Rack 'em up with Bill 'Willie Jopling' Marshall Bill Marshall might be one of the better-kept secrets in the pool world. Everybody knows Willie Jopling, but not many know the real person that is behind the trick shots, and just how big a fan of One Pocket he's been all these years. But then again, fans of Willie Jopling can't help but notice the many One Pocket stories and tips that slip into his trick shot columns, and his trick shot book includes a whole special section on One Pocket. More recently Bill Marshall, AKA Willie Jopling, has produced two comprehensive One Pocket instructional videos. Most of this interview took place January 2005, at the Derby City Classic. © 2006 Steve Booth, OnePocket.org

1P: Bill Marshall might be one of the better-kept secrets in the pool world. Everybody knows Willie Jopling, but not many know the real person that is behind the trick shots.
BM: I don’t know about that. I’m not a real good player. I played pretty good pool when I was younger, just not consistent. You’ve got to be a real consistent player to be a champion. You have to play with champions. They are so consistent it is unbelievable. When you hold two balls up and look at that contact point, what a small little point you have to hit on those balls, it’s amazing how accurate they are. I didn’t start playing until I was 21. I had to teach myself to play. Back in those days, nobody wanted to tell you much of anything and I was just banging balls around. I didn’t know anything about position; I was just trying to make a shot. I thought a shot-maker was a good pool player. So I was just a shot-maker, until a few hustlers came into town. In a small town, the local hotshot thinks he can beat anybody and the people who back him think he can beat anybody too, until they see somebody come through who can really play. We had a guy in our town who made good money, and he loved pool. He was a railway mail clerk. I don’t know if you know but back in our day they used to sort mail on the train. The train would go from Lynchburg to Washington and back to Atlanta and get the mailbags. In the little towns they would put the mail in a sack and this arm on the train would catch it.

1P: So the train doesn’t even stop.
BM: Doesn’t stop. The only time it stops is if you have somebody to ride it. That’s the way it was. Bedford was a little tiny place.

1P: And that was in Virginia?
BM: Yes. The mark in our town loved pool and he made a lot of money on the railroad. He was working two weeks on, two weeks off, two weeks work, two weeks off. The hustlers would come through Lynchburg and try to catch him. A lot of times he would be on the road and couldn’t play them. Grady came through and set up his camper right beside the poolroom so as not to miss him. The mark owned the poolroom by that time; finally he retired and was at the poolroom all the time. After Grady was there, Mike Carella -- the player that got killed – came by. He parked his trailer right beside the poolroom, too, and stayed until he won some money. But until those guys got to beating on the mark, he didn’t think he could lose. I took him down to the US Open in Norfolk one time and on the way down, he said ‘If anybody down there wants to spot me 8 to 6, they got it. Nobody can beat me 8 to 6.’ I was a friend so I tried to tell him, ‘There’s a lot of guys down there who could play you 8 to 6.’ I said, ‘There’s Hopkins and Carella.’ I said, ‘Those guys could spot me 8 to 4 and they could spot you 8 to 5 or more than that.’ But he played them anyway and he lost. But what I was getting at is, the local player can get a stake against anybody like that who comes through a small town. The locals think that they can’t lose.

1P: For guys on the road, that’s their bread and butter, local hot shots like that.
BM: They think they are world beaters, there’s no way somebody like that can win, because most them are just shot makers and they don’t know how to control the cue ball. Every now and then you run into one that can, but most of them are just shot makers; they just think they can really play.

1P: So, you said you started playing when you were about 21?

BM: Yeah, I came out of the service at 21 and that’s when I started playing because I had never been in a poolroom except for this little town Lowry, between Bedford and Lynchburg. It had a pool table in the grocery store and I watched pool but I wasn’t allowed to play because of my age. I would roll balls on it and whenever somebody would pull up outside I would just back off until everybody was gone again. My father didn’t play pool, but we would sit down and watch other people play. The guy who owned the store played pool and he knew a lot of propositions and that’s where I got some of my propositions.

1P: So that’s where you first got introduced to proposition shots?
BM: Right. And then we moved to Bedford from Lowry and I didn’t play any pool, we lived on a farm. None of my friends played pool. We played jazz; we were jazz fans.

1P: What instrument did you play?
BM: I don’t mean that. I mean jazz records. I liked hillbilly music early on. The Wabash Cannonball and stuff like that. When I met these guys, they introduced me to Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and those big bands and I fell in love with jazz. So we used to go by different guys’ houses that had record collections and I got real interested in jazz. I played the drums a little. I worked in a funeral home when I was in high school and when one of my buddies that had a set of drums went in the service, I set the drums up at the funeral home. I slept there at night to answer the phone, then I would go to school. My buddy left the drum set and I started playing along with records.

