 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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May: Worst-case Scenario May 2026 [Reprinted from December 2007] You can weep and wail and gnash your teeth and blame Texas Hold ‘Em if you like, but pool, both in game and business form, is pretty much standing still at the moment. Yet, the game has already proved that she can weather lots of different kinds of storms. She has endured the rhythmic rant of Professor Harold Hill (“Trouble” from “The Music Man”), the “misspent youth” bloviation of moonbeam philosopher Herbert Spencer, and even the Manhattan nut-bar who, after shooting in a nearby poolroom, campaigned to have poolrooms banned across America.
But suppose that, for some misguided reason, you were hell-bent on proving Hill and Spencer right. What and where would you point to as examples of how low the game can go? No fair singling out individual creeps; today’s professional team sports, on a near-daily basis, are demonstrating that no sporting endeavor has an exclusive franchise on creeps. Your research, to answer the above glum question fairly, has to target overall evil.
Now, just about every major American city has poolrooms that are unfit for strangers to visit today. For the last 40 years, road players haven’t even considered action in reputedly dangerous rooms, so those don’t really count. But if you’re going to narrow your focus to mainstream, action billiard rooms as candidates for pool’s worst-case scenario, then you’ll have to take a long, hard look at the New York room that was simply called “711.”
As it happens, the room’s nadir in terms of lowlife attendees coincided precisely with its zenith in the quality of play; it was the latter, in fact, that attracted the former. From roughly the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s, the New York/New Jersey area was America’s hotbed for all forms of expert pool. Each of New York’s five boroughs along could boast 200-ball runners, plus shortstops with a legitimate shot at anyone they didn’t know. But the key action almost always wound up at 711 (so named for its street address, 711 Seventh Avenue, at 47th Street). The room theoretically closed at 4 a.m. and reopened two hours later, but that got winked at a lot. Back then, there were no casinos to visit within 2,000 miles, and there were not computers for online gambling. After Roosevelt Raceway, or wherever the harness racing was held, closed for the night, the gamblers who quested for still more action had no place to turn but the poolrooms.
711’s apex predators, when it came to action, were Eugene “Johnny” Ervolino at 14.1, Jack “Jersey Red” Breit at one-pocket, and Al “New York Blackie” Bonife at 9-ball. Blackie gracious entreaty to prospective backers was, “I’m New York Blackie; I ain’t missed a ball in t’ree years.” Red was so obsessive about missing out on action, even the most meager, that he stayed in the room for days at a time, sleeping under tables, his body unwashed except for the occasional splash of cold water in the face, his clothes unchanged. And Ervolino, in particular, drew in a lot of animals to watch him play. He had an uncle who was not only a bookie but insufferably proud of his nephew’s pool exploits, and who bragged about them to friends not only in his own industry but in several that were tangential to it. Thus, when any of the three men played, it was not unusual to see mob money behind them. Indeed, that sort of backing generally was the only assurance side-bettors had that any of the three men would in fact be playing to win.
And theirs was far from the only action taking place. “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his two hoodlum brothers, all 70- to 80-ball runners, played 711 among other Manhattan haunts. The hitman Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, a habitual high-roller and pool wannabe, would be there among lesser killers, in the manner of a lead singer and his backups. Also present were the night armies from “The Deuce,” as 42nd Street, barely half a mile away, was called back then, when it was also host to some of the most dangerous hustlers, dealers, muggers and pimps in the world.
“The room was owned by an elderly couple, and after the husband died, his widow would come up every month or two to check on the place,” recalled “Jersey Frankie” Filerino, who himself was staked to play for cash at 711 a good three years before his adolescence. “She’d come in unannounced at 2 or 3 in the morning, and all the bosses, bookies, killers, enforcers, tush hogs and junkies would straighten up and take their hands out of their pockets, and everything would be, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, ma’am,’ and ‘Why, certainly, ma’am.’ Then she’d leave and they’d instantly go back to being slobs. She never had a bodyguard or anything; she didn’t need one. In that room, she had better protection than the First Lady gets.”
Then there was the killer in the room that had no legs. I’m proud to have made Jersey Red’s goodbye call list, and he told me that although lung cancer was about to send him to the rack, he had quit smoking 20 years before. “The docs told me it was the second-hand smoke,” he said. “All those years of being in rooms, especially 711, where you literally could not see the wall.”
So there’s your wide-angle photo frozen in time, all you Harold Hill and Herbert Spencer backers: uneducated, unemployed men, playing their sinister game(s) at a skill level far, far beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated for vast sums of money, surrounded by wall-to-wall human monsters, all breathing in poison air, smack in the middle of the most treacherous town in the cosmos.
God, I wish I could have been there. |
