Sports
Life of Wiley
He hustled pool for a while and made a living, then turned pro and made a killing. Clearly, Dallas’ CJ Wiley is on the ball.
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Named after Kit Carson, Wiley was born October 18, 1964, in Green City, Missouri, a poor cattle town 125 miles from Kansas City with five churches, no stoplights, and a population of about 650. The youngest of three children born to Jim and June Wiley, a lumberyard owner and a city clerk, respectively, CJ started playing pool at age seven—first on a miniature table, then at a small, smoky pool room owned by a close family friend. Before long, he played every day after school and all day on Saturdays, and by the time he was eleven he was already the best in the area. “There were days when I didn’t lose a single game,” he says. At thirteen he could run all fifteen balls in numerical order and, as a challenge, began playing for small amounts of money, anywhere from a dime to $5 a game. Soon after, unable to find a willing opponent in Green City, he ventured out to nearby Kirksville and then to Columbia, where he’d play for $20 to $50 a game. “I especially enjoyed beating people much older than me,” remembers Wiley. “I think it had something to do with getting respect from them. Maybe because my father, who was an alcoholic, was never really around for me.”
In 1982 Wiley placed second in the Missouri State Championship and won the National High School Championship in Chicago. But it was a year later, during Christmas break in his senior year of high school, that he embarked on a three-week adventure that would change his life: his first road trip to hustle pool. Traveling with a pair of seasoned road players who he says “could sell anybody anything,” he hit Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita, Kansas, and Ponca City, Oklahoma; the trip was such a rip-roaring success that there was no turning back for him. “I learned that there was a life in this,” he says. From age 18 to 25 he worked the road full-time, living out of either a motel, a hotel, or a motor home. (In 1987, so he would have a base, he rented an apartment in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton. Why Dallas? It was pretty, equidistant from the coasts, bubbled with high-stakes pool, and had “the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen.”)
Like all road players, Wiley planned his days as if he were on a cross-country vacation—only instead of setting his sights on, say, the Grand Canyon, he sought hotbeds of pool activity, or spots. In fact, he always carried a little black spot book, in which he had scribbled information extracted from an underground network of other hustlers: It had the names of players he should play, where they played, how well they played (their “speed”), and their betting patterns. “I really enjoyed the freedom of it all, of waking up whenever I wanted, of going wherever I wanted, and controlling my own destiny,” he says.
Which isn’t to say the road wasn’t difficult. Wiley says he has been robbed twice at gunpoint—once around the corner from a pool room in Minneapolis, the other at a bootleg liquor joint with a backroom pool table outside Albemarle, North Carolina—after he won a ton of money. He was punched in Texarkana and served drinks spiked with drugs, he believes, in Queen City and Memphis. Still, he was predatory and merciless. He says he could sense another player’s weakness without even talking to him and got his kicks by crushing opponents to the point of causing their knees to buckle. “I especially loved seeing fear in my opponent’s eyes,” he says, adding that he has not a hint of a guilty conscience about any of his hundreds of conquests: “Listen, all the guys I beat wanted my money just as badly as I wanted theirs. It’s not my fault I was the better player. And besides, a lot of the guys I beat weren’t very nice. I just carried out their karma. God works in mysterious ways.”
It was a life, too, of pure and wildly creative subterfuge. He had his aliases: Besides Mike from Indiana, there was Chris from Missouri and Butch from Tennessee. He had his fake I.D.’s and phony glasses (“Anybody will play someone with glasses,” he says) and at various times posed as a college student, a computer salesman, and a drug dealer. And he had a way to make money, which was to move around a lot, working states from the outside in (that is, playing in the smaller towns first, then the bigger cities), and staying unknown as much as possible. That meant he couldn’t enter any high-profile tournaments or—God forbid—betray his brethren by turning pro. Only once during those years did Wiley take a shot at a major organized event: the 1986 World Series of Tavern Pool in Las Vegas. He was 21 at the time, and when it was over, he had beaten out a whopping 756 players to win first prize: a piddling $7,500, which he had to split with his backers. On a good night of gambling, he knew, he could make nearly three times as much. It convinced him that hustling was still the way to go.
He continued to believe that for five more years, but he ultimately decided there were no challenges left on the road. With some trepidation he finally went straight and joined the now defunct Men’s Professional Billiard Association. “I really didn’t know if I could compete with the best players in the world,” he says. “I mean, these were guys I knew I couldn’t crush mentally.” Of course, in his first pro tournament, the Dufferin Nine-Ball Classic in Toronto, he beat four world-class players in a single day: Earl “the Pearl” Strickland, Efren “the Magician” Reyes, Jim “King James” Rempe, and “Spanish Mike” LeBron. Overall, he finished in fourth place, earned $3,500, and afterward veteran Cecil “Buddy” Hall gushingly labeled him “the best unknown player in the world.” Says Wiley with a grin: “I played my game and it held up. I went in half-cocked and I came out fully cocked.”
That first year, he managed to crack the top ten in the national rankings. He moved to seventh in 1992, fifth in 1994, and fourth in 1995. Then in December 1995, unhappy with the politics of the men’s pro pool tour, he abruptly quit and a month later started a new one, the Professional CueSports Association (PCA). “I just can’t resist doing things that people say I can’t,” he says. That year he captured first place—and a purse of $88,500, a U.S. record—in the ESPN World Open Billiards Championship; he also won the first-ever PCA tour stop, the Dallas Million-Dollar Challenge, and was eventually named player of the year by Pool and Billiard magazine.
Clearly he’s got something—but what? I wanted to see it for myself. So at eleven o’clock on a Monday night, the two of us walked over to a pool room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a place a little smaller than CJ’s Billiard Palace, a room Wiley owns back home near White Rock Lake. Decked out in a dark pin-striped suit, he began by casually shooting on a table that was dimly lit, though he didn’t come close to missing a ball. When it was time to share his secret, he set up a long, sharp cut shot on the six ball. “Now watch. I’m going to shoot this shot at one o’clock,” he said, bending down in a square, powerful-looking crouch. I watched. He popped his heavy thud of a stroke, and the ball split the right corner pocket.
I didn’t really get it; Wiley knew instantly. “Don’t you see?” he asked with some frustration. “With two round objects, it sets up an optical illusion. You can’t aim for a spot on a round object and hit it with another round object. It’s an impossibility. So what I do is look at the two balls as straight lines that bisect.” The explanation only made my head spin faster.
Wiley set up another shot, putting the eight ball on the head spot and the cue ball near the back rail. The balls were about six feet apart—to my mind, a much more difficult shot than the first one. Yet, surprisingly, he said, “Same shot. Still one o’clock.” And again he knocked it down as if the ball had been magnetically pulled to the center of the pocket.
He sighed dismissively and waved a limp arm in my direction. “Man, this game’s so easy it’s not even funny—once you figure it out,” he said with a sniff. Then, looking straight into my unfocused eyes, he delivered his knee-buckling punch line. “At least it is for me.”
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