The Wise Guy

Still a tournament threat, Wiseman finished second at the 2007 Pro Players Championship.

Wiseman loves telling the story, along with several chuckles, about how he once, in Kinston, N.C., conned Keith McCready for $1,000 by using some puny kid as a designated breaker, a kid that seemed smaller than the cue stick, a kid that looked like he couldn't send even three balls to the rail. Of course, that puny kid turned out to be a then-unknown Alex Pagulayan, Wiseman's secret weapon of a road partner and a guy who could seemingly bust the numbers off the balls.

And there was also that memorable night in Flint, Mich., going head-to-head against one of the greatest road hustlers of all time, Jack Cooney, playing back-pocket 9-ball. After 19 hours, Cooney had Wiseman stuck $10,000. "But I had no quit in me," Wiseman said, quickly adding that, by the 22nd hour, the two were, believe it or not, dead even. "So, at that point, Jack goes into the bathroom to wash up and his wife chases after him," Wiseman said. "And I could hear his wife through the walls yelling at him, 'You're not going back out there and playing!' Jack, of course, wanted to keep going. So you know what his wife did? She took his glasses off and stepped on them." He let loose a huge laugh, saying, "Can you believe that?"

But there's one story in Wiseman's pool life that doesn't have a happy ending. That doesn't come with giggles and smiles. No laughing matter is this. In fact, he's lucky enough to have all of his brains to remember it. He might be lucky to even be alive right now.

This was in December 2002. He was in Florida for a stop on the UPA Tour and returning to his hotel in Boca Raton at around 3 a.m. after seeing that "nothing was going on" at the tournament room. He parked his car in the lot, walked around to open up the trunk to get his cue, and then bang!

The first blow smacked Wiseman square on the back of his head.

It came from a blackjack.

"What the f-k are you doing?" a stunned Wiseman said. He swung around to see something that startled him even further: a man wearing a ski mask.

Said Wiseman now: "My first reaction was to go after the guy - I mean, I grew up defending myself and I was really hot - but when I did, suddenly a car pulled up out of nowhere and two other guys came flying out of the doors." They were also covered with ski masks but, more ominously, holding aluminum baseball bats.

"I knew what they wanted," Wiseman said. "So I just threw some money at them - a bankroll of $3,600 with my ID and a couple of credit cards in the middle, held together with a rubber band."

It didn't matter. They still beat him, swinging those bats like madmen, cracking him everywhere, anywhere.

They wanted more money, they screamed: "Where's the rest of it?!"

But after searching and frisking him all over, with frenetic hands, and not finding any more cash, they vanished as quickly as they appeared.

Wiseman, bloodied and bruised and barely conscious, all but crawled his way from the lot to a ground-floor room next to his own - it was Johnny Archer's.

"My wife and I were sleeping when my wife heard this commotion outside," Archer remembered. "She was ready to tell them to be quiet, but I told her not to. Then, a few minutes later, we heard this hard knock on the door, a pounding. Then, we heard, 'It's Ronnie. It's Ronnie.' To be honest, I was afraid to open the door, with my wife being there and thinking that Ronnie might have a gun to his head or something like that. But my instinct told me to open it."

What Archer saw when he did was a black-and-blue Wiseman all but passed out, bleeding from the back of his head, with a massive lump on his forehead.

"All I tried to do was keep him talking until the ambulance came," Archer said, "and I wrapped a T-shirt around his head."

Nothing was broken, nothing was permanently damaged, but Wiseman spent over $20,000 in hospital bills and needed to stay home for a month.

"Oh, and I still have the souvenir of that big bump on my forehead," he said, offering the only joke he could muster about this.

"It's amazing to me that after all those years of being on the road and nothing ever happening to me - I'd never been threatened with a gun, never had a knife held at my throat, nothing - then that happens. And I wasn't even in action that night."

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