Cornbread Red

Walter Tevis isn't the only renowned billiards hustler from Kentucky; there's also Cornbread Red (1931-2004), born in Mayfield, KY to sharecroppers during the Great Depression.

According to the book Cornbread Red: Pool's Greatest Money Player, "in a fast, thrilling and sometimes dangerous culture, Red learned the "Rules of the Road" from hustlers, gamblers, con-men and champions."

Cornbread, whose real name was Billy Burge, went on to Las Vegas and Detroit and became one of the greatest money-earning players and proposition men of all time. According to Wikipedia, when someone asked Cornbread about the highest-stakes game he ever played in, he replied that it was a Race To Six for $100,000.

Not bad for a Kentucky farmboy.

Walter Tevis

Walter Tevis was a good ol' Madison County boy who served in World War II at a young age, attended Model High School (now Model Laboratory School) in Richmond, and went on to college at the University of Kentucky. His two biggest passions were playing pool and writing, and he somehow managed to juggle the two well enough to earn his Masters degree. Tevis spent a great deal of time in the smoky, dirty pool rooms of Richmond, even after becoming a schoolteacher in small towns like Science Hill, Irvine, and Carlisle. Later, he went on to become a professor at UK, and then Ohio University. His pool shark's life of drinking and smoking caught up with him in the end, however, and in his final years he battled alcoholism and lung cancer. He died in New York in 1984.

Oh, and he also just happened to be the author of three blockbuster novels: The Hustler, The Color of Money, and the Science Fiction classic The Man Who Fell to Earth, all three of which were also made into equally blockbuster Hollywood films.

The nationwide pool craze created by Tevis with his book The Hustler and the subsequent movie version single-handedly revolutionized the billiards industry, making it what it is today and giving it enormous new popularity and respectability.

For what it's worth, Tevis also inadvertently gave the world "Minnesota Fats", AKA Rudolph Wanderone Jr., the world famous pool player who achieved fame by appropriating the name of a character in The Hustler and claiming that Tevis (whom he had never met) had based the book on him! Tevis denied this and called Wanderone a fraud, stating, "I made up Minnesota Fats just as Walt Disney made up Donald Duck."

Tevis is buried in the Richmond Cemetery in Madison County, not far from where the last of the great old Richmond pool halls - Taylor's Billiards - still existed up until just last month.

Death of Taylor's Billiards

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot??

The last great old-school pool hall in Madison County is gone. I just happened to be in Richmond recently and decided to get a couple of "Jasonburgers" (so nicknamed by fans of the owner and cook) and found it closed down and empty inside. How could such a thing happen?

Then I realized that ALL the shops on the whole First Street block were shut down. One's even in the process of being torn down. Since First Street was one of the last interesting and useful blocks in Richmond that still had any character or integrity, doesn't it just figure that someone would of course want to get rid of it? I've gone to see many a band on that block over the years, from the silly (A Styx cover band) to the sublime (Southern Culture On The Skids), and I've even BEEN that band several times, with my old musical combos like The Kentuckians, Cheeseburger & Fries, and Formula LX-321.

Most importantly, historically speaking, the great Kentucky author Walter Tevis used to do much of his drinkin', smokin', and pool sharkin' here back in the day, and for that reason alone, this place should have been named a protected historic site.

The mysterious motorcyclist-savant "Buckhorn" (see page 110 in the Weird Kentucky book) also dwelled here daily, hawking wristwatches, fountain pens, pocket knives, zippo lighters, antique silver cigarette cases, and other doodads from the virtual general store that was the inside of his denim coat.

You'd walk through the filthy screen door to find an ancient green countertop, with discolored places worn from decades of elbows. You'd find a seat on an ancient stool held together with duct tape, and you'd be likely to have a tobacco farmer sitting beside you on your left and an attorney on your right.

The mighty Jason would open the fridge, pluck balls of raw burger that had been prepared in the early morning hours, and spatula them flat on an ancient grill that was caked in the carbon-black grease of a century, much like the one Kerouac described in Visions of Cody. Then he'd reach into a huge bucket filled with freshly hand-cut french fries immersed in icewater, and drop them onto the grill as well. A dozen oddball characters shouting orders at him (and calls for "another beer over here!") and Jason always managed to keep his cool and never screw up a single order. I heard rumors that he's a master golfer when not in his cook's apron, and this cool probably serves him well.

If you ordered a beer, it came from a glass-doored cooler unit right in front of you. If you ordered a soft drink, Jason or one of his minions would get fifty cents out of the cash register, walk all the way down to the pool-table area to a Coke machine there, purchase your drink from it, and come back to the counter to bring you the can. I always thought that was a peculiar and wonderfully Southern way of doing it.

People smoked at Taylor's. Hard to imagine in this confused and sterile modern world, but they gleefully smoked like chimneys at good ol' Taylor's - cigs, cigars, pipes, not to mention dip, snuff and chaw. They drank and they smoked and listened to George Jones and smoked some more, then they ate meat and consorted with whores and then drank some more. Some even occasionally played pool.

There were photographs of the place's early history on the wall, along with an old sun-bleached and nicotine-stained nude photo of some woman with a 1960s hairdo. There was still an antiquated cigarette machine, even though political correctness had eliminated them from most other places in America. There was a 1920s-looking wood-and-glass showcase filled with sad-looking store-bought snack cakes that nobody ever ate. There was a giant greasy old handpainted menu overhead whose prices were no longer correct but they left it up for show. There was also a greasy sign above the grill that said "We serve the best burgers in the Universe".

And with that, I'd have to agree. I will miss Taylor's. Goddamnit.