Playing off the Rail - A Pool Hustle
By (Author) David McCumber
HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Avon Books
14th January 2003
United States
General
Non Fiction
Biography: general
794.72092
Paperback
384
Width 135mm, Height 205mm, Spine 26mm
340g
At the age of 17, David McCumber was stricken with "road fever" that irresistible call to the itinerant life of a professional gambler. Twenty-two years later, he got the chance to follow that dream-not as a player but as the "stakehorse" (financial backer) for Tony Annigoni, a non-smoking, macrobiotic-eating "Renaissance Pool Hustler," student of Eastern religion, and master of the pure green-felt poetry of the dead stroke." With $27,000 in David's pocket they took off together on an astonishing four-month odyssey across America-traveling from seedy, hole-in-the-wall billiard parlors to high-class snooker rooms to high-tension pro tourneys, from Seattle to Miami and back again-exploring a shady twilight subculture and uniquely American mythos, in search of serious money, local glory...and the perfect hustle.
David McCumber is an award-winning journalist, a former assistant managing editor at the San Francisco Examiner, and the founding editor and publisher of Big Sky Journal. He has worked for more than twenty years as a writer and editor at newspapers and magazines across the American West. He lives in Seattle, Washington.