Pool Players Taking Their Cues From Connoisseur

SANTA ANA — Who is fixated? What criteria do we apply each week to pluck someone from the firmament and deem their proclivity peculiar enough to warrant newspaper ink?

Some weeks there is simply no question about it: When you find someone with a shrine to Vic Morrow in her bedroom or a party with model trains running through holes in the walls of his house, you know you’ve got a winner.

With other ones, though, you have to weigh several factors on a point system.

Take Rick Cochran, for instance. The Fullerton 48-year-old has 4,000 pool cues: Give him 10 points. He sells them for a living: Subtract eight points. But he keeps many of them in a massive safe: Add two points. He does keep a few for himself, and is sad to see some others leave his shop, even if he gets thousands of dollars for them: Add two points. He’s nuts enough to put up with the sort of customers who spend thousands of dollars for pool cues: Add three points. Sometimes he X-rays his pool cues: Add four points.

Voila! At 13 points, he’s three over the fixations demarcation line, and that’s without even mentioning that he once took a pool cue to a medical center to have a Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan done on it.

At his Santa Ana shop, Best Billiards, Cochran has what he claims is the world’s largest selection of cues. Those range from $6.95 amateur models, to exotics--as they are called in the trade--that sell for as much as $12,000.

We’re talking about the pool cue here, that cousin of the broom handle. There aren’t any moving parts, certainly no microchips. Yet Cochran sells them all the time at prices that rival the zippiest personal computers.

It must be admitted, these are some very fine broom handles, eye-beguiling combines of rare woods, ivory, precious metals and--rarest in this day and age--handcrafting that reveals an unblinking focus and skill on the part of the maker.

“Pool cues go for such money now because they have become more than just an extension of your arm,” Cochran said. “These have become functional art. You can’t take a Picasso with you to show your friends. You have to lock it up under guard, and you can’t even have people touch it, but a pool cue you can. Most of the cues I sell get used every day, but because they are also art, collectors might have 10 or 15 cues.”

They certainly have risen in the world, given that the abiding pool-cue image of my generation is of beer-swilling Hell’s Angels using them to whack folks senseless or worse at the Rolling Stones’ ill-fated Altamont Speedway concert 26 years ago.

It was around that time Cochran first tried to make a go of a billiard-supply business.

“I might as well have gone fishing,” he said. “The sport was in decline. There wasn’t any fire to it, unless you counted the guys with cigars in smoke-filled rooms. No women would go into a poolroom. It just wasn’t happening.”

Cochran’s father owned poolrooms and had tried to discourage his son from involvement in the sport.

“I’m left-handed, so he told me left-handers can’t be good players, and since I was only 16, I believed him for a while,” Cochran said. “He wouldn’t help me, because he didn’t see a future in it.”

Even back then an appreciation was beginning for well-crafted cues, though Cochran learned of it the hard way.

“My first cue cost me $45 with the case, and nine years later a guy saw me playing with it and offered to give me $300 for it,” Cochran said. “Me being a smart entrepreneur and 19 years old, I said, ‘Sure,’ and handed it to him. I went back to the cue maker and said, ‘I want one of those $45 cues,’ and he said, ‘They’re $325 now, and the case is extra.’ I didn’t buy it, and in seven more years the same cue had gone up to $1,100,” he said.

The cues made by that craftsman, Tad Kohara of Stanton, now sell for $4,000, which doesn’t bother Cochran so much, since he is now the exclusive distributor of that maker’s output.

After his initial failed billiard enterprise, Cochran spent several years not having much fun in the furniture business. He continued playing pool (he rates himself above average, getting two first places and a second in his last four tourneys) and, after noticing an upturn in the sport, got back into it first with a wholesale business and then with the retail Best Billiards five years ago.

“Much to my father’s chagrin, pool has really changed,” Cochran said. “My dad passed away about three years ago, and he was in awe, because he would sell 20 cue sticks a year, and we sell 30 a day.” He’s certainly not dissuading his progeny from the sport: His daughter, Mitia Landsburg-Cochran, now manages his store.

As a player, Cochran had begun collecting and trading sticks, “much the way kids do with baseball cards.” But it wasn’t lost on him that these collectors were adults, willing to spend thousands of dollars, and that there was no other business brokering exotic cues on an international level.

