I can give you a little history about how this tournament came about:
In 1993, Ed Hall was still the owner of Billiards Playground in Kalamazoo Mi. I was his manager and best friend, and we drove out to the BCA Expo in Kansas City that year. In addition to some other goals for the show, we wanted to find a pro player to do an exhibition and maybe a workshop or two. We had hosted a few trick shot shows (Fast Eddie Parker and I think Tom Rossman), but we really wanted a player, not just a trick shooter.
As we worked the floor of the expo it became clear that most of them were out of our budget. Massey, Buddy Hall, the Miz, etc. all wanted thousands plus expenses. On a whim, being a one pocket player and a fan of Grady’s column in BD, I found “The Professor” at the Accu-Stats booth and started asking about doing an exhibition for us. He only wanted $300 and expenses! We hired him on the spot and booked a date a couple months out.
when he came to the room that fall, it was the best $300 we ever spent. Grady not only did a trick/fancy shot exhibition. but also ran 100 balls, took challenge matches, and did a ton of demonstrations and lessons that day. He was there from open to close and said he’d stick around a couple more days if we’d cover his room and meals which we gladly did. He stayed and played and taught for two more days. At some point in that visit, having discovered our local affection for one pocket, he said we should host a U.S, Open One Pocket tournament and he’d help promote it and get it running. He helped us for the first few years and then Ed and I did it all ourselves after the momentum was going.
That first year, 1994, we didn’t know what to expect. Every day we were getting checks in the mail and phone calls from LEGENDS, many of whom are in the One Pocket HOF, and even in the BCA HOF. Jack Cooney, Cornbread, Bugs, Varner, Vickery, Cookie Monster, Incardona, Freddy The Beard, Teddy the Greek, Lou Figueroa, John Lavin
on and on.
Then we started getting calls from spectators who couldn’t find a hotel room. We had block reserved about 60 rooms at the nearest three motels and they were all full now. I started calling other hotels around town and three of them told me they had no rooms available. “Some huge pool tournament has every room in town booked up” they said. I looked at Ed and said, “I think we have a problem. Either someone else booked a tournament on top of ours or this thing is gonna be bigger than we can handle.”
We rushed around and rented two more sets of bleachers and ordered more T-shirts and hired some temporary helpers (Ed’s mom sold the tickets and managed the flow of spectators). Everything turned out better than we ever imagined, and we had created a tournament that people still talk about nearly 30 years later. We did have a visit from the fire Marshall about exceeding our building capacity and people parking In the fire lanes, but he was cool and just told us to clear the fire lane and have a good event.
I had bought the pool room and the tournament from Ed in 1997 when he moved to Lansing for another business opportunity. He still came down and helped run the tournaments each year, but I was on my own for the rest, and it was a lot of work. The seventh annual tournament, in 2000, would be our last year running it, and we had certainly outgrown the pool room as a venue. I worked with the convention and visitors bureau and the Radisson hotel downtown. The basement of the hotel that originally stood there was a legendary room back in the old days, even back in the late 1800s. The room was there for a long time, and I spoke with Jimmy Caras one time at the expo and he remembered playing exhibition matches there.
The event was a smashing success, especially since we had partnered with Diamond for the tables. It was a bit tough finding extra staff to work in two locations, especially since all our regular customers who I had deputized as employees in the past didn’t want to work but wanted to watch. We pulled it off again, but in all those seven years, we barely broke even each time. Without major cash sponsors and selling TV rights, it’s hard to make a dollar on a tournament over $1000 added. I was usually sweating bullets each day of the tournament counting the money coming in because I had personally laid out all the money ahead of time and hoped to earn it back.
Although it was a ton of work, I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for all the money you can stack.
