12/3/2023 0 Comments Chris billiards chicago hours![]() “This is an average game,” said Chopstix. The Color of Money was Chris’s moment of worldwide fame. ![]() Setting the spot is the overture to any money game, as nits negotiate to even the odds with hustlers. Baby Ghost has to sink eight shots in his pocket to win, Chopstix nine. At Chris’s, you’ll also meet Pappy, Cowboy, Rocket Man, Chino, Chicago Fats and BBQ - “because I barbecue everyone else,” he says.) Chopstix is a seasoned player - he’s been haunting Chris’s since he was a senior at Senn High School, in the 1970s - so he’s spotting Baby Ghost a ball. ![]() In the middle of the gloomy room, at a table illuminated by an overhead lamp, Ken “Chopstix” Lee was playing one pocket for $50 a game with his buddy John “Baby Ghost” Daminato. I went to Chris’s last Sunday night, to play in the $20-a-head nine-ball tournament, and to see whether there’s still as much action as there was in Waterdog’s day. A pool room is a marginal world that has a place for a character as marginal as Waterdog. Most junkies wear out by then.īy the standards of the streets, Waterdog was homeless, but he had a home of sorts at Chris’s. In the last picture I saw of him, he looked content. He’d put on a lot of weight toward the end of his life. Every time I had a relationship with a woman, it made it pretty much a shambles. “I know it messed up everything else in my life. “Some people say I might have been a world champion” if not for heroin, Waterdog told me. His cheeks were winnowed, his mustache looked enormous on his gaunt face, he dressed in baggy corduroys and cracked sneakers, and he walked with a limp: The cops had tackled him and broken his femur while he was fleeing a drug bust. Waterdog - he got his nickname because he was from Waterbury, Connecticut, and he was getting dogged at the table one day - was not so formidable in middle age. By the time I met Waterdog, drugs had so scrambled his coordination that he was stringing along from one score to the next by winning $5 nine-ball games against eggs - novices with no speed - and giving $30 lessons to players who remembered when “he’d walk into the room like a gunslinger,” when “you mentioned the guy’s name, nobody wanted to play him.” Whenever I climb the worn, dimly-lit cement stairwell to Chris’s Billiards, the pool hall at Milwaukee and Wilson, I feel the ghost of Waterdog, the junky hustler who slept in a Lincoln Town Car in the parking lot, and got his fixes at the park fieldhouse across the street, because the owner wouldn’t let him shoot up in the bathroom.Įven in life, Waterdog was a ghost - the remains of Donnie Edwards, who once shot so straight he hustled a $30,000 payday in North Carolina and finished second at the 1981 National Pool Classic, here in Chicago.
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