By George Fels
[Reprinted from April 2005]
I suppose one way to measure my respect for the late Eugene “Johnny” Ervolino would be to note that he was a focal point of the first piece I ever published on pool (August 1976 in The National Billiard News). The man intrigued me well before I ever met him; he was almost universally thought to be the best money player in the pool form I loved most (straight pool).

Ervolino, who would have been 70 this spring, is to be admired even more as a survivor than as a pool player, and we’re not talking about being voted on or off an island as TV cameras roll. As far as I know, the man did not even have a grade-school diploma. The only honest labor he was ever known to have done, besides helping with his father’s produce business as an early teen, was as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. Yet as far as his loving family was concerned, he was totally dependable as a breadwinner. He was said to have missed not one single night’s work in Vegas in the five or six years on the job; a good part of every single score he ever made on the road at pool or horses was mailed back home to his wife, Maryanne. His daughters, Nicole and Linda, finished school and never missed a meal.

His reliability in the poolroom was another matter. “As good as he is,” his detractors would lament, because no rational man questioned his pure ability, “it seems like every single time he plays, somebody is in a trap.” There are endless stories of backers who watched him lose under suspicious circumstances, and still returned the next night to stand in line to back him again. If the game was on the square, there was only a handful of men in the world who figured to beat him; the gamble therefore became not whether he would win or lose, but whether he was really into the game or not.

What everyone agrees on is that his best game by far was straight pool. “Johnny Ervolino can run 100 balls anytime he screws his cue together,” raved the late tournament promoter Fred Whalen, and the praise was near unanimous. His stroke appeared to be little more than a twitch, yet there was an elegant slip to his backswing, with his pinky extended as though he were taking afternoon tea. Ervolino hit the ball almost exactly the way Allen Hopkins does, a stroke designed to “bounce” the cue ball off object balls from close distances (which helps explain why neither man particularly welcomed long shots, and why their 9-ball games, fearsome though they were, did not measure up to their 14.1 or one-pocket). That ultra-compact stroke was one reason he could recapture his game almost at once after long intervals, which his lifestyle not only made necessary, but occasionally mandatory.

He also had the good fortune to flourish in an era when compulsive gamblers (read: suckers) had hardly anywhere else to go at night but poolrooms. There were no casinos outside Las Vegas, no OTBs, not even any computers. Johnny could make $30 or $40 a day, not bad money back then, with little more effort than stifling his yawns. The trick was keeping said money in his pocket after the win. “Bangtail fever” raged in his blood from his teens on; he bragged that he knew more about the game at New York’s Aqueduct and Belmont racetracks than any living human.

Before the U.S. Open 14.1 tournament was inaugurated in the mid-’60s, the one really prestigious pool tournament was the invitational event sponsored by the Billiard Room Proprietors of America (BRPAA), held at either the Roosevelt or Ambassador Hotels in Manhattan. Then in his mid-20s, Ervolino was actually blacklisted from that tournament; notwithstanding his near-brilliant street smarts, he had made some very foolish mistakes, and there was a record of those. He thus joined two other New York players and world-class competitors, Cisero Murphy (shamefully banned only because of his race) and Jack “Jersey Red” Breit (banished for his hustler’s rep and probably his toilet of a mouth) on the sidelines.

So, it was almost exclusively money play that Ervolino had to carve his reputation. He did win a few tournaments in and around New York City, but he was far more feared going for the green. In 1967, I happened to visit the famous Golden Q room in Queens, where he had just concluded a three-discipline exhibition with the immortal Eddie Taylor. The scores still stood proudly on the wall: Ervolino had beaten Taylor in one-pocket, 9-ball and bank pool! While it was Baltimore’s Eddie Kelly who was getting most of the acclaim as the world’s best all-around player at the time, there’s little doubt that Ervolino would have given Kelly all he could handle. “Look what he did to Taylor,” gushed one Golden Q regular. “If he’d give up horses, he’d be the best pool player the game ever saw.”

Now he’s gone, dying Feb. 19 of a heart attack, and it’s virtually impossible to think of another player who represented the game the same way. Away from the table, everybody loved the guy, with his fingernails-on-the-blackboard voice, his quick wit, and his endless stories. At the table, far more than merely playing the game brilliantly, he became it, raffish and charming at the same time, sort of a Lee Trevino brought indoors. Pool has never been played better, by more players, than in New York through the ’50s and into the mid-’60s; Ervolino (along with Murphy and Breit) was always in the center ring of that perpetual three-ring circus. He survived a stroke; he survived double lung surgery; he survived a lifestyle that occasionally saw black coffee and Oreo cookies as a wholesome meal.

I’d like to see a movie on his life. But who would portray him? My nominee would be the equally Italian Michael Imperioli of “The Sopranos.” But whomever it turned out to be would have one hell of a time living up to the original.