marrrlee
Joined: 09 Aug 2007
Posts: 122
Location: ca
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 Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 11:26 pm Post subject: straight shooter |
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Straight Shooters
It’s the flint that shines inside the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome — home to one of the most devoted groups of game players around.
By Jenna Schnuer
Photographs by Sean McCormick
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Inside the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome,a little slice of history is dying.
Chances are you’ve never heard of the guys who gather here daily, with baseball caps perched on their heads and some with their names embroidered on the patches of their work shirts. And it’s rather unlikely that you’ll weep or even feel a twinge of sadness when they turn out the lights for the last time. But 150 years of tradition is slowly being silenced by video games and modern conveniences. • Saying goodbye to the past wasn’t on my mind when I went to Tompkinsville, Kentucky. I wanted to hang out with the guys who, day after day, fill the Marble Club Super Dome with bad jokes, friendship, and some of the hardest-hitting marble shots I ever could have imagined. • Marble Club Super Dome. The name conjures up visions of a palatial state government building or a Louis XIV–inspired monstrosity to sport. To get there, you turn off Highway 163 North in Tompkinsville (population 2,600) onto Armory Road (it looks like it’s a one-lane road, but you can squeeze two cars on there) and drive about a minute past the Monroe County Fairgrounds. On the far side of the parking lot sits a large wooden shack that looks less than super and nothing like a dome. But what goes on inside is as grand as the name implies.
This is where they play Rolley-Hole Marbles, a tradition in Monroe County that stretches back a century and a half, to a time when James Buchanan was president.
Click. Thwack.
“You shot him out of the hole.”
“Get your hole and come on.”
“Whoa! Whoa!”
“What a shot! What a shot!”
“That’s a dandy.”
“They’re nervous, ain’t they?”
“Yeah, they see the end is near.”
The tension builds as four men step around the marble yard, a 20-by-40-foot packed-earth floor with three marble-size holes running down the center, about eight feet apart. A string, staked into the ground, marks out-of-bounds; wooden boards stand ready on the outskirts to keep marbles from skittering away. The dirt floor, groomed smooth with the edge of an old wooden wagon wheel, holds on to the footprints of every step of the game. Sifted fine, the dirt is powder-soft. The white-flint marbles are scattered around the holes, most exactly where the players meant to land them. Shiny glass marbles of childhood don’t have a place at the Super Dome; they would split in half at the first thwack.
Every day, the players usually start to filter into the Super Dome around four p.m., once the work on the farm or at the factory is done. The outfit of choice for most is jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. While the club membership has fallen from its high of about 60 in the early 1990s to about 20 now, there is still a devoted lot — members and nonmembers — who show up daily to jaw with friends, tease some more than others, and play the harder-than-it-looks game of Rolley-Hole Marbles. Most evenings end by eight. “There aren’t too many night owls around here,” says Paul Davis.
“If we got everybody to pay their dues, we’d probably have this [place] bricked,” says Timmy Walden. It’s pretty clear that collecting dues is not at the top of anybody’s to-do list: The membership-dues list on the wall went six years without an update. Instead, the walls are covered with silvery sheathing; players feed boards to a hulking metal wood-burning stove to fend off any chill in the air, and the furniture looks like it was discarded from a frat house. But nobody’s complaining.
Built in 1988, the Super Dome is part clubhouse, part sports stadium. Monroe County is dry; there’s no local bar to belly up to, so for the Marble Club regulars, the surest way to find their friends — and their regular attendance makes it clear that most want to find one another every day — is to frequent the Super Dome. Though there are a few younger players (the sons or grandsons of the regulars), most are in their 40s to 70s. “We can’t hardly get the young people to play. I’m afraid it’s going to play out,” says Rondal Biggerstaff.
It’s as though the Little Rascals stayed together for life and just kept adding on to their clubhouse. And for three days in March, I got to be their Darla.
•••••
THERE ARE THREE ways to determine if you’re talking to a marble player: the telltale click-click of marbles coming from his pocket, the callus on the back of his thumb, and the dirt embedded on the knees of his pants. The marble yard literally loses several inches of dirt every year to the players’ pants.
Rolley-Hole looks pretty easy to follow when you’re standing outside the boards and all the guys are running you through the how-tos. The goal: for each team of two to go up and down the marble yard three times, landing their marbles in each hole while keeping their opponents from doing the same. It’s not just about the shooting. It’s about the strategy. Players can shoot, roll, toss, flick, or even tap their marble forward with the tip of their shoe. Hit an opponent’s marble and you get to take a second shot. There aren’t many rules to break. The first duo to take 12 holes in order wins. You just have to be careful that you don’t go out too early, or your partner will be left to fend off the opposing team on his own.
“You coming up for the dog? He’s getting his rover; he’s ready to go out,” says Biggerstaff as one player takes his last hole.
None of it, especially the game jargon, seems straightforward once you step onto the marble yard.
Almost all of the players favor white-flint marbles. For newcomers, figuring out which marble belongs to your teammate — and which belongs to your opponents — is harder than keeping your second cousin twice removed’s identical twin babies straight. You just can’t do it if you don’t see them all the time. Even the regulars spend a fair bit of time asking, “Whose marble is that?” Shoot for the wrong marble and you could send your teammate sailing out of the marble yard. That is, if you can manage to shoot the thing in the first place, and shoot it straight.
