2”, a 50% bigger target to hit. Mike Massey uses a shorter Snapple bottle. He has trouble getting the cue ball up which is why. It’s your show, use any bottle you like.
I now fill the bottle with sheet rock mud and seal the cap. It now weighs 2 lbs, does not tip well when impacted. I take clear plastic shipping tape and cover the entire bottle which cannot be seen just in case I do bust or crack it, no liquid or glass can not get on the cloth and end the show. When I travel and fly and have luggage weight restrictions I use an empty bottle, when I check in the hotel I empty the ash tray out side of its sand and fill the bottle.
Now Set a ball on the top of the lid and then pound the top until you make a nice crater in the lid, then when the ball drops and does not hit perfectly it will catch and drop in the hole. Put a little dab of rubber cement in the crater and let it dry, then its sticky and a half miss might then catch and hold, my little inside secret I share with you.
Table are making the pockets now lower and I hate leather, they are rounded at the top and the 10 is flying in at warp 7 at 1 to 2” off of the table bed hard and it can hit that side now and go right over the top and nail a fan. I move every one away from that pocket. I get some pockets that just will not hold the shot. Two solutions. A, have a piece of heat and air duct metal that is cut to fit the back of the pocket and can be bent in a circle to fill up the back of a pocket and rise 3” above it and that will catch the shot. B, set up the shot off of the short rail and shoots the 8 up table. Put a rack next to the pocket in case the object ball does get down there it will pot.
The balls, I use a 2 on the bottom and one on the top, or 8 on the bottom and 9 on the top. I tell people, snooze and you lose, and this shot goes faster than the eye can follow. You can’t see it go down. Just remember, 9’s on top, 8’s on bottom, if the 9 ends up on the bottle cap, the shot worked.
You need several sets of these shaved balls as back ups because the punks steal them on you. After the shot they must be put up and never left lying around or they grow legs and walk. Everyone wants to know, how can you balance on ball on top of the other one and I answer, simple, cheat, gaff the balls. Byrne showed how to do this on his video tape and blew the secret, a violation of code, the magician never reveals the secrets, we should have had vito wack him, just kidding, we all love Bob.
You file a small flat edge on one side of the one, one side of the two, place the flat areas together and they balance on each other. Put a towel around the ball, put it in the vice and try and hand file it, good luck, that is tough. Practice on some old Junker balls first. I have a wood frame built that a ball drops into and then when I file it the file is perfectly flat. Always file on the center of the number that is the only way you know where the north and south poles are on the ball. Make the flat area small so it can’t be seen when the ball falls off the bottle and rolls around.
It is a physical impossibility to balance two perfectly round spheres on top of each other. In 193l a man got into Ripley’s for doing just that, balancing 4 billiard balls on top of each other. The next year a man got in for doing same with 4 pool balls. Every year 1 million people try to get into Ripley’s for doing something that is impossible and nobody else can do, only 365 make it every year. I was in 5 times, 5 years in a row, a Ripley’s record. Back then they were using Ivory balls which are a tooth with a vein down the middle and as the ball shrinks in time, the north and south poles tend to sink in and create places where the balls would balance on each other. Let me find a room that has the pockets nailed in and I will show you a lot of balls with chips in them, little small chunks out of them. The balls keep hitting the nails going in the pockets because the nails keep working out. I can always find two balls I can match up two chips and balance. That messes with some people when they do not know what and how I did that using their house balls.
THE HISTORY OF THE BOTTLE SHOT.
At the turn of the 20th century it was common to jump a ball over a mans top hat, you shot into a OB which went no where and sailed over the hat and that brought the house down. The jump soon became a Japanese thing. The used really large and tall fat beer bottles. They shot into a red ball, ramped up into the air to hit and knock off a white from the top of the bottle. The great Yamada taught this shot to the Katsura sisters in the late 20’s in Tokyo. In the late 30’s, Willie Hoppe does the same shot in a movie, but jumps 4 ‘ to knock a red sitting on a chalk on top of Buster Keatons hat off, his jaw was on the rail. The great Gargini of Argentina made this his signature shot in the 50’s and all this was on billiard tables with no pockets. Pool was about to get into the act.
In the 60’s Weenie Beenie Staton ramps up off of a pool ball, pots in it the far corner, flies the cue ball up and knocks a ball off of the bottle and pots it in the opposite corner, a 2in2 in the long corners. I did it on video tape and I can tell you that is a serious tough shot.
Next they figured out it was easier to make the first ball in the side and that shot never missed and the distance the 2nd ball had to travel was 3’ less, live and learn, shots do evolve with experience and different people trying different things. Some where in the 70’s, somebody got the bright idea to set two balls on top of the bottle and he was trying to knock off the top one and came in short and by accident knocked out the bottom one and the top ball fell and the guy wet his pants. The modern bottle shot was born by total accident and nobody knows who did it. We think it was a young American teenager. Usually this is some nobody and he shows the shot to a touring star coming in town and he grabs and steals the poor guys shot who has no voice or appeal in the matter. In this field, it is a very long line of thieves.
Soon this became Yoshi Kimura's signature shot. He put two bottles next to each other and made top balls drop, a spectacular shot and idea. I have that one on my video tape also and I am pretty good at it but I do not do it live as I view it as too high risk. In the early 90’s he put several bottle shots on his video which was widely seen. The PBT 9 ball tour then on TV every week had its pros do a trick shot during commercials and Kim Davenport made the 2 ball bottle shot and astonished every one.
In 1993 Kimura and me, both at the exact same time, both made the first 3 ball shot and neither one knew the other one was working on it and we are co inventors of that. We knocked out the two bottom balls and dropped the top ball. We both also knocked out the bottom and top ball and dropped and stuck the middle ball, a much harder shot.
In early 95, I made the first 4 ball shot and nobody including Kimura could figure out how I did it. You knock out the bottom 3, drop the top ball. The problem is they all come down on top of each other like a building implosion and you have to figure out how to make them separate to make a path for the top ball to come down, this is the secret making 3 balls racket off of each other in 3 different directions. When I made that first 4 ball shot I had been shooting it for 8 solid hours trying to figure out why it failed. I finally made it which was captured on tape and is on my main video tape. I did it back to back for a 2nd time and made all 3 bottom balls, including the ramp ball in 4 different pockets, a perfect shot. The only 2 balls left on the table were the cue ball and the 9 on top of the bottle. In the last decade I have never even got close to doing that again.
In 97 I made a 5 ball bottle shot, another invention and world record. On the Ripley’s set on 10-14-99 I made the 4 ball shot in practice on the 3rd snap and on the live shoot the next day I made it on the 1st snap and the set up of the balls and the entire shot took 62 seconds. My shot mechanic on the shoot was Willie Smith and he was a TASA world amateur champion and touring artistic star who I had been working with for years. I showed Willie the entire inside secrets of how it worked, why it worked and why I could do it and nobody else could. In 2000 Willie became the 2nd person to make the 4 ball shot, in 2001 he became the 2nd person to make the 5 ball shot and early in 2004 he became the first person ever to make the 6 ball shot. He balanced 6 balls on the bottle, knocked out the bottom 5 and the top 6th ball fell and stuck and he has that on tape, a world record. Who’s up to do seven? Records are made to be broken.
