Great talent can come at all ages. Mozart was writing music when he was five years old, and Picasso did his first oil painting at nine. Of course, some young prodigies can do things other than art and music.
The rural community of Gordo is known for things like its annual celebration called Mule Day. Visitors line the streets to watch a parade of mules and tractors. The town’s dry, so you can’t drink. You might wonder what people did for fun years ago. For Bruce Falls, it was pool.
“Just being that young and coming from a small town, not having a lot to do. It’s probably one of just the few things we had in Gordo. I just went to the Dairy Queen and picked up a stick one day and started playing and just fell in love with the game of pool.”
As a child, Falls practiced as much as he possibly could. After school, on weekends, sometimes on Sundays, before the Dairy Queen’s owner opened the restaurant for lunch. Falls would be waiting.
It was more than just fun. Pool helped him cope…
“It’s kind of hard, I mean, seven years old you’ve done lost your brother and your dad. So, I guess I sort of used pool as a coping tool, you know, just to take my mind off thinking about it all the time.”
Falls’ father and older brother both died in a house fire in 1981. Falls was six years old at the time. After he turned seven, he committed himself to practicing pool religiously. His efforts turned him into a local legend. He’s an adult now. Back in the day, he was beating grownups at pool by the time he was 9—the same age Picasso painted his first picture.
“Nobody wants to get beat by a kid so once I would beat an adult I’d sort of rag ’em and, you know, make ’em mad just to make ’em play again.”
“I used to pick him up by his, um, waist band on his britches so I could pick him up high enough to get him to where he could shoot.”
That’s Tony Elmore. He’s one of Falls’ fans.
Elmore works at Moss Auto Supply in Gordo and he remembers how people from town played the kid who could barely see over the edge of a pool table.
“Your older people that would come in there, they kinda, you know, just kinda brush him off as being a kid. And, uh, didn’t really take him serious. But, uh, most the time when they left they did.”
“Well, you’d see folks come in, totin’ their little bags with their pool sticks, you know, fancy and have their own chalk.”
Joey Griffin works with Elmore. He remembers when people from Gordo got tired of losing to the pint-sized pool player, and Falls accepted challenges from people who came from outside Pickens County.
“Here Bruce just get him a stick off the wall and he’d just be sittin’ there grinnin’ and well, when Bruce would run the table on ’em, they couldn’t believe it. You know, everybody be over there laughin’, ‘Yeh-heh-heh,’ ragging him, you know, ‘Yeah, that little boy just wore you out.’ And then he’d say, ‘That was just a fluke. But I gotta try it again.’ Well, he’d do it again. Then that guy would put his stick up and he’d go home.”
Steadily maintaining his reputation, Falls eventually encountered people who came as far away as Mississippi to take him on at the Dairy Queen.
“Far as people coming from out of town playin’, like I said, it’s just pool’s a strange game. It’s hard to explain. But I don’t know, I didn’t ever turn down no challenges. Growing up, beatin’ grown folks at the age of eight or nine years old. I mean, like I said, of course, you know, I had the big head, I’m sure. But I always backed it up with my stick.”
Bruce Falls is all grown up now. But people in Gordo still remember the child who was like a Mozart with a pool cue.