DEAD STROKE

DEAD STROKE

By: William Chilton

“Dead Stroke” is a pool term referring to a phenomenon which very good players experience on a rare basis. It can be compared to a trance like state where your concentration level is at it’s very highest, you are focused on nothing but your game and everything else is zoned out. Everything that you do seems to work perfectly and mistakes seem to be nonexistent. Dead stroke is an extremely euphoric feeling that, once experienced, you will constantly strive to recapture, however, it comes and goes at it’s own whim. You find yourself in a zone where you have perfect control of the game. You are like a well oiled machine that is run on a flawless computer program. You see the game from a different perspective where everything is extremely clear. While there you can make no mistakes and you stand in awe wondering why the game ever seems difficult at all.

This book is dedicated to the search for the key to unlock the mystery, to those who have been there and to those who will do whatever it takes to stay there.

The Gift

Life is funny. I’m a firm believer that some people are born to do certain things, while others are either just average or are lazy underachievers who will never make anything out of themselves.

I’ve known many people in all walks of life who seem to come into this world with certain abilities that others of us seem to work at for years and are never able to achieve. It makes you wonder if these talents were developed in a previous life or if god just reaches down and points a finger and “BANG!”, there’s your next Einstein’ Bethoven or maybe even Tiger Woods.

However it happens, it does happen. You hear stories about people like this blind, retarded guy who can’t walk, talk or even communicate. His adoptive mother plays music in the house every day of his life, and when she later buys an old piano, she is awakened in the middle of the night thinking that she has left the radio on playing her favorite classical music.

This kid, who had to drag himself across the floor and pull himself up to the keyboard, was able to play classical music on the piano immediately despite his mental and physical handicaps, not to mention that he had no training whatsoever and had never even seen a piano.

This is a true story and is only one of many. How was this kid able to do this? Where does this come from? Why him, when there are so many thousands of others who can’t do anything extraordinary?

I make this comparison because of the similarities between this story and the subject that we will be talking about. After all, this book is about pool players and what better subject to discuss when you are talking about people with an abstract gift or ability.

Pool players are an unusual group in that the ability to play the game and to play it well depends on a variety of different abilities. First of all, you have to have great hand-eye coordination. After all, this is a very precise game. There is very little if any margin for error, especially at the higher levels of the game.

Second, you have to have nerves of steel and an extremely high concentration level. This game requires these traits because of the high level of competition. In order to win, you have to beat other great players and believe me, they are out there. There is no room for mediocrity. You have to be better than everyone else.

Third, you have to be in good physical condition. You may laugh at this and say, “Yea, I see all of these great athletes hanging out in the pool halls all night!” Well, you are right. The “average” pool player is usually a fat slob or maybe he drinks too much, but we aren’t talking about “average” here, are we? In order to compete at the top levels of this game, you have to be able to outlast the other guy and this may require you to stay up for hours. After all, a great pool player may not be that far separated from another great pool player in ability. Sometimes you have to trade off with him until you wear him down physically or mentally.

Fourth, you have to be mentally sharp. I would venture to say that this game is probably about 20 percent physical and 80 percent psychological. I’ve seen really good players lose to players with far lesser skills simply because they were “Psyched Out”.

There are guys like Tommy Kennedy out there who disarm you because they are so damned nice. You let your guard down and meanwhile, they just shoot your lights out.

On the other side of the coin, my favorite master of the psyche job is Earl Strickland. This guy has the reputation for being a real hot head. Earl is reputed to have this extremely volatile temper. He keeps everyone at bay simply because they are afraid of upsetting the apple cart. Some players have tried to upset him thinking that a temper flare up would get him out of his game. They think that it will affect his ability to play well. Hell, it seems to affect all of the rest or us that way. With Earl, it’s just the opposite. Earl seems to get upset right before he falls into dead stroke and leaves you sitting on the sidelines wondering what happened.

I watched Earl get in an argument right before a match in Charlotte North Carolina. He immediately went to the table, broke and ran eight racks on a four-and-a-half by nine Gandy with tight pockets, played a brilliant safety and ran the next three racks in a race to eleven games. With four balls left on the table in the eleventh game, Kim Davenport threw a towel onto the table in mock surrender.

