Deacon v. Machine Gun

Wimpy Lassiter, his belly ballooned by hamburgers, was back again, still conversing animatedly with himself. Jersey Red Breit was there, too, as nervous as ever, with five cigarettes lit at once. Minnesota Fats, not in the same class, had not been invited. He probably wouldn't have come anyway, it being black-tie and all. "Dressing a pool player in a tuxedo," Fats once said, "is like putting whipped cream on a hot dog."

Fats may have had a point. For most of the 20 players in this year's World Championship of Pocket Billiards--a black-tie name for straight pool--seemed uncomfortable in their cummerbunds. There was something similarly uneasy about the championship setting; three neon-lit tables amid the faded splendor of the Great Lodge Hall in the Elks Building of downtown Los Angeles.

For more than two weeks the click and plop of expertly cued balls echoed off the ceiling. Squinting, stretching, chalking, the players met each other twice in round-robin competition for the $5,000 first prize. Each game was standard "14.1 ball": 15 colored target balls are set on the table and the players take turns using a white cue ball to knock them into any pockets they choose. Each contestant can continue shooting as long as he keeps pocketing the target balls, which are replenished when only one of them remains. Each time a player fails to pocket a ball, worth one point, the other takes over. The first to score 150 is the winner.

By the final smoke-filled night of competition, there were some 400 casually clad spectators in the blue tiered seats and only two players still in contention: Irving ("The Deacon") Crane and Lou ("Machine Gun") Butera. It was a classic match-up of the tortoise and the hare, introvert against extravert and experience versus enthusiasm.

Private Rooms. Elegant, arrogant Deacon Crane evokes the days of billiards in private drawing rooms, played by aristocrats in smoking jackets. In fact, Crane had his own miniature pool table at the age of eleven, a gift from his lawyer father. Ebullient Machine Gun, so nicknamed because of his rapid-fire technique with a cue, was even more precocious. He had his own table when he was only seven; that was when his mother died and the pool room that his father owned became little Lou's playroom.

The Deacon, now 59 and a Cadillac salesman in Rochester, N.Y., competed in his first world pocket-billiards championship match in 1937 and finished second to Ralph Greenleaf, the best pool player ever. Crane went on to win the world title five times between 1942 and 1970; he would have done even better if Willie Mosconi, probably the alltime second-best player, had not become his nemesis.

The record compiled by Butera, now 34 and a pool-hall manager in California, was accurately--if somewhat disparagingly--summed up by the Deacon himself: "The best he's done is the Pennsylvania championship."

It still is. In the climactic game, Crane coolly opened up a lead of 103 to 57. Then Butera hit two hot runs and went ahead 110 to 101 (Crane had lost two points on fouls). It was enough to make Crane break his stoic silence. "That's just a lot of luck," he muttered to a nearby spectator. It became Crane's turn again. He dipped his fingers in talcum powder, sipped some water and hunched over his cue. Forty-nine times he hunched; 49 times the cue jabbed forward; 49 successive times a ball disappeared into a pocket. Machine Gun never got a chance to reload.

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