I was sorry to hear of the death the other day of "Fast Eddie" Parker. The renowned American pool player died of a heart attack at the age of 69 while making an appearance at a US Classic event near Brownsville, Texas.
In this country and in Britain, snooker has (disappointingly), lost just about all of the seedy low-life aspects which once made it attractive to young people wishing to waste their youth. But the American pool game has always retained its down-market, hustling, fast-moving semi-criminal appeal. The pool hall throughout the US remains a wonderfully disreputable place, despite all the misguided American efforts to glamourise the game. It is entirely appropriate that while you "play" billiards, you "shoot" pool, (as in shooting craps, just a bit bit more reputable). It is equally appropriate that Fast Eddie should have died while playing in what is known as an Eight-Ball Showdown.
Eddie Parker started early. He began shooting pool in Kansas City at the age of nine, and had acquired his "Fast Eddie" moniker by the time he was in high school. Still in his twenties, he famously became the model for Fast Eddie Felson, the hero of Walter Tevis's 1959 novel, The Hustler, which was made into a very successful movie in 1961.
However, Fast Eddie always insisted that he was a "money player" rather than a hustler: "A hustler will let the other guy win, then up the bet", he once explained. "He's conning up his opponent. A money player freezes up the money in advance and plays his best right from the start."
I wish I had known this in the days when I first knew and played with Fast Eddie. I wasn't too hot a pool player in my early days growing up in the US. But I learned quickly, and by the by the time I had dropped out of high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was known as "Fast Brennie". I talked fast and played fast. Things went well for a while, and I was spending those bucks as fast as I made them, but I gradually ran out of opponents. I realised I was becoming the victim of my own reputation.
I had to do something, and fast (which was in my nature, fortunately). Time was running out for me in Tulsa. So I slowed my game right down. I also stopped adding subjunctive clauses to my sentences. I slowed everything right down. I cut out all adverbs. There were guys I knew in Tulsa who didn't have two words to throw to a dog. Soon, I didn't have one. My reputation faded away, and within a year I became known as "Slow Brennie".
It worked a treat. The challengers returned, and over some of the slowest and most boring games ever recorded in American pool history, I cleaned out the best players in town. Then I left and never looked back.
About this time I first met Fast Eddie. We were both attending a match in New Jersey between world pool champion Willie Mosconi and Irving "Deacon" Crane. Six-times world champion Benny Allen was there too, I recall, and the legendary "New York Fats", Rudolph Wanderone, who became "Minnesota Fats" in the movie. It was some night.
Afterwards, I challenged Fast Eddie to a "friendly" game. We were both old enough (22, I think) to know that in pool there was no such thing, but we had a few drinks in Jerry Lynch's and then hit a favourite old hall of Eddie's on the Jersey shore. It was a dingy place where smoke hung heavy in the air, and a few old-timers banged balls about without much interest. They registered Fast Eddie's presence all right, but didn't make a fuss about it. That was the way he liked it.
We agreed on a "friendly" series of $500 three-cushion games. From the beginning, I was in trouble. I had Fast Eddie down as a hustler, who would let me win a game or two, then raise the stakes - at which point I intended to politely retire. I was wrong. He hit me straight off with his best shots, and talk about fast - Fast Eddie truly deserved his name. As he said later, he wasn't a hustler - he was a money player, freezing up those dollar wads right off, playing his best from shot one.
I lost everything. After that, there was nothing for it but to find a novelist for whom I might serve as some kind of American inspiration, perhaps leading to a hit movie. This never happened either. I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the way most pool players are all their lives, not that any of us ever regretted it.
bglacken@irish-times.ie