Mike Massey, late out of Loudon County, now holds the world of billiards at bay
by Mike Gibson
At the recent Trick Shot Magic pool tournament in Baltimore, Md., eventual winner Mike Massey was behind the proverbial eight ball when he unveiled the shot that propelled him to victory in the ESPN-sponsored world invitational championship.
With the contest seemingly slipping away, Massey positioned a cowboy boot six feet from the end of the pool table, then lined the cue ball up near the corner pocket on the opposite end and took aim. Touching not an inch of green between its original spotting and its destination, the ball leapt from Massey's stick, sailed across the length of the table through the air and landed in the mouth of the boot.
"The whole momentum changed after I made that shot," Massey says with one of his characteristic easy chuckles. "From there on I won the competition pretty easy. There's been versions of that shot before, easier versions, but I did it at an extreme, 11 feet, where you really have to put a lot of power into it."
The victory marked the third time in four years the former Tennessean has won Trick Shot Magic, its $25,000 purse one of the largest he's netted in four decades of playing pool for money— legitimately and otherwise.
Having honed his skills first in the small-town beer joints and billiards halls in and around his native Loudon County, Massey's was a long, strange odyssey from vagabond hustler to one of the all-time greats in the game of pool. Today, he travels the world in a 35-foot RV with his wife Francine, performing exhibitions, playing in and usually winning trick-shot and straight-pool tournaments alike. He's worked in a handful of pool-related films (The Hustler, The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, Poolhall Junkies, and others) as both an actor and a technical consultant, and he's also a proud witness for his deeply-held Christian faith, having used his prowess with a cue as a means to captivate and connect with spiritually impoverished listeners at schools, churches, prisons and detention halls all over the country.
But he hasn't always been comfortable sharing the turbulent and sometimes outright weird story of his travels and travails with audiences outside the realm of spiritual witness. "In school, back in Loudon, everybody probably thought I would end up alcoholic, a gambler and a hustler all my life," Massey admits. "I've lived a pretty unusual life, but in the end God's been really good to me."
His recent conversations with a Metro Pulse reporter marked an end to his former reticence and perhaps the first time hereabouts that he has received broader recognition for his accomplishments.
Now in his 80s, J.D. McDonald is one of only a few locals who still remembers the nativity of Mike Massey's colorful career. The second-generation proprietor of McDonald's Billiard Supply Co., a pool hall and equipment supplier off Chapman Highway, McDonald knew Massey when he was a little more than a precocious 15-year-old high school drop-out who hitch-hiked from Loudon to Knoxville on weekends in search of more lucrative competition.
McDonald's overlooked the 600 block of Gay Street above a one-hour cleaners then, one of four such halls in downtown Knoxville circa 1960. ("That big sumbitch in the rowboat is what's there now," J.D. says of the well known man-in-a-boat statue that now sits on the property that was once home to his establishment, next to the Centre Square building downtown. "I still don't understand what that thing is.")
His son Pat is now a third-generation pool hall patriarch, and both men call the unassuming little building behind an old grocery store on Chapman "one of the last of the old-timey pool halls." As such, the same house rules have remained in effect since opening day in 1923: "No drugs, no drinking, no horseplaying around, no loud talking...and watch your language if there are ladies in the house."
There's a sense, therefore, that the stern-countenanced J.D. is paying Massey no small compliment when he remembers that the youngster "was always a gentleman. He never was a horse's ass. He ran with a pretty good bunch of people, no trash. He never gave no problems.
"He was damn good, too. He could beat anybody his age and a whole lot of the older ones."
Massey's weekend sojourns into Knoxville to play at McDonald's and the neighboring Comer's Pool Hall came about because, within two years of his first serious flirtation with a pool cue, he had beaten time and again all of the best players in Loudon and nearby towns like Madisonville and Sweetwater.
Mingling with a colorful mix of locals with names the likes of Tootle, Weasel and Maryville Lefty ("In pool, you had to have a nickname," Massey explains; his own moniker was Tennessee Tarzan), he soon established himself as the man to beat among the region's regular players.