Maybe one in a hundred people have the physical dexterity and ability to even make a ball. This one percent of all people might be able to play the game well enough to enjoy a friendly game every once in a while.

Only one out of a hundred of these will ever become competitive enough to play in a league or an occasional tournament.

Only one in a hundred of these league and occasional tournament players will ever win a small bar room tournament with any reasonable amount of consistency.

Of all of these people who might win an occasional bar room tournament, maybe one in a hundred of these will ever try to make it on the road playing pool.

Of all of these players who will ever try to make it on the road, maybe one in a hundred of them will ever make it to the professional tour.

Of all of the players who make it to the Pro tour, only maybe one in a hundred will ever see any reasonable amount of success.

A kid would have a much better chance picking up a bat and a glove and making it to the Major Leagues. After all, each and every one of the hundreds of players in Major League Baseball make a good living.

Only maybe the top twenty pool players in the world make a good living at it. At least on the books. If you are looking for the proverbial “House with the white picket fence”, you might want to think about doing something else with your life.

So, why do people do it? Because they love the game, they love the action, they love the rush. If this is your gift, you are drawn to it unmercifully. You are powerless against it and there is nothing that you can do about it. It’s like a drug addict stealing money out of his mother’s purse just so that he can go out and score his next fix.

There is an indescribable power that comes with an ability to do something better that everyone else. When you are in dead stroke, it’s like you are a well oiled machine that is run by a flawless computer program. You know that there is no way that you can make a mistake. An unbelievably high percentage of people never feel this way about anything. They are content to wander through life in mediocrity having never felt the rush of “being in dead stroke”.

The Search For The Dead Stroke

Have you ever known someone who was good at everything that they do No matter what they were doing. They could be playing baseball, basketball, tennis or even chess. I heard that all of my life. Especially when I was a kid. No matter what I did, I always put every ounce of effort into it and usually was able to beat all of my friends and anyone else that came around.

I could have done any one of a number of things if I had had the right guidance. The only real roll models that I ever had, at least the ones that I respected at such a young age, were the guys that I hung around at the pool halls.

The only thing that I really wanted to do was play pool back then. God, I was sick for that game! I would get up in the morning and spend most of the day thinking about getting to the pool hall. I had found something that I was really good at and people respected me around there.

I would spend hours and hours honing my skills even if I had to practice by myself. I never had a problem with playing alone, however, I would rather be matched up with someone. I wasn’t afraid of anyone, even at an early age. I would seek out the better players around town and try to get them in action. Whatever I could afford. If it was someone that I couldn’t beat, I would either try to get a spot to make the game more even or I would get them to play as cheap as possible in order to minimize the loss. All the while, I would play as hard as I could and try to learn something from each of them in order to improve my game.

I had interests other than pool. I played baseball from the age of 11 and was competitive through high school. I was better than most of the other kids, hell I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I boxed and studied Martial Arts for four years. Let’s just say that I was well respected. I always had a bit of a temper so people learned to avoid confrontations with me. I never liked street fighting much but I wasn’t afraid of it by any means.
I always found that, win or lose, you ended up hurting the next day and I liked my hands too much. Hell, sore hands affected you pool game. We couldn’t have that.

I went out for football spring training every year during High School just for the conditioning experience. I was almost 6 feet tall and only weighed around 160 pounds in the tenth grade. I could bench press around 240, which was right up there with the bug guys at the time. I was pretty strong for my size. I once beat the meanest guy on the football team in an arm wrestling match during study hall. They talked about that one for a while.

I worked two different jobs after school and on weekends while I was in High School.
I did it for spending money and to buy an old car. If I was going to have one, I had to buy it myself. I had a 1963 Ford Falcon. It wasn’t as nice as most of the other kids cars, but it got me around town.

Slim and Clean Billiards

There are turning points in everyone’s lives. Turning points are events that change the way that you act or the direction that your life will take. One of mine was wandering into a pool hall at 12 years old and not being asked to leave.

I was just a 12 year old kid without any direction and some time on my hands. There was an old run down movie theater over on the east side of town. Not the best neighborhood to be hanging out in, but just the type of place that a curious kid in the late 60s who’s feeling his oats wants to be on the week end.

Lots of kids hung out around the movie theater but only a few were allowed to go around the pool hall. This place was somewhat unusual in that there was a game room up front with 6 bar tables in it and a beer bar in the back.