His stock of exotics now requires three safes. The hefty main one looks as if it would survive Armageddon, and the cues are further protected by $500 custom-made anvil-style cases. You almost expect Cochran to be bringing out the Crown Jewels. Some of his cues aren’t far from that: One appointed with ebony, ivory and 18-karat gold bears minute scrimshaw of magnificent animals (most makers use fossilized walrus or mastodon ivory); another is a contrast of African blackwood, Makassar ebony and bird’s-eye maple, with a fine pin-striping of blue-dyed holly wood ending in ivory diamonds. Other cues feature pink ivory (actually a rare African wood), pink-lip mother of pearl or grips of pressed and polished Irish linen.

Cochran said that with all the painstaking stages and proper drying of the wood, it can take a maker three years to complete a cue.

Which means an $8,000 cue will whack the ball that much better than a $7 cue?

“There is an immense difference between the two because the good cue is properly aged and is weighted and balanced perfectly, and the cheapest cues come off the boat crooked,” Cochran said. “But that’s not to say you couldn’t find a well-made cue for $150 that plays as good as an $8,000 one. I’ve seen some unbelievable hitters for $150 to $200, and an $8,000 one won’t necessarily make you play better.”

He said that most top pros don’t collect exotic cues, being less concerned with a cue’s rare appointments than with how true it hits. But in a game as reliant on skill as pool, many non-pro players like to also think they have some luck on their side, and a cue with a pedigree can give them that feeling.

“Sometimes it’s a mystical thing,” Cochran said. “I call it the hit . A guy has a cue, and it just doesn’t hit anymore for him, and he wants to change his game and will find a cue that’s maybe weighted more forward, or back or has a different taper and he feels better about it. And when he feels better about the cue, he feels like he’s playing better.

“Somebody should come up with a machine that measures hit. But what is the hit? It’s what you like. Some guys like a hard hit, others soft.”

Then his voice grew softer, as if he were sharing a secret: “Hit, I think, is about 50% sound . I think if I could make a cue that would just make that good crisp sound when it hit the ball, people would buy it.”

Even if he thinks he’s demystified the hit, he’s still enthralled by it himself. One of the few cues he keeps for himself is one “with a phenomenal hit.”

He also keeps a cue his father gave him and a couple of others, but he maintains: “My collection is in the business. I’m there seven days a week, so I see my babies there.”

When he’s grown attached to some of them, he admits that on a couple of occasions he’s marked the prices up to a point where he thought they wouldn’t sell.

“That’s what I did with a pair of Gina cues I’d had that had been owned by Luther Lassiter and Minnesota Fats,” Cochran said. “I even had a glass case made to display them. And, wouldn’t you know, someone came in and paid the $15,000 for the two of them.”

He gets 80% of his exotic cues directly from the makers. The rest come in used and include classics from other eras, such as Harvey Martins or Balabuska (the cue used by Paul Newman’s character in “The Color of Money”). It is with these that Cochran sometimes employs X-rays or the MRI scan to authenticate their origin. As with other high-dollar collectibles, there are forgeries. However, most makers’ cues have their own internal construction peculiarities that are revealed in the X-rays.

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to X-ray a few heads as well. Some collectors do run to extremes, Cochran said.

“I had one cue aficionado who would come up from San Diego once a week and buy a new cue, and would love it, staying in the store talking about it for hours after buying it. Then he’d come back a week later and want to get something else. He never missed a week for over a year.”

Once he had a customer’s wife call, pleading that they not sell him any more cues.

“More often, it’s the husband telling us, ‘If my wife comes in here, you tell her I just paid $200 for this.’ ‘But you just paid $3,000.’ ‘No, $200,’ ” Cochran said with a laugh. That scenario is becoming less frequent now that many of his customers are women.

Cochran’s collection attracts customers from around the world--a group of Germans was shopping in the store as we spoke--with particularly strong sales to Japan and Taiwan.

“It’s a credit to our country that U.S. billiard supplies are the most sought-after in the world,” Cochran said. “There’s more cues made in Taiwan than anywhere. They spit them out by the thousands. But pool playing has become very popular there, and the players there only want American cues.”

Though he deals internationally, most of his sales are still local. His exotics clientele includes postal workers and bikers, but more often they are professionals: not billiard professionals, but lawyers, architects and doctors.

“The guys playing pool now are showing up at halls with cases made of everything from alligator to ostrich, and are pulling out an exotic cue to break with, another to play with and a cue to jump with, and are putting it back in their BMW or Mercedes. It’s a different breed,” he said.