Blind Man

"This will be a breeze. Layton is blind. Hoppe is too old. Bozeman is too young and de Oro should have his grandson playing for him. Who else is there?"

That was what boastful Welker Cochran thought of his principal opponents four weeks ago when he settled down at Manhattan's Capitol Billiard Academy to a three-week defense of his world's three-cushion billiard championship. In his first match, against left-handed Alfredo de Oro, 71-year-old Cuban who was the champion pocket-billiard player 47 years ago, Cochran led at 37-10-36. De Oro made a run of four that included a billiard in which his cue ball touched not the minimum of three cushions before striking the object ball, but five. Then he added five more points. But when he missed for ten innings in a row, Cochran tied the score. It was tied again at 48, at 49. De Oro finally clicked off the winning point. Cochran chuckled, blamed his defeat on bad luck.

Johnny Layton said he thought there was no good fortune at all in de Oro's victory. Thereupon the onetime carpenter from Sedalia, Mo., proceeded to lose to de Oro 50-10-46. For a time during the 66-game competition it looked as if the lead might pass to Willie Hoppe, who is not really old (46), or to young Jay Bozeman, married for the second time just before the tournament and sporting a slave bracelet on his left wrist. But by last week all but two of the twelve contestants had played eleven matches and lost three or more. Those two were Cochran and Layton, each with eight wins out of ten. Their match last week, on the last night of the tournament, was for the title.

Cochran lit one cigaret after another while Layton, handling his cue with annoying deliberation, wiggling his pale eye brows with conscious archness, worked his score up to 7 before Cochran had made his first billiard. Twenty innings passed before Cochran could make two points in a row. Then he got a run of four but Layton was ahead, 29-to-9. When the crowd grew noisy, dawdling, red-faced Layton walked to his chair and waited for silence. When Cochran demanded new balls, Layton insisted on the old ones, compromised by keeping his cueball, letting the other two be replaced. Cochran's 4 was his high run. Layton's high run was only 7 but he nursed his growing lead perfectly, leaving Cochran one impossible shot after another. After one hour and 45 minutes of play and one of the most onesided finals on record, Layton knocked off an easy billiard that gave him the title, 50-10-23. Walking around the table he shook hands with the man who thought it would be a "breeze." Said the new world's champion: "I never wanted to win so badly and I don't think I ever played any better. ... He caught quite a blind man, didn't he?"

Layton's eyes are not now quite so good as they were when he first got into the game with a top-notch professional. That was when Alfredo de Oro stopped off at St. Louis one afternoon 30 years ago for an exhibition match, and advised his practice opponent, a boy just out of short trousers, to give up pool for three-cushion billiards. After becoming the world-champion pool player, Layton did so. The diamond-shaped plates, now set in the rail of every standard billiard table, were developed from his system of studying angles. World's three-cushion billiard champion ten times, Layton's newspaper name is still "the Sedalia carpenter." In addition to carpentering, he has been a farmer, professional wrestler and baseball player, manager of a string of prizefighters, proprietor of a summer camp, trapshooting champion of Missouri, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

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