 Tips & shafts By George Fels Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.
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July: Ray of Hope July 2025 For many decades, the prevailing wisdom concerning the game of 8-ball was that if two players of equal ability at the game go to the table and play long enough, the better straight pool player of the two should win. On that basis, it was not much of a surprise to hear that, at the IPT’s inaugural King of the Hill event in December, some of the best patterns and overall play were being authored by the IPT’s second-oldest competitor (after Mike LeBron), BCA Hall of Fame 14.1 genius Ray Martin.
Martin was born Feb 26, 1935, in Peterson, N.J., the town made infamous two generations later by the wrongfully imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. As professional pool standards go, Martin took up the game at a shockingly late age (15). Just after that, he met the girl he would marry (Barbara) at a screening of the film “Mighty Joe Young,” and balanced the two relationships for four years. In just three years, he was runner-up in the New Jersey State Championship. Then, at age 19, he did three significant things: played his first pro tournament, got married, and left the game. He did not pick up a cue again for 11 years, making his living in the printing business.
In 1965, Ray managed to talk Barbara into accompanying him to watch a tournament at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. There they ran into Frank Paradise, an old friend of Ray’s and one of the very first great custom cuemakers, who had always admired the player’s ability and felt it a shame that his talent was going to waste. Paradise remarkably persuaded Barbara to let Ray come back to the game, insisting, “He could be the greatest player alive.”
Ray began playing again in 1966, by then the father of three. If he had to travel to a tournament, Barbara would find a babysitter and accompany him. She was afraid if she watched, she would communicate her nervousness to her husband, so she would knit patiently as Ray played. Ray had left the printing business and opened his own poolroom in Clifton, N.J., playing anyone and everyone. He got better and better and won a few minor tournaments in the East. In 1968 came a big breakthrough, the New Jersey State Masters; one year later, he was second in the New Jersey Pocket Billiards Invitational.
Then, in 1971, a World 3-in-1 Pocket Billiards Championship in Los Angeles was announced. Covering three different disciplines (straight pool, 9-ball and one-pocket), the event would last nearly a month. Martin was neither sure he could afford that much time, nor that he would do well, but Barbara was. For weeks she helped him practice his break shots, re-racking the balls time and again as he re-broke them for hours and hours; she was not even allowed to speak, so serious was her husband in his pursuits. The trip had an inauspicious beginning; the Martins’ home was burglarized, with significant losses in silverware and jewelry. Two days later, as Barbara discussed the break-in via long distance phone early in the L.A. morning, the first shock hit. “I thought the hotel’s boiler had blown up,” Martin would recall. “Then the building started to rock.”
Typically, Ray concluded his conversation with his wife, rolled over, and went back to sleep. He was living through his first earthquake. Half an hour later, another tremor rocked the hotel, and Ray finally got the message, grabbing his wallet and cue before evacuating. A number of contestants in the pool tournament packed up and left town post haste, but not Ray Martin. There was a tournament to be won. Hardly anyone knew his playing reputation outside New Jersey. He was supposed to be scared; he was not supposed to win. The field, even after the fleeing of the terrified, still included three future Hall of Fame players (Irving Crane, Luther Lassiter and Joe Balsis), but Martin had worked too hard to worry about reputations, geology or anything but pool. The first two weeks of the tournament consisted of round robin qualifying competition to pare the field of 100 down to 11. Martin, occasionally playing right through after-shocks, wound up in a three-way playoff for the final spot at 7-2, which he won. In the final week, he amassed a record of 8-2. Lassiter needed to beat Balsis (7-2) to help Martin secure the title. Living up to his nickname of “Cool Cat,” Martin stepped out for a bite to eat while his fate was being decided. Lassiter beat Balsis, making Martin the champion and a heady (for then) $5,000 richer.
In 1974, Martin returned to California, this time quakelessly, and won the tournament again. So fierce was his concentration that he did not even call Barbara for three weeks; he did not want the distraction of problems from home. If there was anyone crying “fluke!” in 1971, there were no such critics left anymore. In 1978, Martin claimed his third world title at New York’s Biltmore Hotel. Barbara had remained in New Jersey, not wanting to be a jinx. But when she got the good news call at 1 a.m., she jumped into their station wagon and blazed to Manhattan with the entire family, where they celebrated late into the wee hours at Umberto’s, a clam house well known for both seafood and the assassination of another noted straight pool player, mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo. Along with some old friends, they reminisced about the day job as a printer that Ray had hated so, the tournaments he had entered where nobody knew his name, and early uncertainty about his talent and the financial hardships that all pool players had learned to live with.
Ray Martin was elected into the BCA Hall of Fame in 1993. That he once won a tournament during an earthquake seems reason enough for induction right there. |