1P: So you were fairly young when you first started watching pool but you still hadn’t started playing yourself?
BM: When I got out of the service, my father said, ‘Your brother has picked up a bad habit.’ He said, ‘I wish you would go by the poolroom and pick him up.’ I went by the poolroom and I saw him win $600 in one night and I didn’t think it was such a bad habit.

1P: Is he younger or older than you?
BM: Younger. He was still in high school. I got out of the service in ’46.

1P: What year were you born, Bill?
BM: 1926. I started playing then, in ’47, I believe.

1P: So of course at first your younger brother was beating you?
BM: He would have, but we never even played. He would show me a trick or two that he had learned and of course I liked tricks. I was into magic before pool, so tricking people was fun.

1P: So that’s another reason why you got into trick shots – they were like magic tricks on a pool table?
BM: I think so. The magic, along with the guy that did proposition shots on that old country store pool table.

1P: So you developed your basic pool skills and you collected trick shots and propositions along the way, because you had an interest in them right from the beginning.
BM: Yeah. Most of the stuff about pool I learned from trick shots. How to throw a ball, how balls kiss off at a right angle, I learned stuff like that from trick shots. People can learn a lot from trick shots.

1P: What pool games were being played around home when you first started?
BM: Back then in my town they played five ball. You’d rack six, which would make a triangle, and you’d break the balls and throw the six off and the five was the money ball, only the five ball. It’s a real fast game.

1P: So it was a rotation game, like playing 6-ball but even quicker?
BM: Yeah, rotation. Then they also played 5, 7, and 9, which was a rotation game. Like 9-Ball but each one of those balls was a money ball.

1P: We used to play 3, 6, 9 up in New England.
BM: Same idea, except 5, 7, and 9 were the money balls. I’ve counted up the number of pool games and I’ve got to over 60 different pool games. There’s so many different games that people don’t even play anymore, like Cribbage and Near Ball.

1P: And then there are some, like Golf, where within Golf there are quite a few variations.
BM: Even 8-Ball; there’s a lot of different ways to play 8-Ball. Last pocket, one in the side, fifteen in the other side. You have nine ball one pocket and one pocket nine ball.

1P: When you say one pocket nine ball, are your talking about where you rack like 9-Ball but you play One Pocket?
BM: No, you play it just like you play 9-Ball but you’ve got to make the nine in your pocket and he has to make the nine in his pocket.

1P: Oh, you mean like Back Pocket 9-Ball?
BM: Well, Back Pocket is up this way. Back pocket is a different game, too.

1P: Oh, so that’s kind of like Back Pocket but it’s in the front pockets?
BM: Yeah.

1P: How did you first get introduced to the game of One Pocket? Where did you first start seeing it?
BM: When I got out of the service. It’s real funny, a guy that was in the service with me, but I had never seen before, until the night before we left. He was throwing dice against my footlocker. When I got out of the service that same guy had opened a poolroom here in Lynchburg. I walked in and thought to myself, ‘I’ve seen this guy before.’ I knew I had seen him before.

1P: So you started playing after you got out of the service?
BM: I started playing in that room and there was a doctor that lived out in the country. I don’t know if you know who Snuffy Smith is but he had a big black fedora with a big floppy brim and black suit and vest. He would come in once a month to play One Pocket with the guy that owned the poolroom and I had never seen One Pocket before. I started playing One Pocket with a friend of mine and after a while I got so I could beat the houseman. And I played it a whole lot until I wasn’t playing anything but One Pocket.

1P: So you discovered the game after playing pool for only about a year, and you became hooked on it?
BM: By ’48, I started playing nothing but One Pocket. I just liked the idea of the game, the playing safe and the creativity.

But a couple of times I stopped playing pool for a while when my children were born, like when my son was born. I would go right by the poolroom on my way home from my work so a lot of times I would stop at the poolroom to see what was going on, but when those children came along most of the time I used to go home. Then another thing that influenced me was, I had a friend named Harry Crabtree who was the only person in Lynchburg that became a genuine pool hustler. I mean he was like Puckett and all those guys.
  

