“My whole family — my mom, my dad, my older sister, Mariah, me — we all played pool,” Billy Thorpe said.
The family had a table in the basement of their Englewood home, and he said he was drawn to it as a 2 and 3-year-old.
“My dad sawed a cue off and they put me on the table, and I started knocking balls in,” he said ‚”They’ve got videos of it.”
His dad, Bill, remembered those days with a chuckle: “I’d set the balls right up in the holes for him and make him use the cue ball to make each shot.
“He had a real knack for it and when he made all six balls, he’d come to me and say ‘Rack ‘em, Dad! Rack ‘em!’
“He loved it.”
Billy Thorpe is 28 now and his ongoing love affair with the game had him in Orlando last month, representing the United States in the fabled Mosconi Cup, as his dad, his mom, Amanda, his sister, his grandma and other relatives cheered him from the stands.
The annual tournament — similar to the Ryder Cup in golf — pits five top Americans against a like squad of Europeans in a series of matches.
The Europeans have dominated in recent years, winning 13 of the past 15 Cups, including this year, 11-6.
Team USA did win in 2018 in London and 2019 in Las Vegas and Thorpe was part of both efforts.
“The Mosconi Cup is one of the most prestigious events in the pool world,” Bill said. “It’s great watching your son out there representing the USA with the best in the world.”
Although he’s now in Louisville, preparing for the celebrated Derby City Classic, the international tournament where he’s won three times in the past eight years, Billy took some time to reflect back on the recent Mosconi Cup and his rise from the Dayton area to the international sporting stage:
“Playing in the Mosconi Cup is definitely a great feeling. Because of everything that’s at stake, those are my two biggest wins. But it also has the most pressure. You’re in the middle of an arena with 3,000 to 4,000 people and all eyes are on you as you try to do what you do.”
Thorpe is one of the Miami Valley’s true sports world stars and he has many of the trappings that come with that.
From Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone to Luther “Wimpy” Lassiter to “The Black Widow” Jeanette Lee, pool has always been known for its colorful nicknames.
Thorpe is no exception. He’s been called “The Thorpedo” and especially “Billy the Banker,” since many consider him the best bank pool player in the world right now.
“His real forte is bank pool,” Bill said. “I don’t think anybody can beat him by the rail, which is what they call a three-rail bank shot.”
As Thorpe has grown in name and fame, a myth or two has been manufactured, as well.
“You’ll hear different stories out in the pool world,” Bill said. “People say they remember Billy, as a little boy, standing on a milk crate to play. As far as I know, Billy never stood on a milk crate. He just reached and played.”
As a pro, Thorpe has won big tournaments, made money and made headlines, most of them positive.
Although he still calls Trotwood home, his career has taken him all over the world.
Asked where he’s visited thanks to a pool cue, he rattled off a few of the stops that first came to him:
“Let’s see, I’ve been to China five times, Russia five times and London and Germany several times. All over Europe really and places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Vietnam, Canada ... I’ve been around the world, for sure.”
In Vietnam he’s especially popular and has fans follow him.
Back here he has a big following in the local pool world.
“Dayton has had some really good pool players over the years,” he said. “It’s considered the Philippines of America when it comes to the sport.”
One place he’s especially known is at Airway Billiards on Needmore Road where, as a teen, he honed his cue stick skills and fattened his wallet.
Almost everybody liked him there.
“By the time I was 7 or 8, I was beating grown men, it was crazy,” Thorpe said. “Around Dayton, the people who knew me, most of them wished me luck and some said, ‘You’re going to be a champion one day.’ It was cool to hear that.
“But every once in a while, mostly when I was playing somewhere where they didn’t know me, I’d beat older guys, and they’d get upset and leave the pool hall or even leave the entire tournament.”
The flip side reaction came from some of Billy’s young friends.
“Some of Billy’s friends at school told me he always ate the best lunches,” Bill said with a laugh.
His boy could afford to get what he wanted. He had money in his pocket. While his classmates loved that, some of the guys in the pool league at Airway did not, his dad said:
“When Billy was 14, I remember some guys in a tournament there griped about him playing. I was told they got tired of him coming over every Saturday and winning $200 to $300 of their money. So, he got kicked out.”
Education on the road
Bill worked at General Motors for 17 years and Amanda worked at Emery Freight for nearly 20. Both lost their jobs when the companies closed their area operations.
“We lost our home too, so we moved to a rental property we had off Gettysburg, not far from the V.A,” Bill said.
He got retrained as a welder and joined the plumbers’ and pipefitters’ union, but now runs the steam plant at Miami Valley Hospital.
Amanda drives a school bus for Trotwood-Madison schools. Billy’s sister Mariah, who’s with Fifth Third Bank, has an 11-year-old daughter who helped him practice when he was here the past few weeks.
Through all the ups and downs, Billy has been the family’s constant source of pride.
“One of my buddies gave him an old Robert Weir cue and he used it forever,” Bill said. “The first national tournament I took him to was in Minnesota and at first they weren’t going to let him play. He was just 7 and their youngest division was for kids 9 to 11.”
Bill and Billy made their case and finally the organizers relented.
