Luther Clement Lassiter, Jr. (November 5, 1918 – October 25, 1988), nicknamed Wimpy, was an American pool player from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The winner of 7 world pocket billiard championships and numerous other titles, Lassiter is most well known for his wizardry in the game of nine-ball and is widely considered one of the greatest players in history, He was inducted into the Billiards Congress of America's Hall of Fame in 1983. That same year, he was also inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. He was ranked number 9 on the Billiards Digest 50 Greatest Players of the Century.
Early life
In his youth, Lassiter showed signs of uncanny hand-eye coordination, both in the areas of pool and baseball. In sandlot baseball games, Lassiter was an ace pitcher. According to his friends, who affectionately referred to him as "Bud," he was the player everyone wanted on his team. Lassiter's younger brother, Clarence, spoke of his brother's ability to pitch: "Coach was always trying to sign him up. You know, Bud could pitch a ball. But by then, pool had caught him and he didn't care about the athletic end of things. The coach pestered him and pestered him and tried to get him to play, because he had a natural talent for baseball. But he didn't use it; he was trapped by pool."
Queried on the subject of his pitching, Lassiter himself said, "Oh, sure, I played some baseball. In fact, it was at some little old ball game that I once ate twelve hot dogs and drank thirteen Cokes and Orange Crushes, and everybody fell to calling me Wimpy" (after the J. Wellington Wimpy character of the Popeye comic strip by the same name who loved to eat hamburgers). So instead of baseball, Lassiter focused on pool, developing his game at City Billiards in Elizabeth City. The owner of the pool room there, a man named Speedy Ives, allowed Lassiter to enter through the back door and to shoot whenever he wanted as long as Lassiter swept the floors and cleaned the pool tables.
As a young man, Lassiter became afflicted with a condition which he termed "the swolls"; it would follow him throughout his life. This was a condition in which Lassiter's lips would puff up and become red and swollen when an attractive member of the opposite sex approached him with affection. This peculiarity first appeared in the early 1940s when Lassiter was in Norfolk, Virginia.
Minnesota Fats remembered his friend's condition well: "[Lassiter's] lips would be all puffed up and at first I thought it was from wiping off the lipstick. But there was nothing he could do about it, so he finally gave up on tomatoes across the board by remaining a bachelor. Evelyn told Wimpy he should fall in love and get married, but Wimpy would always say, 'Bless you, Mrs. Wanderone, but I'm already in love - I'm in love with pool.' And he really was."
Hustler Days
During the early 1940s, following his discharge from the Coast Guard, Lassiter's main running buddy was Rudolph Walter Wanderone, best known as Minnesota Fats. Their town of preference was Norfolk, Virginia, which was known at the time as the highest-rolling place for pool hustlers, card players, and gamblers in general. During these years, Lassiter became the "undisputed king" of the pool hustlers, reportedly winning hundreds of thousands of dollars from gambling on pool games between 1942 and 1948 (including $15,000 in a single week). He often accepted "money games" involving extraordinary sums, often around $1,000 a game. It was during this time that he developed his confidence and skill necessary to begin competing on the professional level with the greatest pocket-billiard masters of the day, including Willie Mosconi and Irving Crane.
After the sudden decline of the gambling action in Norfolk around 1948, Lassiter was forced to begin competing professionally in pool tournaments held across the country. His first major tournament was the World Straight Pool Championships in 1953 held in San Francisco's Downtown Bowl; the player who knocked him out—and who would go on to win the tournament and then the world title—was Willie Mosconi.