Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other
periodicals. He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe
and the United States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning
magazine Attenzione and was editorial director of the
East-West Network, overseeing a dozen in-flight magazines and
the PBS organ Dial. Don's latest book, Nullo,
is now available.
Long
before Babe Ruth became baseball’s principal attraction
in New York in the 1920s, three other figures from the national
pastime dominated both day life and night life in the city.
And much of their relationship -- one of the strangest in professional
sports history -- was measured by pool and billiards tables.
The
first of the trio was John McGraw, once described by the venerable
Connie Mack as “the only manager” in baseball. Between
1903 and 1931, the pugnacious McGraw piloted the New York Giants
to three world championships, 10 pennants and 11 second-place
finishes. Even in the rare years when they didn’t finish
in the first division, the teams he put together over that span
were never colourless. They might have differed in their emphases
on pitching, hitting, or speed, but they were alike in their
raucous brawling on the field and their late-night hobnobbing
with show business celebrities, politicians and racketeers after
the games were over. On one club alone, the 1919 edition, the
roster included 10 players linked to scandals involving everything
from throwing games to selling stolen automobiles, plus an eleventh
who once shot a hunting partner to death after mistaking him
for a cougar. Among the most popular after-hours hangouts for
these characters and their cronies were two pool rooms owned
by McGraw in the Herald Square nexus of 34th Street, Sixth and
Seventh avenues. The propriety of players spending their leisure
time in establishments owned by their manager, and where more
than one kind of gambling went on, was not a throbbing ethical
concern of the period.
The
second member of the triumvirate was Hal Chase, the first baseman
for the Yankees (then known as the Highlanders) who became the
sport’s chief drawing card for women as soon as he stepped
into the major leagues in 1905. Known as The Prince for his
flamboyant personal style, the California-born redhead revolutionized
defensive play on the diamond while getting rid of money as
fast as he could away from it with the help of showgirls and
busted flushes. Although he would later gain a (highly questionable)
reputation as the 
biggest
crook in baseball history, Chase was the city’s most popular
position player in the pre-World World I years -- a primacy
he did not surrender until long after he had left the Yankees
and Ruth arrived from Boston. For much of his playing career,
he was also able to count on McGraw as one of his biggest boosters
in baseball circles, not least when he was being flayed with
game-fixing accusations. Chase became such a regular on McGraw’s
pool premises that he often sat in as a cashier.
If
Chase wasn’t New York’s most popular baseball player
period in the first decade of the century, it was because of
the third member of the trio -- Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson.
Mathewson’s surface appeal was the direct opposite of
Chase’s -- the college-educated boy and one-time choir
singer who didn’t drink because his mother had asked him
not to on her deathbed. In fact, however, the Hall of Fame right-hander
who won at least 20 games 13 times and topped the 30-mark three
years in a row had a taste for gambling more honed than that
of most professional athletes at the time. When he wasn’t
prodding teammates to get a crap or poker game started, he was
usually to be found at the nearest race track. The big difference
was that, while Chase relished having such a reputation, Mathewson
got the word early on that such an image would not be good for
the turnstiles at the Polo Grounds (or for the novels upholding
the values of clean living that he was co-writing for teenage
boys). McGraw reinforced the message by making it clear that
the pitcher he always viewed as his “good son” (Chase
was the “wild son”) could find better things to
do with his time in the evening than hang around his manager’s
Herald Square pool halls. For this reason, Mathewson needed
years to add pool and billiards to the list of gambling activities
he routinely indulged in. To close the circle neatly, however,
it was Chase who eventually instructed him in the wonders of
Eight Ball.
McGraw
was no novice to the business when he decided to sink some of
his winnings from the 1905 World Series into a pool room. While
still an active player with the Baltimore Orioles in 1896, he
and teammate Wilbert Robinson had purchased a major property
near the centrally located Academy of Music theater on North
Howard Street, installing steel lanes for a bowling alley on
the street floor and six tables for a billiard parlor upstairs.
The Diamond Cafe had turned into a popular meeting place for
sports figures and gamblers not only from Baltimore, but from
Washington and other nearby towns. (It has also been often cited
as the source of the bowling variation of duck pins.) Indeed
the venture had proved so successful that in 1902 McGraw had
been able to trade in his half-ownership profits in the cafe
as a key financial move in a syndication scheme that destroyed
the Orioles franchise and allowed him to depart for New York
as the Giants manager.
The
atmosphere was even more promising for pool investments in New
York in the fall of 1905. At the time there were an estimated
130-140 public rooms operating in the city, and this did not
count the saloons or other premises with the odd table or two.
More than a dozen manufacturers of pool and billiards equipment
were recorded as averaging almost a million dollars of business
annually at the time. Aside from the thriving state of the industry
itself, of course, McGraw had his own name going in, and that
was never more of a magnet than after the Giants had defeated
Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the 1905 Series. His
two partners didn’t hurt, either. The first was Tod Sloan,
the recently retired world-renowned jockey who had brought shortened
stirrups to horse racing. The second was Jack Doyle, one of
the neon lights of the city’s sporting crowd and the owner
of another successful parlor eight blocks north in Times Square.