“When we were kids, before learning to shoot, we would shoot it off the thumbnail and wear the nail to the quick and have to stop playing until it healed up,” says Colonel Bowman (yes, that’s his real first name). To keep your thumbnail out of harm’s way, you have to use your thumb like a slingshot. Hold it back with your pinkie, middle, and ring fingers, and lean the marble against the back of your thumb, pointer finger lightly curled around it. “Lay it in there till it feels right,” says Bowman, one of seven brothers who grew up playing. “You don’t have to squeeze the marble.” Once it’s settled in, you slam it forward with your thumb knuckle. “That’s your trigger finger right there,” adds Bowman. “That’s what throws the marble.”
“If you can make the marble spin, it’s like a bullet flying true,” says Davis.
To make a straight shot, you have to line up your rump with the marble and your target. “Some people squat, some people kneel, some people get down on both knees,” says Davis. But even then, no matter how much I tried to line up and put correct shooting technique to work, my shot usually fizzled or traveled an embarrassingly far distance (in the wrong direction). This isn’t a game of muscle. A drop of extra power in a toss makes you feel like a fool. Luckily, newcomers don’t get ribbed quite as much as the regulars. They’ll even let some stuff slide.
But one thing they won’t let slide: the opportunity to poke fun at the day-after pain first-time players endure. It isn’t easy to get out of bed the day after a game. You constantly squat, stand, walk around, and squat back down again during a game. “Anybody who says, ‘How can marbles be good exercise?’ has never played Rolley-Hole,” says Biggerstaff. Bad knees or a bad back can sideline a player permanently.
•••••
WHILE MOST OF the marble games are friendly, there’s a bit more competition — though still friendly — among the marble makers. Just a handful of Monroe County guys turn raw stone into polished marbles, and they’ll drop their wares into your hands to show off their work within moments of meeting you. “They’re very hard to make and get them true and round,” says Davis, who sells his white-flint marbles for $15 to $20 each. Since flint is one of the hardest rocks around — it has a scratch hardness of about 7, while diamonds are a 10 — a good marble can last for years.
When marble makers get going, the dust flies. After carving small squares of flint out of hunks usually found in nearby riverbeds, they grind the edges off. The flint is held tight between a rough rock form and a grinding wheel. As the flint spins, it glows bright red with heat — up around 250 degrees. “If you get the flint too hot, it’ll just crack and bust,” says Davis.
Most marbles are about three-quarters of an inch thick. Without measuring as he goes along, Davis can make a marble that’s within three one-thousandths of an inch round. Though he sends finished marbles through a tumbler to put a shine on them, it’s the time marbles spend in their owners’ pockets that really puts the best finish on them. “The longer you pack them in your pocket, the slicker they get,” he says.
•••••
“HAH! MAN.”
The long shot hit. The opponent’s marble goes flying.
“You finally hit one, did ya?” a whittler razzes from the sideline.
The whittlers are the Super Dome spectators, and they work on their hunks of wood no matter what happens in the game. When Colonel’s brother, Michael, who is acknowledged as one of the best players, sends a marble arching into the air and to its intended place in a display of skill and precision, the wood shavings keep falling. They’re not carving anything; their hobby is one of deconstruction. They whittle just to whittle. By the end of the evening, the piles of cedar shavings they’ve dropped will make the Super Dome look like a hamster’s paradise.
Then, quietly, the game is over. Michael stays out on the marble yard practicing while everybody else takes up a chair, waiting to see what’s next. But, on this night, there’s another sport that’s going to win out.
“The game starting?”
“Yeah.” And just like that, the potential for more games fades away as players peel off to go home to watch the semifinals of the NCAA basketball tournament.
Last one out shuts off the lights.
If you go
If You Go
How to get there: Tompkinsville, Kentucky, is just 83 miles from Nashville International Airport. From the airport, take I-65 North out of Tennessee and into Kentucky. Make a right onto exit 43, the Cumberland Parkway, and then take exit 14 to Highway 90. Make a right on 90 and go 20 miles to Highway 163 South. Tompkinsville is 13 miles down the road.
Where to sleep: The Tompkinsville Inn is a marble’s roll away from the Super Dome on Highway 163 North. Contact the inn at (270) 487-9228, or visit www.tompkinsvilleinn.com.
When to play (or watch): Visit the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome any day after four p.m. and on Sunday mornings after about 8:30. No marble handy? No worries. “We’ll let anybody play. We’ll even loan them a marble,” says Rondal Biggerstaff. Friday night is the best night for marbles, though there’s sure to be a game or two going on every other night of the week as well.
What to eat: There’s another reason to show up in town on the weekend: barbecue. Hunger for the local vinegar-based barbecue sauce on slow-cooked pork shoulder (along with a side of vinegar slaw) keeps eight or nine barbecue restaurants going at a time in this county of only 12,000 residents. Beware: Most of the barbecue restaurants are only open Thursdays through Sundays, and when they’re sold out, they shut tight. Call ahead to make sure your favorite cut of meat — or some pulled pork — is still available. Three of the best:
Backyard BBQ
293 Old Edmonton Road, Tompkinsville,
(270) 487-9271
Frances Bar-B-Que
4134 Vernon Road, Hestand, (270) 487-8550
R&S BBQ
217 South Jackson Street, Tompkinsville,
(270) 487-1008 |
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