What's the truth about Eddie Parker????

I enjoyed seeing Scott Lees post as a remembrance.
I’ve googled several pool playing people I knew in the past & it nearly always brought me to this site. I’m pretty sure this is why I’m on here.
Was on Chalkboard 20 years ago.
I for one like reading the history of pool people of the past
 
SpiderWebComm said:
It's the Cancel Culture of AZB doing their job. It's goes from the top down and more pervasive than one would think
until you get hit by it and see all of the different ways it goes into action and the players involved toward various subjects
or members. Censorship is one of the favorites.
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Sorry that you feel that is the reason.
 
I had never seen this thread either.

To all the people complaining, get over yourselves, you're nothing special because you saw it when it originally came out.

What's messed up is you people posting in the thread complaining - it's simple, DONT READ IT!
 
JAM said:
Fast Eddie was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1931. He began playing pool at age nine. He attended school at Ava, Missouri, and he was graduated from high school in 1949. While he was still a teenager, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he was tutored by the late, great Benny Allan, a six-time World Champion; and it was during that time that Fast Eddie became a money player.

In 1952 Fast Eddie joined the Navy and moved to California. After a tour of duty in the Navy, he continued playing pool throughout the country in the 1950's and 1960's. He has taught pocket billiards to hundreds of students, and although Fast Eddie was a money player, he won a number of tournaments, including the California 14.1 straight pool tournament in the 1950's.

It was when Fast Eddie was playing pool down South, in Kentucky, in the early 1950's that he became acquainted with a young man who had helped pay his way through college by working in a pool hall. That young man, Walter Tevis, wrote a book in 1959 entitled "The Hustler", of which a motion picture was made in 1961, starring Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott.

Being a money player, Fast Eddie would sometimes use assumed names. As well as Eddie Ezzell, Eddie Santee, Terry McKee, he used the name Eddie Felsen, and it was the later that the author changed the spelling to Felson and used in his novel. Fast Eddie's real name is Eddie Parker. According to Fast Eddie, only about thirty percent of the novel is based on fact. The remainder is fiction. For example, Fast Eddie had told Tevis about Rudolph Wanderone, also known as "New York Fats". Tevis changed the name to "Minnesota Fats" in his novel. Fast Eddie also related a few of his own experiences while on the road, such as the finger breaking incident and the big money match with the wealthy Kentuckian, which was played in the Kentuckian's home. Tevis changed the events slightly. Instead of Fast Eddie getting his two thumbs broken, as depicted in the movie, in reality his right forefinger was broken during the incident. The big money match with the wealthy Kentuckian was described accurately, except the match was played close to Lexington, Kentucky, instead of in Louisville, Kentucky as suggested in the movie. And Fast Eddie and his stakehorse (financial backer) won $30,000, instead of $12,000 as depicted in the novel and in the movie. The error was that Fast Eddie's percentage of the $30,000 was $12,000, his stakehorse received the remaining $18,000. The famous pool hall "Bensinger's" was changed to "Bennington's" in the novel and to "Ames" in the motion picture.

Fast Eddie attended Missouri University and the University of Tennessee for one year each. He has had many newspaper and magazine articles written about him; he has made television commercials; he has been on television talk shows; and he had his own television shows, "Shooting Stars with Fast Eddie" and "The Fast Eddie Show".

In 1980, he set a yet unbroken record by pocketing twenty-two balls in one legal stroke (the old record of twenty-one balls was, reportedly, set by Paul Gerni). In 1982, Fast Eddie toured Europe for the Department of Defense. During that tour, he performed in West Germany, Greece, Italy, and Spain. In 1987, he formed a partnership with a large Japanese company for the purpose of creating an instructional video tape; he spent nine days in Japan performing exhibitions and creating the video tape. He is the author of a pocket billiards workbook entitled, "What You've Always Wanted To Know About Pocket Billiards, But Were Afraid To Ask".

The workbook has been used by colleges and universities as an instructional tool. The workbook and an earlier video tape by him was in the possession of actor, Paul Newman, before filming "The Color of Money". Fast Eddie received a letter of thanks from the actor and from the casting director, Gretchen Rennels, before filming began.

Because his real identity was kept secret by himself and by the author, Walter Tevis, in 1987, a newspaper reporter asked Fast Eddie if he would consent to take a polygraph test to prove or to disprove his claim to have inspired Walter Tevis to write "The Hustler". In September of that year, a lie detector test was administered to Fast Eddie. The results proved that, indeed, Fast Eddie had told the truth and that his claims are accurate and truthful.

Since coming out of retirement in 1980, Fast Eddie performs more than two-hundred shows per year, and he has recently completed a novel himself, which is scheduled for publication soon.

As reported by a newspaper reporter, Fast Eddie is, indeed, "One of the last of a vanishing breed".

Source: http://www.insidepool.com/ubbthreads/printthread.php?Cat=&Board=questions&main=12369&type=thread [Retrieved 7 August 2009]
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Fantastic history!
Thank you JAM!
 
u12armresl said:
Sorry that you feel that is the reason.
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I'm not. Look at the initial response of a few griping about the resurrection of an old thread when it if fact was very well
written and documented. You were the one most vocal and adamant about it. Why? I was here during that thread and don't remember it. A very good read for me and everyone. I'm glad it was brought back.
Jam did a fantastic job of researching and putting all of that information together.

What happened to NPR? What happened to the Aiming Forum? Why is Cocobolo Cowboy gone? CANCELLED.
Cookie and I are the two people here who know the most about the aiming system that's bitched about and vilified by a small crew of antagonists for decades. WE can't log in and post there because we got cancelled! Yet, it's growing worldwide with thousands now using it including pros like Tyler Styer.

And where does all of the bitching and whining come from? Those who haven't a clue on where to start with it and haven't since it was first introduced 26 years ago. But we're CANCELLED!

And for those of you who want to jump my ass by trying to say I'm starting to bring in three letters of the alphabet where it doesn't belong in another thread and it's verboten on this forum, CANCEL away and prove my point.
 
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Z-Nole said:
Seems like a lot of cool pool things happen in Chicago. Really glad this one got brought back up.
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Yeah, the pool people here enjoy having the professionals come through.
Lots of new interest in pool would have made him happy.
Jeff moved from Florida to Chicago for a while.

He had a table in the back that he had placed grommets on to mark the positions of the balls for the shot above.

He never let me film him executing it, but I’ve filmed him at Chris’s talking about it, walking to the table and the camera he had setup on a tripod(I used the same Canon camera)

He was very joyous and loved to kid around.

Pool keeps very innovative company, Jeff was one such person.
 
I played Fast Eddie when he came through Schweinfurt, Germany in the early 80s. I’ll dig up some pictures of him and I. I was the post 14.1 champ at the time, placed fairly well in the US Army Europe 14.1 tournament too.

I went to dinner with Parker while he was there and he admitted that neither Minnesota Fats nor Fast Eddy ever existed, but that he and Wanderone were passionate performers. What a great man he was.
 
I don’t know much about Tevis but he was so adamant about having created his characters from whole cloth I sometimes wonder whether he “doth protest too much.”

Certainly, anyone with an objective perspective can look at photos of how the characters of Fats and Eddie where portrayed in the movie — by Gleason and Newman — and spot a decided resemblance in age appropriate photos of Wanderone and Parker.

Lou Figueroa
 
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