Luther Lassiter - Early Life

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 cleaned the floors and swept 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: " 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."