“He ended up finishing third,” Bill recalled with pride. “From then on, we travelled all over the country — the West Coast, Florida, Pennsylvania, you name it.”
After his freshman year of school — because he was travelling so much — Billy began homeschooling.
Some real educational moments though came when he was on the road.
He said he was 14 or 15 when he found himself in a match with an older player of some note.
“Suddenly a guy from the crowd yells out that he was betting $500 on me,” he said. “I looked and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Shane Van Boening, one of the greatest players in the game. He was my idol, but he’d always been super quiet and didn’t like to talk a whole lot. Then, all of a sudden, he’s yelling out a bet on me.
“The guy I was playing said something (sarcastic) like, ‘Oh, we have Mr. ESPN betting on the kid now.’”
The opposing guy didn’t really know Thorpe and might have dismissed him because of his age or maybe even because of his mechanics.
“Usually people who play pool, their arm is at a perfect 90-degree angle,” he said. “My arm is crooked because I started so young.
“In the beginning I was eye level with the table and my arm ended up sideways with it. It’s kind of a disadvantage now, but it works for me. It would hurt my arm to try to straighten it.”
If his set up is askew, his mindset is straightforward. He’s aggressive.
“I have a lot of creative ways I can do things on the table, so I try to never fear anybody at any time,” he said.
At 16, he didn’t fear the guy he was facing that day, nor did he wilt under the weight of that $500 bet and all the expectant eyes the challenge had brought with it.
“I beat the guy in 20 minutes,” he said. “It was crazy.
“Shane took my dad and me out to eat after that. He told us he’d kind of take me under his wing and let me travel with him and that would make it easier and more affordable for me.
“He’s really a smart guy, one of the wealthiest guys in pool, and he was a good example to follow. I wanted to be like him when I grew up and I travelled with him for four or five years.”
A year after that connection, Thorpe had another key encounter.
He was 16 and had gotten into the Derby City Classic, a tournament he used to come to as a 10- and 11-year-old spectator with his dad.
“I used to dream about it and then here I was at 16, playing one the best guys in the world,” he said.
He was matched against 44-year-old German, Ralf “The Kaiser” Souquet, one of the game’s great players.
When they met, Souquet already had held two world titles, amassed 19 Euro Tour victories, five Mosconi Cup championships and had just been enshrined in the Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame.
Thorpe beat him.
“I was like, ‘Whoa, if I just beat him, I can beat anybody in the world — probably.”
Four years later, at age 20, he became the youngest person ever to win the Derby City One-Pocket Championship. Two years after that he won the 9-Ball Banks Crown and in 2020 he triumphed in One-Pocket again.
Derby City Classic up next
One of the only bumps in the road in Thorpe’s rise to prominence was an unfortunate two-month suspension from WPA events in May of 2022 by the Disciplinary Panel of the Polish Anti-Doping Agency for a prohibited substance found in a random blood test.
“I’ve never been a big pothead, but I was having trouble sleeping in Vegas and I took two puffs on a joint and slept like a baby,” he said. “The next day I got drug tested.
“It definitely hurt me. It really hurt my heart.”
He felt he was made an example of and that opened the door for the anonymous trolls of social media to attack him and try to turn the incident into something it was not.
People who knew Thorpe knew he was a decent guy and soon he worked his way back into good graces on all fronts.
He has sponsorships from Meucci cues and Savage Billiards Apparel.
In 2023 he secured his first World Nine Ball Tour (WNT) ranking event title with a victory at the McDermott Classic, in Malden, Massachusetts, and this past September he won the Battle of Bull in Roanoke, Va.
With his recent success, his past victories in the high prestige-high pressure event and his fiery demeanor seen as a motivator, Thorpe again was chosen to the five-man team representing the U.S. in the recently-completed 2024 Mosconi Cup, where he lost a back-and-forth match with Spaniard David Alcaide.
After spending the holidays back here, he’s now in the Louisville-area preparing for the Derby City Classic with Fedor Gorst, the 24-year-old Russian American who is coming off a phenomenal 2024 when he became the first player ever to win the WPA World Nine-Ball Championship, the U.S. Open Nine-Ball Championship and the World Pool Masters title all in the same year.
That made him the 2024 Billiards Digest Player of the Year.
Back here, Thorpe had added a “pool room,” as Bill Sr. called it, to the back of their home.
“He’s getting all his accolades together and is going to display them there,” Bill said. “He’s got big banners and there are medals and trophies from his junior days and things he’s won now. It’ll be something to see.”
And a few of the first people he should bring over are some of his old teachers who, he said, were skeptical of the times he’d ask for a week or two of homework assignments because he was competing in a national tournament.
“Some of my teachers looked at me like I was crazy,” he said with a small laugh. “Pool is kind of a unique thing to do, and a lot of people didn’t believe me.
“But I kept telling them, ‘Yeah, I’m playing all over the country. It’s something I’m really good at.’”
But then that already was obvious back when he was just a 3-year-old, working a cut-down pool cue, cleaning off the table — ball after ball after ball — and then calling out:
“Rack ‘em, Dad! Rack ‘em!
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