It’s been said that baseball and jazz are the United States’ only real contributions to world culture.
Here’s another: the great American pool cue.
Not those found in some bowling alley lounge that, after years of leaning on barstools like their users, become warped and unbalanced.
We’re talking functional art here, collectibles. Fabulous two-piece cues such as the old Balabushka presented by Paul Newman to Tom Cruise in “The Color of Money.” Cues inlaid with diamonds, turquoise, gold, sterling silver. Ebony, ivory, malachite, scrimshaw. Ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000.
And America is where they’re at.
“The only cuemakers in the world that can do anything are the Americans,” said Joe Gold, a Chicagoan whose custom Cognoscenti cues are recognized by his peers and collectors worldwide as among the very finest. “You go to any foreign country and find a collector who’s collecting stuff over 25 grand a pop, everything he’s got is from an American cuemaker.”
Gold, who handcrafts between 90 and 125 cues a year out of his North Side shop for local, foreign and domestic buyers, players and collectors, is one of at least 400 custom pool cuemakers nationwide, according to Keith Walton, a Burr Ridge man whose vocation seems as select as the cuemaker. He is a cue broker.
Yes, a cue broker. This is a burgeoning market, with buyers realizing as much as 10 percent annual return on their investment. In December 1996, Thomas Wayne’s “Celtic Prince” cue was sold at the Gallery of American Cue Art in Los Angeles for $103,000, the highest known price for a cue, said American Cue Makers Association President Jim Buss.
If the U.S. is the focus of the custom cue world, Arlington Heights is its epicenter through Sunday. Nineteen craftsmen from the American Cue Makers Association will gather to show and sell their wares at the Arlington Park Hilton in tandem with the World Pool-Billiard Association’s eighth annual World 9-Ball Championship. The largest cue show to be held in the Midwest this year, the display also will feature makers from outside the association and an abundance of other billiards merchandise.
“It’s just like going to an art show and seeing different types of art,” said Walton, who uses a jeweler’s loupe to judge the precision detail of the sticks. “All these cuemakers have their own little niche. After you’ve been in the business you can see a cue and just by looking at it and the design and how it flows you can generally guess who made that cue.”
The masters in attendance at the free exhibit (admission will be charged for the pool tourney) will include Gold; Wayne; Mike Bender, from Alaska via Arlington Heights; Bill Shick, from Louisiana; Jerry McWorter, from California; Jim Stadum and Dave Doucette, from Maryland; and Texan Richard Black. They extend a tradition that included legendary New Yorker George Balabushka, who from 1959-75 made cues for the top players in the country.
Ernie Gutierrez — who once declined an offer of at least $75,000 for a cue — apparently won’t make it to the Arlington Heights show from California, Buss said. Gutierrez just sold his entire stock to Japanese collectors.
“High-dollar collectors will be flying in from Japan to buy cues,” Buss said. “They’re the type that can fly their own jets.”
The Japanese came in on the ground floor of the cue-collecting craze at about the time of “The Color of Money” in 1986, “buying all the Balabushkas they could get their hands on because that was the name that was portrayed in the movie as the premier cue,” Walton said. Investors from South America, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Europe, Taiwan — and, yes, billiards aficionados here in the States — have since joined the fray.
Walton said the majority of the cues he sells go for between $1,500 and $4,000, and those are mainly used by active players. Those priced at $5,000 and up “normally get into what we call `one of a kind,’ where you do not duplicate the design.”
Domestically, Walton said, “it’s not your Rockefellers of the world necessarily (who are buying the cues), although those people are involved to a certain degree. But it’s the people that have been around the sport and are trying to get into the investment side of the house, which is starting to take off. I think the person that bought that $103,000 cue is going to put it up in his case, and he’ll sit on it as an art piece.”
Why would people spend that kind of money on a pool cue?
Because they can.
“Everything that you can buy, there’s different grades of it,” said Gold, who gets the ideas for his signature “floating point” designs — as opposed to traditional point designs, which are attached to certain places on the cue — everywhere from architecture to flatware to “somebody’s hat.”
“A ball-point pen,” he offers as example. “You can buy a Montblanc, spend $400. Is it going to write 40 times better than a Scripto? No. But that’s perceived value.”
The reason the cues command such prices is because the buyers demand and appreciate such a high degree of craftsmanship.
“It’s the quality of what’s done, what’s put in, how the inlays fit,” Gold said. “A lot of stuff looks pretty but on close inspection there’s gaps or glue lines. Or it doesn’t hold up or doesn’t play well. There’s a lot more to it than just putting a design on a piece of wood.”
The time it takes from when Gold receives the raw materials to when a two-piece Cognoscenti cue (he translates the name as “in appreciation of the finest”) leaves his shop is more than two years. In between, he’ll have taken the maple that comprises the shaft and the variety of woods in the “blanks” — nose, handle, butt — and shaped the wood through thousands upon thousands of tiny saw cuts, routed pockets for the inlays accurate to 25 millionths of an inch, and programmed designs into his computer for those inlays to be cut. He’ll have cut, bent, hand-tapped and glued hundreds of pieces into the pockets, from fragile ivory to rock-hard, Russian-cut diamonds.
Generally, the more inlays and detail a piece has, the more expensive. But not always.
“You should be able to have a cue that’s got hundreds of pieces in it that doesn’t look gaudy and, in the same way, you should be able to have a cue that’s got 15 pieces in it that looks finished,” said Gold, who got his start with $40 in 1988 after watching a friend, the late Chicago cuemaker Craig Petersen, at work. “That’s a balance. That’s just an eye for balance and aesthetics. It can look loaded and tacky.”
Of course, there’s the seasoning, sanding, lacquering, polishing and, well, waiting until the cue is smooth as glass and ready for the loupe test.
“It’s labor intensive,” Gold said. “That’s where all the money is. But the initial base product has to be the very finest.”
But even the most expensive cue wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t play right. Characteristics of balance, weight, straightness, transmission to the ball and consistency are all as much a part of the equation as the accoutrements.
Expert makers seem to prefer that their cues see action rather than the inside of a display case.
“That stuff that I work on, I want it to be seen,” Gold said. “I don’t want that going into somebody’s collection.”
Local radio veteran Fred Winston, who does a morning show on WPNT, appreciates both the beauty and utility of Gold’s cues.
“I was a skeptic,” said Winston, who quit his boyhood sport for 25 years until picking it up three years ago at Break Time Bar & Billiards on North Halsted Street. “Why would somebody want to pay two grand for a cue? If you pick up one of these cues, you’ll know why you’re paying the initial money.
“Here’s an analogy. A tri-wing Fokker will fly you from here to Rockford. But so will an F-16. The cost is considerably different. They’re both the same type of instruments; they are airplanes. But one will get you there with high technology, and the other one will get you there and you kiss the ground and be very happy you’ll have made it. It’s that sort of thing. It’s a precision instrument.”