Mike's elder brother by five years, Larry Massey remembers that he first heard about his sibling's pool hall exploits while stationed at a U.S. Army base in Germany. "I was talking to a friend back home and he asked who I thought were the best pool players in Loudon," says Larry, now a construction worker in Loudon who admits to being little better than average at the game himself.
"I named a few names, Pap Coarsner and Weasel and a few others," Larry says. "The he said, 'Would you believe the best one is your brother Mike?' And I didn't believe it; he wasn't that good when I left just a year earlier."
"It's a gift I have; the first time I played I could see all the angles," Mike says. "I was making shots right away. I enjoyed playing, and I really, really enjoyed playing for money. I was already like a compulsive gambler at that very young age."
Youthful restlessness and the increasing difficulty in finding willing opponents (Massey was by this time so good that he had begun taking handicaps of several balls at the outset of every game, or else shooting games entirely one-handed to entice other players into betting) led Massey to enlist in the army at age 18. The time was the mid-1960s, in the earlier stages of the Vietnam War, and he was a few months too young to be shipped directly into combat. Like his brother before him, he was assigned to a post in Germany, and spent an uneventful two-and-a-half years there, never guessing that he would eventually return to that country more than 50 times—though as a sportsman, not a soldier.
His thirst for adventure little quenched, Massey returned from the service at age 20 and remained home only six months before seeking his fortune on the road with a high school chum. The pair stopped over first in Little Rock, Ark., and Massey was introduced to the dubious art of hustling.
"I was in a bar the first week I was there, this guy saw me playing for a beer a game, and I was playing real good," Massey remembers. "He was a taxi driver and a local bookie, so he calls me over and says 'You shouldn't be showing your best game playing for a beer. I can take you where you can win money, but you'll have to stall. Don't show your best, otherwise people will still start running out on you.'"
He was a quick study. In the coming years, hustling would be Massey's trade—his meal ticket, his key to the nightlife, a profession that could net him sometimes thousands of dollars in the course of an evening's work (money that usually disappeared as quickly as it was won: Pat McDonald recalls that Massey and other roving pool sharks of his ilk "would have $5,000 in their pocket today and be flat busted tomorrow.") His skills by that time had sharpened to such a fine point that losing was the least of his worries.
"Usually, when I went into a place, I had protection, someone that knew people or someone they were afraid of," Massey says of his hustling days, which often exposed him to the wrath of the players he conned. "But sometimes I didn't."
The fall-out could be perilous. Massey remembers peering down the barrel of another patron's gun in a town in Oklahoma, and in Alabama having local lawmen arrest him for gambling only to steal his winnings. His closest brush with disaster came in one nameless town when a pair of roughneck bar patrons, angry that Massey refused to "dump" (lose intentionally) a pool game, wrestled him into an office in the back of the establishment and held him at the points of a knife and a Luger.
Massey lost his winnings that night, too, and believes that his skin was saved only by a group of onlookers who saw the attack and interrupted would-be mayhem by banging on the office door.
But Massey had to contend with another hazard of the trade, too, one almost as dangerous as that of reprisal from drunken, belligerent hustling victims. Swallowed up in the lifestyle of the itinerant pool shark, Massey grew ever more dissolute, drinking heavily, and popping handfuls of speed—speckle burs, white crosses, diet pills—to keep himself sharp during marathon sessions of playing and gambling.
"I didn't meet too many players who could beat me straight up," Massey tells. "But I got inconsistent because of my lifestyle, partying and drinking and stuff. Sometimes someone would beat me who wasn't supposed to beat me, because maybe I had been up partying the night before or whatever.
"But I would use it to my advantage, too. I was a big drinker, and I could handle a whole lot of liquor. I would use that, act drunk and stuff like that to get people to play me."
During a stint in California, the young Massey in his dissipated condition began delving into psychic phenomena and self-help spiritualism, a haphazardly cobbled program of self-hypnosis, astral projection, self-styled Buddhism and ESP. Even today, Massey believes he experienced a very real, albeit dangerous, communion with the supernatural during that period of his life.
