25 Questions
with Eddie Taylor
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Eddie Taylor
- "The Knoxville Bear" |
If you hadn’t been a
pool player, what do you think you would have done?
I’d probably have been
digging ditches. No, I’d have probably been working with my father. He
was a foreman for the state highway department, building small country
bridges. I went to work with him when I was about 15, and it paid $3 a
day for 10 hours a day and six days a week. So we’d go out at six
o’clock and start working and quit at five o’clock. I worked about three
months and I was probably in better shape than I ever was in my life. I
was rolling up wheelbarrows full of asphalt. And what happened was, one
night I went to a poolhall and I won $70, and I told my dad, “I’ll see
you later, Dad.”
How did you fall in
love with bank shots?
In my early days, my
best game was actually snooker. I finally got to where I could beat
anybody in town playing snooker, but there was no money to be made in
snooker. And all over the South, all the big money games were all bank
pool. That’s Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. So naturally, I
started playing banks because that was the big money game. Of course,
the big money back then was like $5 a game.
What was the most
dangerous situation you ever found yourself in on the road?
Actually, back in the
early days, I wasn’t hardly in any danger. And I would do a lot of
hitchhiking when I first started out. When you would get out on the
highway, there might not be a car passing for 35, 45 or 50 minutes, or
maybe even an hour. But any time a car or any kind of truck came by,
they’d always stop and pick you up. There was no danger at all back
then. … There weren’t problems [with angry opponents] until later. There
were a couple of times that I had lots of money and I could tell I was
going to have some problems. Sometimes I left a sweater, sometimes I
left a coat or a jacket or something. I’d say, “Watch my jacket, I’ll be
back in a minute,” and I’d just leave it, because I’d be wearing $200 or
$300 and I knew I was going to have trouble.
Who deserves to be
in the Hall of Fame who isn’t already?
Allen Hopkins. I think
he definitely deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, not only for his play
but for his management of some of the tournaments and expos he does.
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