Show notes

This episode of Appraise The Phrase is about the history of the phrase "behind the eight ball". Mario and Twenty are joined by Brandon Miller to unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value of "behind the eight ball" and it does not come from the game you are picturing. It comes from Kelly pool, invented in Chicago in 1893 by a man named Calistus Mulvaney, who nobody called Calistus. Sixteen numbered markers, called peas or pills, go into a bottle, and every player draws one in secret before a single shot is taken. That number is your ball, and the balls have to come off the table from lowest to highest. Draw a nine, a ten, a twelve, and you may never get a turn at all. "Behind the eight" was never a position on a table. It was the number in your hand. The game everyone assumes it came from did not exist yet. Eight-ball arrives around 1940, and the phrase is already in American newspapers through the 1920s. Steve Mizerak, a multi-time world billiards champion, went on record with it plainly: it cannot come from the game, because the phrase predates the game. And when the version we know was first marketed, the set contained seven balls of one color, seven of another, and one unnumbered black ball. The eight ball did not have an eight on it. Then the eight ball outgrows pool entirely. In 1946 a man in Cincinnati patents a fortune-telling device built from his clairvoyant mother's spirit-writing slate. It is called the Syco-Slate, it is a cylinder, and it fails completely. He dies before the patent clears in 1948, having never seen a single sale. In 1950 Brunswick Billiards asks for it rebuilt in the shape of a black-and-white eight ball, and that is the Magic 8 Ball, now on TIME's list of the hundred greatest toys of all time. The object cemented in your head was never about billiards. Brandon Miller runs Stepping In The Right Direction out of Los Angeles — HBCU tours, mentoring programs, and more than twenty-five million dollars in scholarships facilitated over five years. He puts the phrase to work on his own life: a conditional acceptance to Howard in March 2001, ten weeks left in the semester, and a 46 percent in a math class he had to get to 70. His read is that sometimes it is your own shot that puts you behind the eight ball, and not somebody else putting you there. Also in this episode: what the San Francisco school board voted to change and why all three of them think it is the wrong fix, the eight-ball jacket that sold for twelve hundred dollars in Harlem, Bow Tie Wednesday, and a Dictionary of Misinformation entry about bulls and the color red. Then the appraisal. Power, speed and preference. Guest: Brandon Miller, Stepping In The Right Direction. HBCU tours and spring trip dates at hbcuboundhub.org, and @strdprograms and @hbcuboundhub on Instagram. Watch the video version on the Underdog Podcasts channel on YouTube. Every phrase gets a grade, and some of them get a mug: appraisethephrase.com/shop Appraise The Phrase is part of the Underdog Podcast Network.