The owner was a rough looking guy that you knew without talking to him that you just didn’t want to mess with him. He was a stocky guy with a patch over one missing eye and a rough, weathered face. This guy was liable to beat anyone in the state on a bar table. He was a great gambler, one of those people who seemed to get better as the bet went higher. He wasn’t flashy and graceful like so many other good players, but he would shoot your liver in for a hundred dollar bill.

Bobby was about five foot ten, about 220 pounds and had a patch over his left eye. He didn’t have a lot of friends but a lot of people knew him and came around. He loved to gamble and promoted it constantly. He loved the action whether he was in the middle of it or just had a piece of it. This place usually never closed, especially on the weekends.

From the beginning, I had a knack for the game. I had a good feel for it and before long, I could make balls from anywhere. The first time that I ran a hand full of balls and watched the dejection on my opponents face as I shot the eight in, I was hooked. I knew right then that this was something that I wasn’t going to be able to shake.

Bobby liked me early on. He would stand up front watching some times and I would catch him out of the corner of my eye looking on with a smile and shaking his head.

Before long, he would call me to the side and match me up with some older kids back in the corner for one and two dollar games. He would usually back me for half just to be in the action.

By the time I was 15, I couldn’t get any action form any of the kids in town, so Bobby would sneak me into the back to gamble with the adults.

My reputation grew rapidly and before long, no one in town would gamble with me. I was spotting people or waiting around for people to come in that we didn’t know.

My First Real Gambling Experience

Jack Jones was a cousin of mine who was about 10 years older than me and had been “around the block a time or two”. Jack had a pool table and could play a little. He loved action. It didn’t matter if it was a card game, a dice game or just pitching pennies against the wall.

The first time we played, I lit him up like a Christmas tree. I must have only been about 14 at the time. He decided right then that he was going to take me on the road to play someone. Up until then, I had never gambled with anyone except under the watchful eye of old man Bobby.

We left one Friday evening and went to this little backwoods town in Mississippi that no one ever heard of until a Superbowl Champion Quarterback came out of it in the mid nineties. This place had a reputation for hardcore, backwards assed country bars and gambling. One of the only things that I knew about it was that there was a family of brothers named Ladner who all played great pool.

We pulled up in front of this place which is long since gone and whose name I can’t remember. After stopping at the front door because I wasn’t old enough to get in and Jack giving the door man a few dollars and telling him that we were only there to play pool, we were escorted in through the side door.

I was as nervous as a whore in church. I had never been in a place like that and I didn’t know what to say or how to act until I picked up my pool cue. Then everything left but the butterflies. I always had the butterflies when I was getting ready to play. A combination of nerves and excitement!! What a Rush!! That is why people become sick for gambling. The Rush. There’s nothing like it in the world especially when your playing pool. It’s not like playing cards or slot machines. With pool, everything depends on skill. There is very little luck involved. You control your own destiny. You hold it in your hands. You have the power to win or loose simply by skill and the power of you heart and will to win.

Back to the game. We were led over to this table in a room by itself and asked what we wanted to play. After some discussion, which I didn’t take part in, it was decided that I would play one of the guys who worked there some nine ball for ten dollars a game. I had never been in that position before and started out cold. I lost three or four games before I caught a gear. About an hour or two later, they brought in someone else from the bar. When we were done with him, they called someone on the phone. Later they called for someone else.

It was all kind of a blur to me, because I was in a zone. I was in my element! Right where I wanted to be. About 18 hours later and far into the next day, we left with several pockets full of money and having beaten everyone that they could call. What a rush for a kid my age! That was the real beginning of a long relationship with the rush.

Home Again

Back home, I started spending more and more time at the

pool hall. Bobby kind of took me under his wing and would feed me and let me sleep on his couch whenever I needed to, not to mention loan me money to play on when I was broke.

Anytime that someone would come to town to play, he would call me. More often that not, we would win. Sometimes we would go out of town to a tournament or just to find someone to gamble with. Since New Orleans was just 50 miles away, that was usually the destination.

There were quite a few places in New Orleans that were well known to pool players. The “Sports Palace” was known all over the country for it’s heavy pool action. There was no telling who you might run into at the Sports Palace. Back then, the top pool players weren’t on television and in magazines like they are today. You knew some of their names, but you wouldn’t have known them if they walked right up to you.

