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 One
of pool’s best-loved legends thrilled a crowd of over 80 excited
fans on July 11th and 12th in Longmont, at the Bit of Billiards
Sports Bar and Grill. Mike Massey, trick shot artist par excellence,
put on a four hour exhibition and played APA 8-ball with ten lucky
challengers drawn from the audience. It was an afternoon to remember!
After the exhibition, Mike sat down with Cue Times to reveal a side
of himself that fans rarely see.
Five members of the audience, drawn
at random from a bowl of raffle tickets, got to play “The
Tennessee Tarzan,” as the burly man from Loudun is known.
Mike’s stroke is as smooth
as the polish on a diamond and as straight as its facets’
edges. He did not waste any energy; each ball rolled instead of
soaring, and when they hit each other they clicked instead of cracking.
Treated gently, the balls obligingly did as Mike bade them. Many
players could stand to learn that lesson.
“The (bar) table is only 100
inches long,” I often tell players. “This isn’t
golf.”
Mike dominated most of his games,
of course. A couple of players got lucky, or played far beyond themselves…
or something. They won and ribbed Mike, who took it with perfectly
good-natured aplomb, like he was used to being beaten by shortstops.
Actually, he gets plenty of practice at winning and losing with
local players.
Mike says he currently puts on “over
90” exhibitions per year, driving from town to town with his
wife, Francine; two Shih Tzu and one Maltese dog. That’s on
top of 70 APA clinics he’s conducted in the past year!
“Sometimes I’ll do 15
shows in a week, then take a couple of weeks off,” said Mike.
He aims to book his appearances only two to three weeks in advance,
so that the initial excitement of “Mike Massey’s coming
to town!” is still fresh when he arrives. Otherwise, people
tend to forget the date or “something comes up.” Francine
wants Mike to book six months in advance; some time in the middle
is what he’s “shootin’ for.”
This grueling schedule is a lighter
load than Mike carried in the past, believe it or not. He has left
the Trick Shot Masters tour, dissatisfied with the proliferation
of elaborate props; “It ain’t pool any more,”
he notes.
But Mike bows deeply to Semih Sayginer, the diminutive, dapper Turkish
3-cushion trick shot artist.
“Semih’s the best (artistic
pool player) in this world,” Mike swears. For his all-around
“best player ever,” Mike names Efren Reyes. (No argument
from here; Efren is a pool god!)
“What would you be doing now
if you hadn’t committed yourself to pool,” I asked Mike.
He didn’t know.
“I had an unusual childhood,”
Mike puts it mildly. Before he took up pool regularly at age 13,
he was gambling at cards and doing other things for which we now
have electronic ankle monitor programs. His first encounter with
a cue was even earlier, at age 8, with a bumper pool table. That’s
when Mike discovered his talent, or destiny.
“It was like I almost knew what I was doin’” with
a pool cue the first time he picked one up, Mike says.
His family was impressed, especially
his father who took Mike into Wicker’s Tavern in Loudon to
play bumper pool, despite Tennessee statutes. “Good men do
not obey laws too well,” as Ralph W. Emerson wrote.
One night, Mike recalls, his father got a hankering for moonshine
and took off in the pickup truck, leaving Mike at bumper pool in
Wicker’s. Dad returned spectacularly.
“There was this huge BOOM out
front and when I went outside there was Dad, upside down in the
truck. He’d tried to slide into a parking space at 65 miles
an hour.”
Surprisingly, his Dad made it out
of this alive. But his feat left a lasting impression on young Mike.
Mike grew up a classic hustler, riding
from town to town in search of matches and stakehorses. He had a
few “regular jobs” including a stint in the military;
five years as a firefighter; and some construction work. But his
long-term career was pool, and at first he went down the Dark Side.
Alcohol, drugs, and other things
nearly killed Mike, he admits. One night, he didn’t dump a
match when he was told to, and he found himself locked in the back
office of nightclub with a Smith & Wesson, a Luger, and a knife
waving all around him.
Fortunately, patrons of the club
banged on the door until Mike’s “patrons” let
him go – without his winnings, of course - with a warning
to never come back to that town.
“As if they had to say that,”
adds Mike with rueful grin. “Other times, it was the cops
who told me to get out of town and never come back.”
Mike had a spiritual epiphany just
in time. “If it wasn’t for the Lord I’d a been
dead a long time ago,” he says. Pool became a vehicle for
spreading the Gospel. And then it got weird…
Decades after Dad’s truck flip,
Mike appeared on Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club”
televangelist program. He told the tale of Dad and the moonshine,
and right in the middle of it Jimmy Wicker, who still owned the
tavern where Mike learned bumper pool and saw his father nearly
die, tuned in to the show and cried,
“That’s little Mikey!”
“Now, what are the odds against
that?” asks Mike. It’s as Albert Einstein said, “There
are only two ways to look at things: either nothing is a miracle
or everything is a miracle.” Mike believes in miracles, and
so do many of his fans.
Indeed, several Longmont fans requested Christian mottos with the
autographs Mike signed for them. Mike works with Steve Lillis of
Gospel Trick Shots ministry to spread the Word through exhibitions
(www.GospelTrickShots.org). But wait, it gets better!
Mike writes and sings Gospel music.
During our interview he sang for me, in a voice reminiscent of Kenny
Rogers, about a pool hustler who goes to “a place where there
are no losers.” Mike will be adding his tunes to his pool
instruction and trick shot videos on YouTube “pretty soon
now.”
Finally, Mike will be at the BCA
Trade Show in August introducing his latest contribution to the
game of pool: the Mike Massey version of “The Ultimate Pool
Challenge,” a card game that combines elements of poker with
pool drills that will improve your game. You can download five free
cards and the rules at www.UltimatePoolChallenge.com.
There’s a lot more to Mike
Massey than a “big stick,” as there is to all great
players.
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