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Marbles is no kids game to these enthusiasts
By Charles Johnson
In a sweat-popping mid-summer late afternoon, a few of the world’s best Rolley Hole players gather at the marble yard in Tompkinsville, Ky., for a practice match, a scrimmage, if you will, that takes a couple of hours to finish. Practice, after all, makes perfect, they say. And, with Rolley Hole, perfection is what it’s all about.
With tongue in cheek, they call this rickety wooden community building the Marble Dome. The walls may look a little shaky, the lighting iffy, the surroundings less than pristine. But the playing surface here, made of a mixture of sand and clay from the nearby river, is faultless. The flint marbles shoot true and fast. Very fast, indeed. So fast, in fact, an onlooker wishes for a slow-motion video camera to bring the mind-boggling speed to something the human eye can fathom.
Serious Play
Here, northeast of Nashville, in Monroe, Allen, and Barren counties in Kentucky and in Macon and Clay counties just across the border in Tennessee, folks take their marbles playing very seriously. The tradition goes back so far that no one, not even the sociologists, can accurately trace it. These players play because their fathers and grandfathers played marbles. It’s in their blood.
Most play one of two games, Rolley Hole and Tennessee Square. Rolley Hole is played by two teams of two players each on a three hole course. Both teammates have to go up and down the course three times, making all 12 holes in a particular order. Opponents can hit the other’s marbles knocking them off the course, but not necessarily out of the game.
It’s a complex, tricky game. So is Tennessee Square, played on a marked carpet, with nine marbles shooting every which way. To a marbles player, explaining the rules and tactics to the uninitiated is akin to a British cricket player trying to outline the finer points of his sport to an American football fan.
Rolley Hole stars
At the Marble Dome, Mitchell and Wesley Thompson get sweaty and dusty playing against Paul Davis and Rondele Biggerstaff. In the Rolley Hole competition world right now, there’s no one bigger than the Thompsons, a father-son team and three-time winners at the national championship tournament held each fall at Standing Stone State Park in Tennessee. Mitchell, the father, won five times with other partners. “I want Wes to be able to stand up there and say he’s won it eight times,” he says.
“We play in these tournaments from eight in the morning until maybe 11 at night, and we’re up and down all the time. It’s tough on the knees. There’s lots of pressure. It’s huge. Lots of people are watching. Being named national champions, we won $200 apiece and a plaque. And our name got out there. It’s what everybody else around here wants,” Wes says. With a father-son team enjoying such success, the question arises: Can marbles-playing expertise be genetic in nature? Or can it be taught, like playing checkers?
“It takes a lot of practice. It takes good eyes. It takes pretty good management to know where to put that marble. It’s kind of like chess,” Mitchell Thompson says. “You and your partner have got to be on the same track,” Mitchell adds. “You have to depend on your partner and know what he can do, and then hope he does it. It’s good to know the limitations of your opponent. And you’ve got to have a little luck. You can’t discount the importance of having a little luck.”
Even so, players can’t depend on luck. “Luck might win a round. But luck won’t
get you through a tournament. A good player will sit you right down,” Wes says. “It’s hard to win. There’ve been good people playing for 30 years who never won. Everybody manages different. Everybody shoots different. Everybody plays different. It’s real serious stuff. People take it seriously in the big tournaments like Standing Stone.”
Hard flint
Even the marbles themselves are serious stuff. They’re flint, precision machined, and perfectly round. They can shatter a glass marble if anyone is foolish enough to bring one to the marble yard. Making them is an art. Paul Davis claims he isn’t much of a marbles player, but the marbles he makes are much sought-after by serious tournament competitors.
“They have to be flint. Marble is too brittle. I use an extremely hard diamond saw and
an aluminum oxide grinding wheel. The finished marble is extremely hard and perfectly round. Mine are checked to within two-thousandths of an inch. It takes 45 minutes to
an hour to make a flint marble,” Davis says. At a marble yard in a shed just outside Moss, Tenn., a group of players stays focused on a lengthy and hotly-played game of Tennessee Square. One of the busiest is another renowned marble-maker, Junior B. Strong.
He’ll custom-make marbles, using calipers to grind them to specific sizes. “The best flint comes off the river and from Dale Hollow Lake. If there are any cracks in a marble, it won’t hold up. It’ll shatter to pieces. I’ve been making them since I was a kid. Back then, it might take a month to make one,” he says. Paul Moore, also playing at the marble yard near Moss, makes marbles and loves to give them away. In the past year, he’s given away 6,000 glass marbles, mostly to schoolchildren around home in Glasgow, Ky.
“I’m 71 and I’m not a very good player. My thumbs ain’t what they used to be. Since I retired from road construction in 1993, I ain’t done nothing except fish and play marbles. I’ve played all my life and I want to help pass this game down to the kids,” Moore says. Strong and his brother, Malcolm, on competing teams this night, used to play both Rolley Hole and Tennessee Square. Lately, Tennessee Square gets more of their attention.
“It’s easier on old people than Rolley Hole. There’s not as much ground to cover. Rolley Hole is on a 40-foot court, and you’ve got to walk back and forth a lot. We like to act the fool when we play. In Rolley Hole, they don’t want you to say a word. So I quit it. I
play for fun,” Malcolm says. David Sullivan, 32, loves marbles so much he built a court in his basement at Westmoreland, Tenn. His young sons now play.
“We have 25 people here every Friday. I showed quarter horses until it got too expensive. I hunted until my coon dog died. Then I went back to marbles, which I’d played as a kid. Boy, I sure love playing,” he says.
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