When I first started making the trip to New Orleans, I didn’t play a lot in the Sports Palace. I was content to just sit there and watch most of the time.
These guys would play 50 and 100 dollar One Pocket all of the time. It wasn’t unusual to find a heavy money game going on at any time of the day or night.

One Pocket was the game of choice in the big rooms in New Orleans. One pocket is the ultimate hustlers game because you have the ability to hide your real speed when playing it. You can be the best player in the world and you might never have to let your stroke out while playing One Pocket. There are so many tricks and moves in the game that even a skilled One Pocket player may not realize that he is outclassed for hours on end. One pocket has been compared to playing Chess. It’s a much more strategic and defensive game than Nine Ball, Eight Ball or Straight Pool.

As I got older, I had the opportunity to play a lot of really good players in the New Orleans area. I beat some of them and some of them beat me.

One thing that I learned about road players is that they either have a pocket full of money and they don’t mind losing it if you have the skill that it takes to relieve them of it, or they are dead broke. This even includes the top players of today. I once saw a top player that I had recently seen in the finals of a major tournament on ESPN drunk and begging for money to eat on in Atlanta Georgia. I watched this same guy have to be carried into Rob’s Roost in Charlotte North Carolina a few months later because he was too drunk to walk. 30 minutes later he beat a top ten pro in a quarter finals match. I watched a former Player of the Year loose every dime that he had outside of a bar room in Charlotte North Carolina and break his hand punching a post in the front of the place at 2 o-clock in the morning. He had to be taken to the hospital. I once saw a top Woman Pro Player in a pool room in Slidell Louisiana stoned practically out of her mind and sporting fresh track marks on her forearms. She was begging for a game. It just goes to show you that success in any one field does not guarantee success in life.

A high percentage of real pool players who like to gamble will gamble on anything. That’s one of the reasons that these guys stay broke a lot of the time. They can’t resist a good card game or throwing money away at a casino.

The Road

Playing on the road is something that few players ever get the opportunity to experience. Everyone talks about it, everyone wants to do it, but until you’ve experienced it you are just guessing.

There are pros and cons in any walk of life and this one is no exception. For the most part, it’s a miserable life. You don’t know where you are going to sleep from one night to the next. You eat what you can when you can. You drink too much and your social life sucks. As a matter of fact, the only real benefit that I can come up with is that it’s good for your game. There’s nothing like being 500 miles from home playing for fifty bucks when you only have twenty. You don’t know how well you can play until your next meal is hanging off of the end of your cue.

Most players do it for the rush. Yea, there’s that word again. That’s why people gamble in the first place. That’s why you see all of those old ladies lined up at the unending rows of slot machines at each and every casino in America. That’s why crack heads will steal out of their mother’s purse just to get their next fix. It’s an addiction that some people handle better than others. Some are helpless to control it. They live for their next rush!

I used to get butterflies when I pulled up to a pool room where no one knew me. The anticipation that I might get into some action would send chills up and down my spine.

I always played better on the road. I think that most road players do. It’s the fact that you are away from home and no one knows you, therefore no one has any expectations as to how badly or how well you really play.

I once played this guy named Tyler in north Alabama. I didn’t miss a ball for two hours playing nine ball for twenty a rack. I won close to 500 without this guy even getting a good turn at the table. Afterward, while taking his cue apart, he says, “I can’t fade a machine.”

Later I found out that this guy is one of the best players in the state. I probably shouldn’t have beaten him. At least not as badly as I did. If I had known who he was, I probably wouldn’t have played as well.

Bobby Jones
The Bar Owner, Not the Golfer

I took a job for a while in Houma Louisiana back in the late 1970s. Houma was a great town back then. An oil town that was thriving due to the high rate of oil production in the Gulf Of Mexico and the demand that the rest of the country put on the Oil Industry.

There are two things that are very predictable about oil field hands. They love to drink and they love to gamble. These guys worked hard and they played equally as hard. Most of them worked offshore on oil producing platforms or drilling rigs. This way of life can only be compared to being in prison. The only difference was that these guys were paid well for their isolation. They would be stuck out there for weeks at a time with no alcohol of female companionship, so it’s no wonder that when they came in, there was no holding them back.