"I started acquiring ESP," Massey says. "I started seeing auras, feeling vibrations, leaving my body through astral projection. I was very sensitive to the spirit realm. And I knew without a doubt these things were real. I'd think about people and then they would call me. I would know what people were going to say before they'd say it. That kind of thing happens to occasionally to people, but with me it happened all the time."
This headlong plunge into the mystic came to a twisted end in a bar in Colorado when, unbeknownst to Massey, another pool player spiked his drink with LSD, the likes of which he had never experienced before.
"I was playing this guy for $50 a game, and all of a sudden I start looking at the ceiling, thinking I could think the balls into the pockets," Massey says. "I had been into all this psychic stuff and I could see how minds do have a certain control over situations that happen, so I started trying to win the game just by thinking positive thoughts.
"I ended up losing everything I had on me but $40. Then I walked outside, and all of a sudden everything seems like it's moving really fast. I'd look around and instead of people I'd see just pieces of clothing walking around, with nobody in the clothes. This hippie came up and asked me for change, and I gave my last $40."
The night ended with Massey in a jail cell; the week ended with his transfer to a psychiatric ward.
Larry Massey hadn't heard from his younger brother in five years when he received the phone call from a Denver hospital. "They asked me if I knew Mike Massey, then they told me they had picked him up walking the streets," Larry says.
Larry wired money, and Mike flew home. For months thereafter, he lived with his parents, spending long hours wandering the railroad tracks of his native Loudon, suffering a perpetual delirium from what he would later learn was a massive dose of LSD. "He was out of it for a year," Larry says. "He'd tell people that he could walk on water, and he'd argue that he could do these different things if he just prayed the right way."
Pat McDonald remembers a seemingly dazed Massey drifting into his father's pool hall in Knoxville on occasion. "It would be nothing to see Mike out in the parking lot talking to himself," he says. "It was like he was in a trance all the time. He was out there."
It was a full year before Massey made significant progress in overcoming the effects of the drugging. His recovery was sped along by the revelation that his experience had indeed been the result of a spiked drink, a fact unknown to him until an old road buddy called him after belatedly discovering the truth.
"It was kind of a relief that came over me," Massey says. "Because in the back of my mind, I'm seeing all this stuff, hallucinating and hearing voices, and I don't know whether it's real or what. When I heard that I had taken LSD, I could say to myself, 'Well, I'm not just crazy. The reason I'm seeing all this stuff is because of the drug.'"
Massey eventually took to wandering and hustling again, drifting circuitously from Texas to California, then back east to Nashville and finally to Chattanooga. In Chattanooga, he met a local girl named Carol Henry seven years his junior, and the couple fell in love, marrying soon thereafter. With his new wife a devout church-goer, Massey left behind both the wandering and the fantastic spirituality of his previous years and embraced the Christian beliefs that have defined his life ever since.
"I got on fire for God," Massey says. "I started reading the Bible every day. I used to run up and down the highway with a sign that said 'Jesus Saves' on my back. In that way, God kind of helped me heal my mind and my body."
Settling in Chattanooga, the couple raised two children, Anna and David, both of whom are now in their 20s. Massey worked construction and became a firefighter, and for the first and only time in his adult life, pool became an avocation rather than a profession. When he did play, it was usually in the service of a church ministry; Massey would entertain his audiences at churches and detention homes with fanciful pool shots in order to set the stage for his testimony.
But the respite from full-time gaming was a brief one. In the mid-1970s, Massey attended a professional pool tournament in Alabama to see some old friends. On a lark, he commandeered an empty table and began demonstrating a handful of the trick shots that were part of his ministering repertoire.
"I started doing these shots no one had seen before, stroke shots and masse� shots that I believe were inspired by God," Massey says. "I had a pool table in my house, and I used to work on coming up with all these new shots. They were like visions. Even the professional players like Steve Miserak couldn't believe what I was doing."
Word of Massey's trick-shot prowess spread, and he was soon performing frequent guest exhibitions at professional tournaments, sometimes competing in them as well. Within a couple of years, he was considered the top player on the exhibition circuit.
The one-time hustler's ascendance in the legitimate community of professional pool led to other opportunities. Massey appeared in movies such as The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, a circa-1980 film starring Dennis Quaid and Kristy McNichol, and The Baron and the Kid, a made-for-TV Johnny Cash vehicle about a pool hustler, for which Massey was both an actor and a technical adviser.