1P: So he had enough larceny to be a pool hustler but not enough to be a carnival hustler -- that's pretty funny! I guess Grady spent time in the carnival, too.
BM: Yeah, Grady did that and Ronnie Allen’s father was a carnival hustler too. It’s a good chance for them to travel all over the country and then when it rains or something, they play pool. I’ve been beat by a couple of carnival hustlers. So ‘Tree’ would go away and I might lay off, but when he’d come back I’d get really into pool again. And we’d stay up all night long telling stories, drinking coffee and eating desserts. One night my wife pushed a dresser in front of the door so I couldn’t get in!

1P: Oh, she was mad at you because you out so late?
BM: I was out until 4:00 a.m. talking to Crabtree. I don’t know what she thought I might be doing. But I was lucky I had a key to get into the basement.

1P: Did Crabtree play One Pocket?
BM: He was a Bank Pool player. He liked Bank Pool, which helped his One Pocket game. After I started playing One Pocket, all these people came through town -- this is what I was getting at when I was talking about the mark -- they all came through town to beat him, they were looking for him. Back in ’47 and ’48 in Lynchburg, we had $100 One Pocket games, $200 One Pocket games where these hustlers come through trying to beat him out of money. That was a lot of money for a small town player to be playing for in those days.

Before I even started playing pool, all of these people like Wimpy, Fats and U.J. Puckett -- all of them had been through. I had heard about them but I didn’t see them because they came through before I started playing.

1P: One of the things that attracted me to One Pocket was that you get to use every little bit of pool knowledge that you have up your sleeve – every little trick. I know one of the things you like about One Pocket is that you get to play shots that are almost like trick shots, yet they are actually a real shot in the game.
BM: That’s true. You get a lot of things out of the stack sometimes that you learn from trick shots. Certain ways the balls kiss. You get those things in the stack sometimes, or even after the balls get broken up. You can just see where the balls will kiss in. It’s such a fascinating game. There’s no other game like it. Of course, there’s some luck to One Pocket but not as much as other games like 9-Ball.

1P: But there’s definitely some luck.
BM: There’s good and bad luck in all games. I think the game that there’s less luck in and more skill in than any other game is probably Bank Pool, where you have to completely call the shot, with no kisses or anything.

1P: Right. About the only luck you have there is position, the final few inches of the roll of the balls.
BM: Right, position, that’s it. You can luck out and get a real good roll on position but that’s about it. One Pocket has always been my game. I’ve created a few shots. I’ll have to show you a couple of them. I bet you George Rood doesn’t even know. Well, you’ve seen them on my tape, you just don’t know which ones they are. That one I was talking about with Beenie is on my tape.

1P: Now when Cliff played it –
BM: He played it twice in one match. One time he didn’t quite hit it right. The balls came around, he didn’t get a kiss, but the cue ball didn’t get hardly any way up the table. The next time he hit it, he moved the cue ball over just a little bit further and it went all the way around and he hung the ball in his pocket. It didn’t go, but it almost did.

1P: When Cliff played it, he had ball in hand, so he chose to play the shot that way instead of playing it the other way, with just draw?
BM: Yeah, he did it twice. And he made the guy straighten the balls up; you need to make sure the balls are spotted straight. Froze and straight.

1P: So once you started playing and really got into it, right from the beginning you got a chance to see a high level of play?
BM: Yes. People like Eddie Taylor, he came through town to drive the guy he was working for. I think I told you about that.

1P: Well I’d like to hear it again.
BM: Eddie was working for Charlie Brooks in Knoxville, Tennessee. Charlie was from Lynchburg, so every summer he would come to Lynchburg to see his family. But Charlie didn’t drive, so on several occasions, two years in a row, Eddie drove back to Lynchburg with him. I could look out the window and here’s the street and over here’s the poolroom and I’m working over here. I’m working right across the street from the poolroom so I could see Eddie Taylor walking up and down the street.

1P: So you got to know Eddie Taylor way back then?
BM: Crabtree had already told me about Taylor and Weenie Beenie, before I had ever seen them. Crabtree told me about all those players. Beenie’s always been my idol, and Taylor too. Well, hero.

BM: Yeah, in Lynchburg in the middle 60’s after Johnston City had started. I told them if we advertise in the Billiard News and put a flyer in it we’d get a lot of response. Well, I didn’t expect to get people from California, but Cole Dixon came. In fact two or three guys from California that I had never seen before came, and of course a lot of people from Texas came. Billy Stroud came. You know who he is?

1P: Yeah, a cue maker.
BM: And Danny Janes came with Billy, that’s before they went in business together. They went to work for Muecci to learn that business. Did you know that?

