By George Fels
[Reprinted from January 2004]
Of all the requests this publication receives, the most frequent are those which ask about players of earlier eras. “We need old-timers like you,” I’ve been flatteringly implored, “to keep those stories alive.”

It’s true I was already 12 when the great Ralph Greenleaf died, and while I was around for the very tail end of the era of the full-time hustler — the nickname set — I wasn’t even aware that professional competitive pool existed until the Jansco brothers’ first legendary tournaments in southern Illinois in the early ’60s. Thus, a good many of the stories this old salt has to tell are the result of reading and listening to the tales of others.

And you are highly unlikely to find any finer pool tales than those told in Texan R.A. “Jake” Dyer’s “Hustler Days.” Not only does Dyer trace the full careers of Rudolph Wanderone (whom, to this day, I refuse to call “Minnesota Fats” because I know he didn’t earn that), Luther “Wimpy” Lassiter and “Jersey Red” Jack Breit, but it’s also a brilliant sociological examination of the game and its place in America over the many decades when those players were around. If you’ve seen the late Ned Polsky’s marvelous “Hustlers, Beats and Others” but were frustrated that the book wasn’t more pool-oriented, then Dyer’s book is absolutely what you’ve been waiting for.

This is a highly unusual trio of players Dyer has selected as subjects. All three men unarguably made their livings from playing pool for money; the only honest labor any of the three ever achieved was when the teenaged Red hold jobs in legendary Manhattan poolrooms, first Ames and then 711. Wanderone and Lassiter were, respectively, 21 and 15 years older than Red, and at no point was competition between any two of the three headted in the least. Wanderone and Breit both favored one-pocket and played one another a number of times when Red was younger, but Red was the better player by far. Breit also played pretty savage 9-ball, but he was not the equal of Lassiter at that game event though he did beat him several times in tournaments. And while Lassiter was well-removed from anything resembling classic form at straight pool, he was largely unbeatable at it through the mid-’60s; three times in major tournaments that he won, the bridesmaid was Breit. (Wanderone would have nothing whatsoever to do with that particular game, recalling days of the Great Depression when “two mooches would play 200 points for a cup of soup,” calling the game “a cancer” on network television.) But Dyer makes the entire triangle perfectly logical and always fascinating. He’s a wonderful writer and longtime readers of this magazine will recognize his name as a regular contributor.

But what’s most intriguing of all about “Hustler Days” (which received a favorable, if quickie, review in Sports Illustrated) is the way it captures each man’s real ambitions. Pool hustlers have historically been ungodly shallow and unsubtle, with nothing apparently more important in their lives than the next ball on the table. These three men, however, had aspirations well beyond that, and Dyer captures them all. Wanderone, quite clearly, wanted fame. To get it, he first had to hitch his portly coattails to someone else’s creative accomplishments, and then turn his back on a 40-year marriage and a woman who would have run through walls for him. But find fame he did, with the considerable help of an otherwise superb sportswriter named Tom Fox and a public — and media, for that matter — who new nothing about pool and would swallow just about anything they were told. He died more or less shabbily, having endured a shoplifting bust, a short stint in the loony bin, and even a front-page appearance on The National Enquirer.

Lassiter, too, courted fame, but only because he associated it with money. A taciturn Southerner, he would become eloquent on just two topics; his own health, about which he never had a good word to say (suffering from bleeding ulcers, sinusitis and a bad gallbladder), and the lack of big-time money in professional pool. “I just won a national tournament, and they hand me $3,000,” he moaned once. “Why, back in Norfolk, I won that much in a single afternoon. Indeed, I did.” A lifelong bachelor, Lassiter was living with his brother in his hometown of Elizabeth City, N.C., when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was the only bona fide tournament pool champion of the three.

Breit comes off as the only real winner among the three men in the game of life. As much as he adored winning high-stakes pool matches, and as badly as he wanted to shake his hustler’s rep and be a true champion, his true quest was simply love. That was supplied for 33 years, until cancer finally took Red to the rack, by Dotty Thorpe, seven years his senior, whom he met in Texas in 1964 and married just six months later. Red was the only one of the three men whom I knew personally. I met him the day after the JFK assassination, got re-acquainted with him at a BCA Trade Expo in the mid-’90s, and wrote about him many times. Making Red’s goodbye-call list, as he awaited death, was at once one of the most touching and fulfilling of all my pool experiences.

In fact, there was a time in the ’60s when, before going out to play, I would re-read the scintillating article on Breit (“Anatomy of a Pool Hustler”) that was written by Dale Shaw (the same author also wrote about Lassiter) and anthologized in “The Best Sports Stories of the Year” in the early ’60s, just to get pumped up about that evening’s play. I’m pretty sure that “Hustler Days” will do exactly that for you. Don’t miss it.