But success and a program of extensive travel also reintroduced him to old habits. "I started backsliding," says Massey. "I was becoming famous in the pool world, and all that stuff went to my head for a while. I was drinking a little bit, and I got caught up in adultery when I was traveling. And I really felt bad because I felt I had no power for change."
The combination of Massey's traveling, womanizing, and an ever-more debilitating depression would eventually lead to his parting with Carol in 1983. Divorced at 36, Massey moved home again, took to walking the backroads and railroad tracks of Loudon just as he had done years earlier after his bout with LSD.
Still in anguish, he would eventually take to wandering for the third time in his life, this time packing a bag with two pairs of jeans, a pool cue and a very strange letter of supplication to TV preacher Oral Roberts. Emotionally wounded, perhaps in peril of another meltdown, Massey somehow believed the televangelist held the key to his redemption. "I had this idea that I would go out to Oklahoma, get on his TV program and give this little message," Massey remembers. "Then I thought maybe he could just fly me out in the jungle somewhere and parachute me away from everything."
The meltdown never came, although Massey remained at loose ends for about two years. His sojourn to Oklahoma was fruitless, although he did manage to deliver the anguished letter into the hands of Roberts. From there, he returned to Little Rock, bounced back to Texas, and then made his first visit to Jackson, Miss.
His lot improved in Jackson when an old friend gave Massey a place to stay and a job as a house pro at a poolroom. One of his first students as a house professional was a woman named Francine. The two were fast friends, and more; they married within a couple of months of their introduction in 1985.
Massey says that Francine's cheerful influence was a catalyst in reordering his broken life. The daughter of a physician, she also had children from a previous marriage, including a Stanford-educated son who eventually became a vice-president at AOL. "She's got a college education, and here I am with an eighth grade education," he laughs. "So I got my act together. More than anything, though, she's a happy person, and I needed that kind of person around me."
With Francine at his side, Massey resumed playing tournaments and working the billiards exhibition circuit, as well as reconnecting with his religious faith. The couple's life since has been a whirlwind of world travel; Massey keeps a mailing address in Las Vegas, but he and Francine live almost exclusively in the RV that carries them to stateside appearances and competitions.
Between his movie work and his television appearances, Massey is now one of the most recognized faces in a game still largely unheralded in the U.S. His accomplishments are legion, as he has won tournaments in every discipline the sport has to offer, from standard eight- and nine-ball tourneys to the "artistic pool" trick-shot contests that have raised his television profile in recent years. The ESPN Trick Shot Magic invitationals alone have been witnessed by more people the world over than any other single billiards competition, with Massey dominating the competition three out of the last four years.
But closest to Massey's heart now are his trick-shot exhibitions, whether they be for an audience of would-be spiritual converts at a ministry in Park City, Utah, or for heads of state in the banquet room of the People's Hall in China.
"A lot of people don't realize that billiards is one of the biggest sports in the world," Massey says. "The first time I went to Russia, every time I went into a room they had my picture on the walls. I was famous there and didn't even know it. I've been on TV in Europe way more than I have in America."
At 56, Massey believes he can maintain his skills at a world-class level for at least another 20 years. In the meantime, he has other aspirations. Still active in film (Massey recently turned down a role in the upcoming big-screen remake of the Starsky and Hutch television show due to another obligation), he's written a screenplay drawn from his own life in the world of billiards, the working title of which is Louie and the Preacher. Set in and around Knoxville, the script recalls both Massey's days as a hustler, and his formative years in the backwater pool halls of East Tennessee.
"It's about a pool playing preacher that hustles the greedy to give to the needy," Massey says. "Kind of a Robin Hood with a pool cue. It's based partly on my life, about 80 percent on things that actually happened to me, but in a different way. I've got some friends in Hollywood who say they would like to be in it; maybe I can get it done as an independent movie."
It would be a no less than fitting tribute to the long, strange odyssey of one of the all-time greats of billiards, a one-time teenage pool shark from Loudon County, Tennessee.
November 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 46
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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