Parting Gift from Freddy the Beard: The "Encyclopedia" of Pool Hustlers*

Freddy "The Beard" Bentivegna

Pool writer Freddy "The Beard" Bentivegna passed away earlier this month. He was a great guy and a very funny writer. Late last year he completed what would become his final book, The "Encyclopedia" of Pool Hustlers. It's top notch. Here's an excerpt of a review I wrote for Billiards Digest.   

RIP Freddy.

-- R.A. Dyer


The 'Encyclopedia' of Pool Hustlers Colorful, Fun

Nowhere in The “Encyclopedia” of Pool Hustlers will you find a list of birth dates and death dates of famous pool players. Nowhere will you find academic descriptions of pool games, the sort you might find in Mike Shamos’ New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards. Nowhere will you find the sensible organization of Robert Bryne’s pool treasuries.

But what you will find in Freddy “The Beard” Bentivegna’s new reference work is fun — 325 chaotic pages of it. The “Encyclopedia” of Pool Hustlers is not a book you’ll ever read from start to finish — at least, not in any disciplined way — but it’s a book you’ll want to have around your nightstand or in The Brown Study. It’s chock full of quick and quirky anecdotes about players both famous and obscure (mostly obscure), all seasoned with Bentivegna’s aromatic brand of BS.

 

The entries are usually short — some just a few paragraphs. But his book is expansive. Formidably so.  Leafing through it, I quickly found entertaining entries for Greg “Big Train” Stevens (He was the only guy that I ever saw eat a whole loaf of Wonder Bread for a meal), Alfie Taylor (old time road-hog hustler) and “Gar” Milborn Frazier (World’s champion stay-up man). Bentivegna includes a few entries for pool playing celebrities, including James Caan and Elvis Presley. He also describes “The Wonder Dog of Pool,” a man he calls “The Filthy Beast” and by necessity includes an entry entitled “Chemical Enhancement.”

The “Encyclopedia” of Pool Hustlers is a better book than it has any right to be.  But if you order the Encyclopedia (and I think you should), don’t for a moment lose track of what it is you be getting in your mailbox. Like the hustlers that Bentivegna writes about, this book is chaotic and untidy. Neither are there any real profiles here, no get-into-the-weeds details.

What you’ll find instead are outrageous anecdotes, first-hand stories of lying, cheating, drug taking and boozing. At its very core, this is an anthology of boys behaving badly. This is a book about pool hustlers.

And for my money, a fine one.

-- R.A. Dyer

New Branch in the Fats Family Tree

Rudolf Wanderone — the many better known as Minnesota Fats — was the most famous pool hustler in American history. But how much do we really know about him?  Here’s a quick quiz.   But be advised:  some of these are trick questions. 

Which statements are true?

1. The Minnesota Fats character in The Hustler, the novel by Walter Tevis, was based on Wanderone. 
2. Rudolf Wanderone was born in 1913. 
3. Rudolf Wanderone was married twice. 
4. Rudolf Wanderone had no children. 
5. Rudolf Wanderone had only one child, the famous rhythm and blues singer Etta James. 
6. Rudolf Wanderone was a top-notch pool hustler.

Wanderone with daughter, Juanita.

This may come as a surprise, but all of these statements — with the exception of number 6, are in dispute.  This, despite what it says in Wikipedia and even what has been previously reported in my own books, like The Hustler and the Champ and Hustler Days. 

New information has come to light, information that I’ve detailed in recent edition of Billiards Digest.  We now know that Wanderone may not have been born in 1913, that he may have been married three times (not just twice) and that he had at least one child other than Etta James (and whether Etta James was his daughter remains an open question.) 

Here's the Cliff Notes version of what we now know: 

Wanderone had a long relationship during the 1930s with a woman named Lucy Blanche Maria Wood, who gave birth to a daughter named Neva Juanita. Lucy Blanche died in 1959. Neva Juanita died in 2010. Wanderone was almost certainly Neva Juanita’s father, and he also may have been married to Lucy Blanche. This is startling because Wanderone never publicly acknowledged any wife prior to Evalyn Grass, whom he married in 1941. His second wife (or third, depending on how you count) was Theresa Bell. Also, the timeline of his relationship with Lucy Blanche puts into doubt Fats' supposed birth year of 1913.

This new information comes to us from JustinVerhovnik, a hithertofore unknown grandson of Wanderone. Speaking to me for a January 2014 edition of Billiards Digest, Verhovnik said that the last time he laid eyes on his grandfather might have been in 1980, at about the time that Fats was divorcing Evelyn Inez. 

The story is long and drawn out, but I’ll try to relate more of it in a future blog post. You can also try to track down that January edition of Billiards Digest. Freddy Bentivegna likewise has included some detail in his new book, 'Encyclopedia' of Pool Hustlers.

 -- R.A. Dyer

Videos of Pool Champ Harold Worst in 1965

Check out the cool videos of Harold Worst playing in Johnston City, circa 1965, which was about a year before Worst died of cancer. You can find the video on a blog maintained by Freddy "The Beard" Bentivegna. Just click here. Worst is playing Larry "Boston" Shorty in the footage. The Beard also has posted a Jim McKay interview with Worst.

A bit of quick biographical information: Worst was born on Sept. 29, 1929, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1949, according to The Grand Rapids Press, "Worst had followed in Hoppe's steps as a 'boy wonder,' having set a record for youth when at the age of 21 he became the youngest player in history to qualify for world championship play." He placed second in that year's national tournament and then fourth in the world meet. In 1954 he won the world three-cushion title during a tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He then went on to amass a great winning record through the first half of the 1960s and might have surpassed Luther Lassiter as that decade's dominant player had Worst not died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 37. Worst was at the top of this game when he got sick. He remained unconquered as the world's three-cushion champion.

You can read more about Worst in a column I wrote earlier for Billiards Digest. The coding is a bit messed up, but it's still available online here. On the top of this post I've inserted an image of the front page of the Grand Rapids Press that features coverage of Worst. Forgive the dark stains. I think I spilled some wine on my hard copy. You can find the home page of the great Freddy the Beard here.