Not Just a Ball-Buster

Exotically-patterned shirts have become Bryant's calling card. (Photo by Diana Hoppe)

Until he was 25, Hillbilly lived in the tiny North Carolina town of Icard, five minutes from Hickory and between Asheville and Charlotte. He played pool for the first time when he was 5, in a rundown building near his house that had three tables. "I shot standing on top of something Daddy made out of two old wooden Coke bottle crates, plywood, and the wheels from an old-time ringer washer," he says.

From ages 6 to 14, he shot in a "little bitty" poolroom - with three 9-footers and two bar tables - owned by his father in the next town over. When he wasn't playing, he was cleaning around the place or racking the balls for other players. And once, after his house burned down, he lived in the room for eight months, sleeping at night atop the slate of one of the tables.

His father, Charlie Sr., was known to his friends as Slick - and he was. "Daddy was a hustler, did a little bit of everything, anything to make a dollar," Hillbilly says. "He did some landscaping, sold watermelons and green beans, was a car salesman, booked football games. He ran a card game in the back of his poolroom. Sold sandwiches and bootleg beer out of there. But mostly, he trained roosters to be cockfighters. He probably was one of the best in the world at it. At any one time, we had somewhere between 1,000-2,000 roosters, and I was helping him from the time I was a little kid, waking up at four in the morning to feed them and give them water. Daddy kept me busy with those roosters. I never got to play as much as the other kids. And during the weekends, we traveled all around going to cockfighting derbies. I became known as Little Slick. Other than three states, cockfighting is illegal, and Daddy got busted three times. I never did - because every time the raids came, I ran like hell."

Slick was also a gambling pool player, and, according to Hillbilly, "was easily in the top 10 of the players within a 100-mile radius." His father was his first and only pool instructor; Slick taught his son how to play pool with tough love. "My dad was real hard on me," he says. "He'd make me do drill after drill, and if I did something I wasn't supposed to, I got scolded pretty good. He'd say, 'Boy, you know better than that. You better not do that crap anymore.' And if I did the same thing again, he'd slap me on the back of the head. It was kinda rough treatment, but that's one of the reasons why I have such good fundamentals." His father also instilled in him the killer mindset, the way he did his roosters. "He'd say over and over: 'Boy, always stand up for yourself. Never let anybody run over you.'"

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