1P: No.
BM: Both of them worked for Meucci a little while. Billy Stroud was a pool hustler for a little while. And I never heard of Danny Janes until that time. I guess he was a hustler of some kind. Anyway, they all fell out with the guy that owned the poolroom after they got here. They all wanted to play right away. He had it set up to play on a certain date. He didn’t have bleachers or anything for spectators, he was just going to have a tournament, he didn’t care about spectators. But all those road players just wanted to get back on the road and go, so they wanted to get it over with. Finally he said, ‘To hell with you. We’ll just play it off tonight. We’ll play all night long.’

When I went in the poolroom the next day, I said, ‘When are you going to start the tournament?’ And he said, ‘We already had it.’

1P: So you weren’t actually there for the tournament? You ended up missing it.
BM: Yeah. But a bunch of those guys stayed around. Lisciotti was one of them. That’s when I played him some Kiss Pool and he beat me. He was the first guy that ever beat me playing Kiss Pool; Larry was a great all-around player.

1P: So who have been some of your favorite One Pocket players to watch?
BM: Larry Lisciotti was one of them. Even though he would get beat by people that didn’t play as good as he did, he could play good One Pocket. I also like to watch Keith [McCready].

1P: I’ve seen Lisciotti play One Pocket, but my impression was -- and I’ve heard other people say this -- he would come up with these tremendous shots, but he didn’t know when to stop being creative, so sometimes he got caught trying to do a little too much.
BM: But he was fun to watch. McCready is always fun to watch, too. He used to wear a t-shirt that said ‘The whole world’s got the 8’ on it.

1P: A very entertaining personality, too.
BM: But he’s not the best One Pocket player though. I enjoyed watching Eddie Taylor and Efren. You can’t beat watching Efren.

1P: Efren is such a tremendous all-around player, three-cushion billiards and everything.
BM: I like to watch Parica because he goes around with his cue stick and shows you what he’s going to do.

1P: I’ve noticed he often puts his hand on the table to kind of mark where he plans on having the cue ball go.
BM: It’s very informative to watch somebody like Parica because they show you what they are thinking about doing. You can almost visualize the shot before they shoot it.

1P: I know you told me once how you got to know Eddie Taylor. You also have mentioned meeting Fats when you went with Eddie down to Shreveport.
BM: I’d been doing a book on Eddie Taylor with Crabtree. I was going to do a book on Crabtree and he had a title for it and everything. A lot of times he was a broke pool hustler so he had a title, “Coast to Coast on Buttered Toast.” He said, ‘We’re not going to sell that book. We ought to write about Eddie Taylor. He’s done some things on pool tables that I don’t think anybody else has done.’ So I started going down to the Carolinas where they both were working for a guy down there just to get social security. I think Eddie’s wife made real good money. Eddie just needed walk around money. So they were both working for Charlie Backer who was a pool player and a guy who backed pool players. He owned a whole street then. But he had a used car lot and Crabtree slept in back of the office. Eddie would come over from his house and they both would trade off working selling cars. That’s how Crabtree got social security. All the guys that came in to play pool, Crabtree and Taylor beat them all. That’s how I got to know Taylor a little better. Because I would go down and pick up the stuff for Crabtree, he’d go over with it to put in the book that we were writing.

1P: So it was Crabtree that introduced you to the inside world of pool hustlers?
BM: Yes. He steered quite a few players through Lynchburg; he and Eddie Taylor.

1P: Who would you say was the best hustler you ever saw; I mean as a hustler, not necessarily a player?
BM: The best hustler I ever saw was Sam Crotzer, and I played him. Sam was from Nashville and Eddie Taylor was from Knoxville and they were road partners. The Knoxville Bear and Nashville Sam, what a duo! Crotzer would deceive his opponent by dressing like someone he wasn’t. When he hustled me he was in a pinstriped suit with a briefcase. Taylor, on the other hand, would tell people in the poolroom he was the best player in the country, but then he would make a fool out of himself by missing balls and talking nonsense, like he ‘just beat Ralph Greenfield,’ mispronouncing Greenleaf on purpose.

So on Friday a friend of mine, a character like some of these characters, he said, ‘This guy wants to play you some One Pocket.’ I said ‘Yeah, who is he?’ He said ‘Well, I met him in the restaurant and he wants to play you. You played him one-handed the other day and he wants to play you some more One Pocket.’ So I said okay. Friday was payday, so I made my car payment, I went home, I paid my landlord and came back with $25, because I thought he wouldn’t play for anything. So when I got back he said, ‘Let’s play for $10 and you won’t have to shoot one-handed.’ Now that should have woke me up right there. That would wake up the dead! But I said okay. I had two barrels. So he won two games and I just said, ‘I’ve got to quit.’ Then the next day I go in the poolroom and he’s playing the best guy, playing the mark and beating him to death.

