“Almost every cue maker in the world has at least one thing in their designs that originated with Ernie,” James Buss, then-president of the American Cuemakers Assn., told The Times that year.
He was the first living person to receive the honor. inducted Gutierrez into their hall of fame. He also made cues for Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. In 1968, he fashioned an 8-karat-gold cue for Dean Martin, which included four diamonds, an emerald, a sapphire and a ruby. We have a massive range of tables of all sizes together with scoreboards, cue stands, light fittings, antique cues & rests, prints and pictures etc, and all our. Soon, he gained a loyal customer base, and word-of-mouth attracted an elite clientele. His hobby of making pool cues earned him some money and his reputation spread. He moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1957, and previously told The Times that he liked to hang out in pool halls. The case is a blemish on a distinguished career for Gutierrez, who trained in woodworking while growing up in Colombia.
“Illegal trafficking of any part of a protected species creates a demand that can lead to the extinction of these vulnerable populations,” Decker said in a statement. Decker noted the “devastating impact” on African elephants from the illegal ivory trade. His defense attorney could not be reached for comment.Īfter the sentencing, U.S. In addition to probation, the judge ordered Gutierrez to pay a fine of $10,000. They were both built by an old Swedish billiards champion turned cue-maker, Lennart Haag. Liu and Chen have each pleaded guilty to attempted smuggling charges and their sentencing is pending in federal court. One example was when I asked him about using ivory on cues.
Today, synthetic materials attempt to reproduce the performance of ivory balls on the billiard table, while in dark corners of old pool halls and in the collections of the Smithsonian, balls such as this one from 1925 recall a time when, at the expense of elephants, the only real billiard balls were cut from fresh Asian ivory.Liu also claimed that Gutierrez told him his ivory was “legal.” Prosecutors ultimately charged Gutierrez with aiding the attempted exportation of African elephant ivory without proper documentation under federal law, including the Endangered Species Act. Raw tusks arrived at shops in New York and Chicago where master ivory turners would reduce blocks of ivory to gleaming spheres. While one African elephant tusk could yield hundreds of slips of piano key ivory, only four or five quality billiard balls could be made from the average tusk of an Indian, Ceylonese, or Indo-Chinese elephant. But mass markets in the western world for ivory billiard balls, combs, piano keys, and commercial trinklets, placed the wild elephant in serious jeopardy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No natural material other than elephant ivory had the physical size, strength, and beauty to perform in the billiard room and the concert hall. The best billiard balls once came exclusively from the tusks of Asian elephants.
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