Houma was a mid sized town in the 70s with more bar rooms than any other businesses. There was literally a bar room on every corner and some in between.

Pool action was crazy back then. For every person who actually lived in Houma, there were three or four who worked out of the area and lived somewhere else. For a town of approximately 50,000 people, there might be over 100,000 transients who came through the area every month. A lot of the bars around town never closed. You could find ten and twenty dollar action every night of the week if you wanted to get out and look for it. There were Ten dollar entry fee tournaments with a calcutta every night of the week at different locations around town. There were places where you could go in the middle of the night and hang around the pool tables where people would beg you to play.

I moved into this middle of the road apartment complex in the middle of town. It wasn’t anything to write home about and I’d lived in worse places. I hadn’t been there long when I met Bobby Jones. Bobby was an old retired bar owner who lived in the apartment complex for the convenience. Bobby also owned a very large home in Thibodeaux, a smaller town 20 miles north of Houma. Despite being in his eighties, Bobby had a lot of energy and loved to gamble.

We became fast friends when Bobby found out that I was a player. We went a lot of places and made a lot of money together. Bobby wasn’t short on money and wasn’t short on guts. He would bet anything if he thought that he had the best of it.

Back in the late 70s there were no pool tournaments on television or instructional tapes for kids to study. In order to become a good player you had to learn by trial and error or simply by going out and matching up with better and better players. This also meant that the only way to see a top pro was to accidentally run into one on the road. If you did meet a pro, you probably wouldn’t know it until it was too late.

Bobby bragged to me over and over about how he knew several of the pros and how he had been all over the country visiting some of the pro tournament stops. He said that he had staked some of those guys in high stakes matches and that one day he would call me to come down and play one of them without telling me who he was. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, and it really didn’t matter since I was always playing on his money anyway.

Inevitably, the night came when he called me to play a match with some gut who I didn’t know. I walked into the place to see this tall guy about thirty years old hitting balls on the corner table.

Bobby pointed him out to me so I went over and asked him to play some nine ball.

We started out at twenty a game and I won the flip to break first. I broke and ran five racks without the guy even getting to the table. He sat there as calmly as could be and never said a word.

I finally got out of line on the sixth rack with only the seven and the nine left on the table. I left the cue ball in the jaws of the corner pocket with the nine in the middle of the same end rail. The seven was frozen to the side rail about six inches from the opposite corner pocket leaving him a long straight in shot with a length of the table draw in order to get on the nine. This was compounded by the fact that he was jacked up in the jaws of the corner pocket in order to attempt the shot. Bear in mind that he hadn’t even hit a ball in the last six racks.

He walked to the table and calmly jacked up and made two short, deliberate strokes at the cue ball and fired the seven in the hole with authority. The cue ball drew all the way back to the end rail with the perfect speed to put him straight in on the nine ball.

Four racks later I finally got to the table again only to find myself frozen behind another ball with an impossible shot at hitting the object ball. By then I figured out that I had been had. I was in trouble and I had figured out that he had brought in one of his ringers. I managed a couple of other trips to the table before I was down about a hundred forty.

Bobby didn’t let the torture go any further. After all it was his money. He introduced me to Bobby Williams who had won the United States Trick Shot Championship and had recently finished second to Steve Mizerak on the last Pro Tournament Stop.

Bobby hung around for a few days and I took him around to all of the good spots in New Orleans. We made some money and I gained some valuable knowledge and experience.

Incidentally, I bumped into Bobby Williams again a few years later at the 1985 Charlotte North Carolina Open where he finished third behind the eventual winner Efren Reyes.

WHO’SE NUMBER ONE ?

Rob’s Roost was an out of the way bar room in Charlotte North Carolina right up the road from the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Each year they hosted a tournament that drew most of the top players in the country.

Charlotte had a hometown feel for a mid-sized city. People were friendly and trusting in a country sort of way, totally unlike the New Orleans atmosphere that I was used to.

I spent some time around Charlotte in the early 80s because my brother lived and worked there. It was an easy destination for me because I always had a place to stay while in town.

My first trip to Robs Roost was memorable in that I got a chance to watch a “Future number one player in the world” run through the field like they were a bunch of school kids. Everyone looked at this guy in total amazement as he would run out rack after rack doing some of the most amazing things that I have ever seen, all the while smiling uncaringly with his mouth full of missing teeth.