The
party opening the Herald Square room in February 1906 was the
social event of the season for everyone who liked games and
liked to bet on them. In addition to actors, vaudevillians,
boxers, politicians, newspapermen and judges, the guests included
18-year-old Willie Hoppe, already famous for his table exhibitions
and only months away from his first billiards championship in
Paris. The main area of the establishment consisted of 15 tables,
described by the weekly Sporting Life as “works
of art and the highest priced ever placed in a billiard room
in the world.” What the periodical did not mention were
a couple of back rooms that soon became the scenes of some of
the city’s most noted poker games. There was no published
reference, either, to a 23-year-old cigar salesman who had been
moonlighting as a pool hustler all over the city -- future rackets
king Arnold Rothstein.
Because
of his need to be in Memphis for spring training and then on
the road for half the major league season, McGraw never pretended
he would be a seven-day-a-week host, leaving most of the practical
operation of the room to Doyle. But when he was back in New
York for a homestand, he was a Herald Square fixture. More to
the point, he didn’t have to be in the city for the word
to get around the American League as well as the National League
that there was a new fun center in town. Since the Yankees were
usually home when the Giants weren’t, Chase became one
of the establishment’s primary promoters, showing up regularly
not only with teammates, but with members of visiting AL clubs
eager for a few racks in familiar company in the big city. That
was the plus for business.
The
minus was that the small-town natives and farm boys who took
off their spikes to go to McGraw’s didn’t find the
modest prices they were used to back home. From the beginning,
McGraw and Doyle had made it clear they weren’t seeking
clientele in off the street, but were after what they called
“class customers.” As usual with such a phrase,
this translated into far-higher-than-normal money, in this particular
case $1.20 an hour for a table. The cultural shock for out-of-towners
accustomed to paying only a nickel or a dime was considerable,
and inevitably meant that only the higher paid players continued
to make the pool room a routine stop-off during their visits
to the city. At least one major leaguer, however, wasn’t
content to grumble and spend his evenings at vaudeville houses.
During
the first visit by the Phillies to the Polo Grounds in April
1906, third baseman Paul Sentell marched out of the pool room
in high dudgeon after being told how much his evening at the
table had cost him. He immediately went to a Philadelphia reporter
to complain about the tab, and the reporter in turn didn’t
lose the opportunity to find another reason in print why the
rest of America should hate John McGraw and anything to do with
the Giants. McGraw, who never forgot a slight, kept his own
counsel until the Phillies returned to New York in July and
until Sentell, apparently over his snit, returned to Herald
Square. As soon as he spotted the infielder, the manager sometimes
known as Mugsy got off one of his customary ethnic slurs (“you’re
a dago with no right to live in this country!”) that apparently
had something to do with the player’s New Orleans origins.
Whatever the crack was supposed to have meant, Sentell responded
to it by taking a swing at McGraw. He missed. Before McGraw
could retaliate, Harry Tuthill, then a boxing cornerman and
the future trainer of the Detroit Tigers, intervened on behalf
of the proprietor and took his own swing at Sentell. He, too,
missed. But then Sentell swung back at Tuthill, not only breaking
the trainer’s nose, but fracturing his own hand. The hand
never healed properly, ending the third baseman’s widely
publicized promise as a major league star.
By
most yardsticks, the pool room prospered through the rest of
the year. McGraw’s personal extravagance, however, made
his criteria more exacting, so that by the following spring
he was forced to sell out his share of the establishment to
Doyle for some quick cash. But barely a year later, with his
finances in better shape, he bought into a second Herald Square
place, in the Marbridge Building diagonally across the street
from the first pool venture. His partner going in this time
was Fred Knowles, the club secretary of the Giants. A year later,
the seriously ailing Knowles had to sell out to Hoppe, by then
an internationally acclaimed master of the baize table.
There
was also a silent partner: the racketeer Rothstein. The Marbridge
Building pool room would in fact turn out to be only the first
of several business deals putting Rothstein in bed with McGraw
and New York Giants officials, raising nagging questions about
the team’s regular involvement in fixing scandals all
the way through to the Black Sox World Series year of 1919 and
beyond. At the time, however, Rothstein was still mainly known
as a small-time gambler who liked to talk about having wads
of cash in his pocket for taking on anybody who wanted to challenge
him with a cue. Nobody doubted his prowess at the table, especially
after a 34-hour Nine Ball marathon with Philadelphia’s
Jack Conway shortly after the opening of the Marbridge room.
The game ended in a tie when McGraw himself closed down the
table, ruling that both players were too tired to go on.
As
skilled a shooter as Rothstein was, he had little on Chase.
Even as a teenager growing up in the Bay Area, The Prince was
known for his table talents. If he never got into the kind of
marathon duels with Rothstein that Conway did, it owed in significant
part to his risk-all approach when there were competing attractions
in McGraw’s back room from the poker table and the Ziegfeld
Follies dancers who draped themselves over regulars. Hoppe,
for one, always called him the best non-professional Nine Ball
shooter he ever played against, including Rothstein. It was
praise that would come back to haunt all the principles -- Chase,
Hoppe, Rothstein, McGraw, and Mathewson -- in a setting as far
removed from Herald Square as it was possible to be while remaining
on the continental United States.
