Having watched incredible footage of World Wheelchair Pool Champion Fred Dinsmore, I was rather hopeful when I learned there was a billiards episode, “Side Pocket,” from Ironside, the ground-breaking, late-60s television series that starred Raymond Burr as the paraplegic, wheelchair-bound Chief of Detectives Robert Ironside. Perhaps Ironside, normally depicted relying solely on logic and reasoning to solve criminal cases, would showcase some hidden billiards talents as part of his crime-solving efforts.
Unfortunately, and notwithstanding the misleading picture to the left, the 1968, season 2 episode left Ironside to his usual sedentary crime-solving, albeit his office houses a beautiful table.
Instead, the episode focuses on Tim Patterson, a pool hustler who is ready to turn in his cue stick in exchange for the opportunity to pursue an engineering degree at Carnegie Tech. Tim asks Ironside for a letter of recommendation, but then inexplicably agrees to a high-stakes game against Money Howard (Jack Albertson), a legendary billiards champion.
It turns out Tim’s brother, Bobby, is in serious debt to Vance, a local mobster. Tim beats Money Howard, suspiciously winning $2000, but causing his brother to go further into debt to Vance for mistakenly betting against Tim. It’s at this point that Tim decides to continue hustling, rather than go to college. Such an about-face prompts Ironside and his entire team to investigate.
Ironside soon learns that Vance is now stake-horsing Tim. Says Vance, “I got the kid who beat Money Howard. I got tournaments lined up across the country. I got tie-ins with pool table companies, billiards ball companies, cue stick companies.”
Ironically, Ironside never seems too concerned that Tim may be in grave danger, working for a mobster. Instead, Ironside’s primary concern is that Tim is forsaking his chance to go to college and continuing a career in hustling, a no-good, amoral lifestyle, in which one “lives in hotels, sleeps all day, smells of stale cigar smoke [and] hops from town to town, looking for suckers.”
The storyline doesn’t make a ton of sense. And the pool-playing is rather laughable, given Money Howard is supposed to be “the greatest pool player in the world…correction…the greatest pool hustler in the world.” At least Howard is played very well by veteran stage actor Jack Albertson, who ironically, had also played a pool hustler in the Gunsmoke episode “Cowtown Hustler.” (But even that acting had limited joy, as I couldn’t disassociate Albertson from his subsequent portrayal of that famous octogenarian, Grandpa Joe, from Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.)
In the end, the best part of this episode may have been Quincy Jones’ opening synthesizer theme, which Quentin Tarantino smartly appropriated for Kill Bill. But, then, you didn’t really need a billiards episode to appreciate that.
The Ironside episode “Side Pocket” is available to watch on Hulu Plus.