1P: You mean it was Crabtree that he was playing?
BM: No, Billy Palmer, the mark. Palmer was the mark in Lynchburg; Crabtree was a hustler himself.

There was another time, when Crabtree was in Lynchburg and he said, ‘Some guys called me up and said that there’s a guy coming through that wants to play some pool.’ I said, ‘Who is it?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know.’ Well, Crabtree and I hadn’t become friends yet; he was trying to set me up because we weren’t friends at that time. So this big guy comes in about 9:00 or 10:00 PM; it was late because the poolroom was about to close, and Crabtree is in the back talking to some guys and he says, ‘Hey Mr. Anderson.’ It was Jimmy Moore but I don’t know Jimmy Moore. In fact, if he said Jimmy Moore, I wouldn’t have known who Jimmy Moore was at that time. Anyway, Crabtree told him, ‘Just make the knife and fork off of Bill tonight and tomorrow all these pool detectives will tell everybody that you beat Bill,’ so the mark would play him. He won the first two games and then I won a game. So he only won $20 off of me. The next day Crabtree invited me up to the hotel where Jimmy Moore and Don Willis were staying. And Crabtree told Jimmy Moore, ‘Come on down to the poolroom around 10:00 in the morning, Billy Palmer is always there.’ I had to work that morning and I didn’t see him when he got there but he came in and they played 9-Ball and Moore beat him playing 9-Ball. Then they played One Pocket and Moore beat him playing One Pocket and then he left, but he came back in the door and said, ‘I’ll give you 8 to 6.’ But Palmer told him to hit the road. He had won $800 off of Palmer, which was back in the 50’s. A little while later Don Willis came in and gave Crabtree 10%. He came in and got Crabtree’s attention and had a little matchbook slipped up behind the cue sticks on the wall. Crabtree went over and picked it up and it was $80.

I can tell you a funny tale about Eddie Taylor and Sam Crotzer. I already knew Crotzer from that time I played him in Lynchburg, but I heard this later, from Taylor. Well on that same trip, Crotzer had started out on a full 360 through Virginia, stopping at all those towns, and he beat everybody he played. He got down to Norfolk. Wimpy wasn’t around for some reason. Of course he knew better than to play Wimpy anyway.

1P: Yeah, he sure wouldn’t want to start with Wimpy.
BM: He got this guy that played just under Wimpy, named Lefty Lewis. And Lefty almost beat him but he finally beat Lefty. Well, five years later Lefty takes a road trip and he goes through Nashville. Lefty is in there practicing and you know a pool player, you might not recognize him, but when he gets down on the table, a lot of times you can recognize him by the way he plays, his mannerisms and everything. So Crotzer comes in and realizes this is Lefty Lewis, practicing. When it rained, Crotzer would wear a hunting outfit. He would say, ‘I would hunt today but I’m just going to knock the balls around.’ When he beat me he had a briefcase and a suit and everything on.

1P: So he had a few different gimmicks…
BM: Yeah. He was afraid Lefty would recognize him if he got down and played him, so he says, ‘No, I don’t play for money, but there’s a guy in the other poolroom around the corner that works for the newspaper. He’ll be dressed up in a suit and necktie. He plays high stakes.’ So Lefty went over there. It was Eddie Taylor of course, unbeknownst to Lefty. So the next day Crotzer was waiting out on the corner for Eddie to pick him up in his Cadillac when Lefty showed up. Eddie always drove a Cadillac and the plate always said JET, James Edward Taylor. Crotzer said he couldn’t shake the guy. The guy said, ‘You know that guy you sent me around to play pool with busted me.’ He was trying to hit Crotzer up for some money. About that time Eddie Taylor drove by in his Cadillac but he didn’t stop to pick him up because he didn’t want to blow the story if the guy saw them together. But Lefty saw him and said, ‘There goes the son-of-a-bitch now!’

Willie Jopling's two One Pocket instructional videos (VHS or DVD) can be purchased from him directly,

and he still has a few copies left of his original trick shots, propositions and One Pocket book,

Willie Jopling's Book on Pocket Billiards

Click here for ordering information

All photos © 2006 Steve Booth unless otherwise noted; all rights reserved.

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