The Way It Was, The Way It Is, and The Way It Should Be

Nine Ball is the game I love. I have played it for more years than I wish to admit, and during those years I have seen it go from being a grand contest of skill and nerves to becoming a crap shoot of little value for gauging either.

During the sixties and the heyday of the game everybody played push-out and they spotted all illegally pocketed balls. In 1965 there was a match played that the Janscos (the Jansco brothers ran the now famous Hustler tournaments in Johnston City) watched and there was a push-out here and another push-out there and it put everybody to sleep.

They felt they had to do something about that, that they needed to make nine ball a faster game to keep the audience interested. So Ronnie Allen, one of the stars of that era, suggested to the Janscos that they play one-foul where the only push-out is the one after the break shot and any other failure to contact the proper object ball results in ball-in-hand. (As an aside Buddy also says he believes they had to go to one-foul because of Eddie Taylor. “If you pushed out on Eddie he would just bank the dang thing in and run out on you. He had an unfair advantage cause he could bank a ball in from anywhere.”)

After that, in 1966, all the players were complaining about how the good players were running rack after rack and taking all the tournaments and so attendance at the tournaments began to fall off. So in 1967 the Janscos took a vote of all the greatest players. Luther Lassiter was there, Eddie Taylor, Marshall Carpenter, Ronnie Allen, Jimmy Moore, all the best guys of the day. They all had the option of playing either winner breaks, loser breaks or alternating breaks.

Those great players decided that the fairest way to play was loser breaks. It allows both players their turn at the table and prevents one guy from totally dominating the match. From then until the tournaments in Johnston City ended the games were all played as loser breaks. The weaker players liked it because they got to shoot. They still couldn’t win, but they got their turn at the table.

They played tournaments that way for a long time. Now, when people matched up, they still tended to use the old rule set of push out anytime and spot all balls. But tournaments went with loser breaks, one foul. Even in tournament play, you still spotted all balls. All the balls had to be legally pocketed to stay down. If a ball went down on a scratch or if a ball jumped the table, it was spotted. The only way a ball stayed n the pocket is if it was made there legally.

At this time, nine ball was a game of quality. You had to play well to win. Luck would not carry you into the finals. Then, in the mid-nineties, people once again began to feel that we needed to speed the game up some more. They wanted it faster in order for it to play better to the TV audience. So they came up with what I call the moron set of rules, Texas Express.

Now illegally pocketed balls would stay down. It completely removed the spot shot from the game. Look, you should never play a game of pocket billiards where you do not have to legally pocket all balls. It cheapens the game. And taking ball in hand instead of the kitchen eliminates one of the classic tests of shooting skill, the spot shot. Yes, when a ball jumps the table, that should be a foul, but the ball should spot and the incoming player should have the cueball in the kitchen (behind the head string).

I can live with one foul and push-outs only after the break, that is fine. But we should play either loser breaks or alternate breaks and illegally pocketed balls should spot with the incoming player starting from the kitchen. Now it is getting worse because tournaments are leaning towards shorter sets. The shorter the set, the more the luck factor counts.

Perhaps the reason that the men no longer play on TV and that our prize funds are not growing is that we have cheapened the game to the point where it is no longer worth watching. We need a rule set that puts some of the challenge back into the game. This must start with legal pocketing of all balls and bringing the spot shot back to life. We have to make these guys play again and remove this ‘rolling the dice’ factor from the table.

Editors note: One of the interesting things about Buddies point is that Nine Ball has undergone a tremendous amount of change while the other cue sports like 14:1, One Pocket and Rotation have remained virtually unchanged.