Hustler Days: Minnesota Fats, Wimpy Lassiter, Jersey Red, and America's Great Age of Pool

This lyrical, profane ode to the irresponsible life explores the dissolute romance of pool through the lives of legendary hustlers Minnesota Fats, Wimpy Lassiter and Jersey Red. Journalist Dyer follows the fluctuating fortunes of the hustler demimonde from its Depression-era heyday, when unemployed men flocked to pool halls looking to make a quick buck (""idle men...surge like lifeblood into poolrooms""), to the doldrums of the years after World War II, when these men had jobs, families and mortgages to absorb their time and money and a""black plague infected pool,"" to the explosion in pool's popularity in the 1960s, after the movie The Hustler glamorized it for a new generation seeking escape from propriety. Following sociologist Ned Polsky, Dyer appreciates the pool hall as the last redoubt of the""permanent bachelor,"" a classless, defeminized zone where""men argued and spat and threw money across green felt"" and evaded the burdens of respectability and domesticity. Dyer brings this subculture to life through many colorful anecdotes about his three anti-heroes, examining their childhood opposition to chores, their unfitness for gainful employment, their titanic tournament duels, where their human deficiencies become virtues, and the sad denouement--especially for pool demi-god Wimpy Lassiter--of a lonely old age. His prose can shade toward the purple (""Jersey Red came at the other fellow ferociously...his young lion heart pounding with every soft thud of the nine-ball,"") but connoisseurs of urban decadence will enjoy soaking up the rich atmospherics. Photos.