By George Fels
[Reprinted from November 2006]
Go have a three-hour ice-cream headache. Endure the full series of anti-rabies shots. Or thrill to the baby Alien eating its way through your chest. And of these diversions, it seems to me, are way more fun than partners one-pocket. And yet the game endures.
I haven’t partaken personally in years and have taken to rejecting invitations with a response that sounds final enough to me: “It’s glum enough to be the lesser of two players; I plain refuse to be the least of four.” Well, I didn’t like Mr. Whipple either and have boycotted Charmin toilet tissue ever since. Four-handed one-pocket is alive and well too, my protests notwithstanding, at least at Chris’s Billiards, where it is played almost nightly.
The primary architects of this shrine to self-flagellation are Bruce Perry and Errol Jacobson, two Chicago players who have known one another for just about 40 years and have played each other so often that they might as well email their moves, as chess and poker players do. When the opportunity for partners arises, they play as a team and much prefer not to be separated. Then they bicker and post-mortemize as though the game was bridge.
When the contingent from Chris’s departs for the joyful Derby City Classic, we take Bruce along as a lightning rod for lousy draws. While the rest of us were catching opponents we’d never heard of, any more than they’d heard of us, Bruce’s last three first-round opponents in major tournaments have been Buddy Hall, Cliff Joyner and Santos Sambajon Jr., respectively. While he did not win any of those matches, he did not go gently into the night either. Bruce Perry is a remarkable visualizer, and if visual ability were all that counted in one-pocket, he’d be very near national-class. He’s not easy to beat as it is, but his shotmaking ability is not the type that closes the door immediately upon the opponent’s first mistake.
Jacobson, on the other hand, shoots quite well but plays an extremely methodical, deliberate and not over-imaginative game. The son of a former room owner and one of the easiest-going pool players in memory, he brings a cheerful measure of yang to Perry’s yin, and the two are highly competitive as a team, at least at Chris’s. For $20 a man, sometimes slightly more, they play the version of partners one-pocket which precludes coaching between teammates during the game, except after-the-fact. This nicety keeps the games moving and no doubt costs the poolroom untold scores of hours of table time. Were the players allowed to debate the worth of various moves before executing them, any given match could probably go ‘til the Apocalypse.
Partners one-pocket has been dabbled with at the game’s highest levels too. The late, great Jack “Jersey Red” Briet took the least likely of teammates, Al “New York Blackie” Bonife, and whipped the competition to a frazzle. Why would two rational men play them in the first place? Because they didn’t think Blackie could even spell one-pocket; he had no reputation whatsoever as a thinking pool player, nor did he need one, because he was one of the greatest shotmakers who ever chalked a cue. Blackie, whose only known game was 9-ball, would introduce himself to prospective backers this way: “I’m New York Blackie; I ain’t missed a ball in t’ree years. Now, you wanna stake me and make some money, or you got a turd in your pocket?” When he and Red teamed up, in-game coaching was allowed, and he did exactly as he was told, executing Red’s concepts flawlessly. Thus, as a team, they simultaneously represented some of the best shotmaking and strategic thinking the game had ever seen. They would win no awards for charm, but they won everything else in sight.
My own last venture at the game was tainted by my choice of partners. Bank pool teaching master Freddy Bentivegna is my oldest pool buddy and one of my oldest friends of any persuasion, but he plays one-pocket at the approximate pace of a brontosaurus, and that’s when he’s one of only two competitors. Bring him to the table every fourth time and the gridlock begins to resemble Boston at rush hour. Compounding the felony many times over, Freddy apparently believed (as did Sigmund Freud) that the student or patient must not be allowed to make any major decisions of any description. So, he utilized my talents for our team by directing me to take intentional scratches most of the time. Now, the intentional scratch is a highly underrated move in one-pocket, but it’s not the whole game either, and bunting the cue ball a few inches or feet each inning, denying it any contact with the other balls as though it had some dread communicable disease, has roughly the same effect as chugging a six pack of Nytol. I’ve successfully repressed who the competitor was, but I do remember as I sank rapidly towards coma, my cracked lips forming the words to what I thought at the time would be a legally binding, dying declaration: “Last … game. Last…game…ever.”
And still the game, like the proverbial beat, goes on. Four men joust over the infinitesimal subtleties that determine when aggressiveness is more appropriate than conservatism, when to summon up more and more veneers of patience, whether an object ball will score to win a game or leave the cross-corner back that loses it. “Again?” I quiz Errol Jacobson. “Why would you put yourself through that again? You and your partner are at each other’s throats for half the match. A lot of the time, you don’t even like the guys you’re playing. Your body language says you hate what you’re doing. Why would you put yourself through this every single night?”
“It’s still a beautiful game,” Errol Jacobson smiles, and for the first time, something about partners one-pocket finally makes sense.
