"Fast" Eddie Parker, probably not the inspiration for The Hustler, but a money-gamer nonetheless.

During the well-orchestrated exhibitions he staged in family-friendly billiards rooms throughout the U.S. and overseas in the 80s and 90s, "Fast" Eddie Parker?an itinerant pool hustler in the 50s and 60s?performed a bevy of jaw-dropping tricks, two of which invariably elicited ooohs and aaahs from those in attendance. For the first, Parker positioned three balls, one of them the cue ball, in the shape of a triangle on the table, onto which he placed a ball rack. Then he added a second layer: three balls and a rack. Next, a third deck of three balls and a rack, followed by a fourth, and so on, until he had constructed a 13-tiered high-rise. Then he suavely would shoot a ball that would knock the cue ball from its place in the bottom rung, in effect replacing it, without disturbing the rest of the tower.

The second trick gave off a faint whiff of vaudeville showstoppers, like the top-hatted magician who saws in half his beautiful, leggy female assistant, or the blindfolded knife thrower who dots the outline of his beautiful, leggy female assistant with daggers. Parker's wife Peg would grip a ball in her mouth at one end of the pool table, and Fast Eddie, from the opposite end, would shoot the cue ball, delicately dislodging the one protruding from his wife's mouth and sending it into the nearest corner pocket.

Attired in a tux and a ruffled white shirt, his thinning gray hair slicked back, Parker?who traded on the notoriety afforded by his claim that he was the model for "Fast" Eddie Felson, the protagonist in author Walter Tevis' 1959 novel The Hustler and the wildly popular 1961 Paul Newman film based on the book?also amazed spectators by dropping six separate balls into six separate pockets with a single shot, and sending 12 different balls skittering around the table until each found its way to a pocket. Between such demonstrations of billiards legerdemain he offered advice to the crowd on ways to improve their pool games, and after these two-hour sessions?he conducted from 200 to 250 of them annually, working from a home base in Universal City, TX, just east of San Antonio?Fast Eddie and Peg would hawk books, instructional videos and autographed photographs.

This legitimate peripatetic existence bore scant resemblance to his former life as a pool shark, when he drifted from state to state, town to town, in search of unwitting victims with disposable income?exciting, mildly larcenous times that he would readily recount at his exhibitions. In 1994, while chatting with a journalist from the Dayton Daily News, Parker recalled a particularly vexatious encounter that occurred in the early 1950s during a 9-ball (gamblers' preferred game) match in New Albany, IN, located across the Ohio River from Louisville.

Play began with a handful of participants, but ultimately winnowed down to just two. "After everybody else dropped out," Fast Eddie remembered, "I got the guy to freeze up some big money." In their first game, Fast Eddie's opponent broke, sinking the 9 ball in the process (an automatic win), then promptly launched into a spiel about how Parker's goose was cooked. Fast Eddie lost his composure, fatal for a successful fleecing.

"I wasn't feeling good?too much tippling the night before?and instead of playing him along, I rushed it," Parker continued. "I ran nine straight racks of 9-ball. Well, his two stake horses?the guys putting up his money?quit on him." Fast Eddie's mark realized he'd been hustled. "That's when he had two of his buddies take me behind a partition and they broke my right forefinger. They knew what they were doing. That's the finger that guides your stroke." A true sportsman, the man still paid off.

Born in 1931 in Ava, MO, a small town southeast of Springfield where he also grew up, Parker started shooting pool at age nine when his father, a school superintendent, purchased a used table. But his mother, Parker insisted, agreed to its presence only if it were kept on the front porch. "It got so I'd go out there in the dead of winter, use a broom to brush the snow off the table and start shooting," Parker told the Daily News. "I fell in love with the sport." His nickname, he often explained, had nothing to do with pool, but, rather, was affixed to him because of the speed he displayed playing football, basketball and tennis as a 5-foot, 7-inch high school athlete. "Being so short," he told the San Antonio Express-News in 1997, "I had to make it up by being fast."

Showing little aptitude for college, a teenaged Parker applied his energies to honing his pool game, winding up in Kansas City, where Benny Allen, world champion from 1913 to 1915, took him on as an apprentice of sorts. "I never had any idea I was going to turn professional and shoot for money until I started studying with Benny Allen," Parker confided to the Associated Press recently. "He didn't like to teach, but every once in a while he would find somebody that had potential."