The thin dark haired philipino couldn’t speak English at the time and rarely even mumbled a word as he would routinely cut balls in with relative ease that other players would’nt even attempt, then promptly run the rest of the rack out.

He strolled around the table with supreme confidence and a slight air if arrogance playing with a cue that could have been picked up at the local K-Mart for about thirty bucks.

Top players like Keith McCreaty shook their heads in amazement saying, “Who is this guy?” while he ran through them fearlessly as if they were no threat to him at all.

Efren Reyes has been known as the undisputed number one player in the world for the past few years and deservedly so. He strikes fear in even the best money players in the world.

The story goes that he came to the states in the early eighties with very little money and virtually no ability to communicate. He was taken in by a wealthy stake horse who gained his confidence with his bank roll along with his ability and willingness to help him with the language barrier.

They ran together for about a year during which time they beat some of the best players in the country out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, after which he gave Efren a few hundred dollars and turned him loose.

It was told in all of the pool circles that they matched up with Grady Mathiews, who was the number one “One Pocket” player in the country at the time. Having very little knowledge of the game of One Pocket, Efren was given the very sizeable spot of nine to six.

Efren, who grew up in Manilla, in the Phillipenes, had played fifteen ball rotation almost exclusively for his entire life. He wasn’t familiar with One Pocket, but had little trouble gaining control of the game as well as gaining control of Grady Matthiews. It was said that after quite a few hours of play, Efren was spotting Grady nine to six and walked away with quite a sizeable amount of cash.

Needless to say, Efren Reyes is probably the most feared player in the world today. The few chances that I have had to watch him in person have been most impressive, to say the least.

STRAIGHT POOL

Straight pool is a fascinating game. If you don’t believe it, then you obviously haven’t seen it played at the top levels. Most of the top players in the world still play the game, however it doesn’t have the popularity that it once had. It has lost ground to nine ball and other faster, more exciting games that promoters of the game can more easily adapt to television.

Straight pool is the purest of all of the cue games. All of the old time great players lived by the game. The great championships of the early part of the twentieth century were all straight pool tournaments played on five by ten foot tables which are all but non-existent in today’s fast paced pool world.

The game was never really popular in the extreme southern United States that I grew up in. There have been several theories as to why the game never caught on, and probably the most likely is the moisture. My area of the country is cursed with ninety to one hundred percent humidity for most of the year round. The felt of the table holds moisture and caused the balls to roll slowly and affects the way that the balls react to each other. They just don’t break apart nearly as well in heavy humidity and when there is lots of moisture in the air.

The further north that you go, the drier the climate and therefore the better the balls react. The roll of the table is much more predictable when it is completely dry. Incidentally, the further north that you travel, the more popular the game of Straight Pool is.

While in northern Alabama, I became aquainted with a elderly gentleman who owned a large pool room, was a part time studio musician in Nashville which was only a couple of hours away as well as hosted a local television program based on country musicians.

Johnny was a phenominal player who had a great love for Straight Pool. He had a beautiful four and a half by nine foot Gold Crown that was dedicated to only Straight Pool. He wouldn’t allow anyone to play anything else on that table. Only serious Straight Pool matches ever took place there.

Every year Johnny would go to Virginia to play in the U.S. Open Straight Pool Championship. He always did very well, even at his advanced age and was even once ranked among the best players in the country.

It was not unusual for top players to stop in town just to match up and play straight pool with Johnny. I once watched Steve Mizerak play Johnny a game to one hundred fifty points for Five Hundred dollars. Johnny beat him One Fifty to minus one with a hundred twenty ball run.

He was always willing to play with a serious player but you had to bet something.
He would play thirty and forty dollar straight pool with very good players and giving them fifty points on the wire. They would seem utterly embarrassed to have seventy five-year old man beat their brains out, but they would always come back for the cheap lessons.

Johnny Tona was a real class act and a credit to the game. He was one of the few real players who would beat you to death and take your money all the while being a perfect gentleman. He never had anything bad to say about anyone, was never critical of anyone unless they were there to hear it and was always ready to be friends with anyone with whom he had something in common. Johnny would probably be close to ninety if he is still living. He has my respect, one way or the other.