Not Just a Ball-Buster

Says Bryant: "My emotions used to overwhelm me, and my game would go straight downhill." (Photo by John Nation)

By 10, Hillbilly could already run racks. A couple of years later, he beat the best player in Icard, who was more than twice his age. "Beat him out of $40," he says. "It was the talk of the town for a while." By the time he was old enough to drive, he began traveling around North Carolina a bit and gambling for bigger money. "I never had any serious stakehorses backing me, so I was always playing with my own money," he says. "I'd play $500 sets, $1,000 sets. And I busted a lot of road players who came through. Nobody had a true line on me, because I never really went anywhere and I never went to any big tournaments. Even though I played good and gambled a lot, I still viewed pool as a hobby. I also had an eight-year relationship with a girl from the time I was 17 who wanted me to have a real job, not go around playing pool. So, like my dad, I did a little bit of everything to make a dollar. I was a tree trimmer, I painted houses, I made furniture, I connected cable TVs. I never thought about being a professional pool player. Never followed the pro tour. I'd watch it on TV if I happened to catch it, and maybe I'd glance at a pool magazine if it was lying around the poolroom, but that was it. In fact, because I didn't have any way to compare myself with any top players, I didn't really know how good I was." He was all of 24 when he played with the local big boys for the first time. Guys like Archer and the late Tony Ellin and Tony Watson and Michael Coltrain. The tournament was in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Archer ended up winning it, but Bryant, remarkably, came in fourth and even defeated Ellin. He finished fourth again a month later, then placed third twice in a row. And less than a year later, at a McDermott Tour event in Dublin, Ga., he did what he didn't know he could do: Shooting out of the gate with a seven-pack, he beat the great Archer. "By then," he says, "I knew I could play."

After he moved from Icard, he spent years jumping from one place to the other, from Oklahoma to Kentucky to Michigan to Florida, before settling in Houston and living on a sailboat. "I didn't have much money," he says. "It was the cheapest way to live." In March of 2001, at a local poolhall, he met the love of his life, Amanda Ramirez, a piano and voice teacher from Big Spring, Texas. She's now his fiancée. "That girl changed my life," he says of the 28-year-old stunner. "Things are finally coming together for me now, and I really feel like it's because of her. She made me realize a lot of things that I needed to do to be a better man. I used to be real cocky and arrogant and say snippy things to people - and I still do sometimes. And I'd drink so much I'd act like a slobbering fool. Because of her influence, I've quit all that hard drinking and become a nicer person."

"He's done a 180," Amanda says. "Not only doesn't he get as angry as he used to, or as often, he doesn't bring it home anymore. I think he just decided it was time to grow up."

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