Allen versed Parker not only in strategy and shooting, but also in the finer points of being a money player. "Among other things, he taught me how to up my comfort zone," Parker recalled for the Daily News. "I used to be comfortable playing for up to $100 a game. After that, I felt out of my element and my nerves got to me. Benny taught me how to play for tens of thousands of dollars?and not flinch."

According to Parker, his headiest score netted $30,000, won during a big-money game one night in the early 50s, a time when he operated under a variety of aliases?Santee, McKee, Felsen. "I used to use lots of names," he told the Daily News. "Back in those days you never let 'em know quite who you were." That approach also figured intimately in the distinctions made when gambling. "There's a difference between hustling and money games," Parker explained to the Express-News. "You're trying to make people think you're no good when you hustle. But in the money game, everybody knows you're good [from the start]."

Despite his indisputable prowess, Parker's decades-long reputation?and his ability to draw paying customers for an exhibition of trick shots?did not stem principally from his shooting ability; lots of men?women, too?can perform super-duper tricks on the pool table if they practice sufficiently. No, it was his association with The Hustler that accounted for his renown. The way Parker always related the tale, at some point in the early 50s he met future writer Walter Tevis in the billiards room of the now-defunct Phoenix Hotel in Lexington, KY. From this encounter, Parker's story went, Tevis gleaned the rudiments of the character who later would become "Fast" Eddie Felson in the author's novel?Felson being virtually identical to Parker's "Felsen" nom de guerre.

The book, while successful, was ultimately overshadowed by director Robert Rossen's highly affecting 1961 film, whose screenplay Rossen adapted, along with Sidney Carroll, from the novel. In perhaps his finest performance, Paul Newman effortlessly embodied the brash, electric Eddie Felson, a gifted hustler desperate to beat the game's acknowledged master, Minnesota Fats, memorably portrayed by Jackie Gleason. A huge box-office success, the movie resuscitated general interest in pool, moribund for years. Suddenly, tv brimmed with broadcasts of tournaments, pool rooms opened everywhere and forgotten hustlers attained hitherto unrealized cachet.

One, Rudolf Walter Wanderone, an entertaining and flamboyant braggart known as New York Fats and Broadway Fats, cashed in on the popularity of The Hustler by metamorphosing into Minnesota Fats, appearing frequently on television and in billiards halls throughout the U.S., all the while proclaiming, to anyone who would listen, that he was the inspiration for the Gleason character, as well as the finest player in pool history.

Tevis?who went on to write a sequel to The Hustler, 1984's The Color of Money (brought to the screen two years later by director Martin Scorsese), and the 1963 science-fiction classic The Man Who Fell to Earth?repeatedly rejected Wanderone's claims. His Minnesota Fats first materialized as Louisville Fats?and his Eddie Felson as an older pool shark, Sam Willis?in a deft short story that he wrote ("The Hustler") for the January 1957 issue of Playboy. Tevis expanded it into a novel, adding characters and non-poolroom plotlines.

"Not too long after the book came out," Tevis writes in the 1979 collection Stories into Film, "there appeared from nowhere a fat pool player calling himself Minnesota Fats. Pool players who do in fact live by the game have written or called me to ask if one of my characters had been modeled on themselves. Apparently they, the people who really know much more about hustling than I ever did as a gawking college boy in a crowd that watched the professionals, were convinced that my stories were modeled on life. Well, they weren't."

Eddie Parker, as Tevis always asserted, was no more the prototype for Eddie Felson than Rudolf Wanderone was for Minnesota Fats. Tevis invented his characters; Wanderone and Parker wisely exploited them. Press and public gullibly bought into Parker's persuasive patter?right up until Friday night, Feb. 2, when he suffered a heart attack while attending the U.S. Classic Billiards Eight-Ball Showdown on South Padre Island, TX, where the 69-year-old was booked to give an exhibition.

If he ever read the short story "The Hustler," then "Fast" Eddie Parker no doubt appreciated the moment when Louisville Fats, on the verge of being taken for $1200, learns the true identity of his opponent: the legendary Big Sam Willis, world champ before he was convicted of manslaughter and imprisoned for six years.

Tevis writes: "Suddenly Fats split the silence, laughing. The sound of his laughing filled the room, he threw his head back and laughed; and the men in the chairs looked at him astonished, hearing the laughter. 'Big Sam,' he said, 'you're a hustler. You put on a great act; and fool me good. A great act.'"