Inside the Monroe County Marble Club Super Dome,a little
slice of history is dying.
Chances are you've never heard of the guys who gather here daily,
with baseball caps perched on their heads and some with their names
embroidered on the patches of their work shirts. And it's rather
unlikely that you'll weep or even feel a twinge of sadness when
they turn out the lights for the last time. But 150 years of
tradition is slowly being silenced by video games and modern
conveniences. • Saying goodbye to the past wasn't on my mind when I
went to Tompkinsville, Kentucky. I wanted to hang out with the guys
who, day after day, fill the Marble Club Super Dome with bad jokes,
friendship, and some of the hardest-hitting marble shots I ever
could have imagined. • Marble Club Super Dome. The name conjures up
visions of a palatial state government building or a Louis
XIV-inspired monstrosity to sport. To get there, you turn off
Highway 163 North in Tompkinsville (population 2,600) onto Armory
Road (it looks like it's a one-lane road, but you can squeeze two
cars on there) and drive about a minute past the Monroe County
Fairgrounds. On the far side of the parking lot sits a large wooden
shack that looks less than super and nothing like a dome. But what
goes on inside is as grand as the name implies.
This is where they play Rolley-Hole Marbles, a tradition in Monroe
County that stretches back a century and a half, to a time when
James Buchanan was president.
Click. Thwack.
"You shot him out of the hole."
"Get your hole and come on."
"Whoa! Whoa!"
"What a shot! What a shot!"
"That's a dandy."
"They're nervous, ain't they?"
"Yeah, they see the end is near."
The tension builds as four men step around the marble yard, a
20-by-40-foot packed-earth floor with three marble-size holes
running down the center, about eight feet apart. A string, staked
into the ground, marks out-of-bounds; wooden boards stand ready on
the outskirts to keep marbles from skittering away. The dirt floor,
groomed smooth with the edge of an old wooden wagon wheel, holds on
to the footprints of every step of the game. Sifted fine, the dirt
is powder-soft. The white-flint marbles are scattered around the
holes, most exactly where the players meant to land them. Shiny
glass marbles of childhood don't have a place at the Super Dome;
they would split in half at the first thwack.
Every day, the players usually start to filter into the Super Dome
around four p.m., once the work on the farm or at the factory is
done. The outfit of choice for most is jeans, a T-shirt, and a
baseball cap. While the club membership has fallen from its high of
about 60 in the early 1990s to about 20 now, there is still a
devoted lot - members and nonmembers - who show up daily to jaw
with friends, tease some more than others, and play the
harder-than-it-looks game of Rolley-Hole Marbles. Most evenings end
by eight. "There aren't too many night owls around here," says Paul
Davis.
"If we got everybody to pay their dues, we'd probably have this
[place] bricked," says Timmy Walden. It's pretty clear that
collecting dues is not at the top of anybody's to-do list: The
membership-dues list on the wall went six years without an update.
Instead, the walls are covered with silvery sheathing; players feed
boards to a hulking metal wood-burning stove to fend off any chill
in the air, and the furniture looks like it was discarded from a
frat house. But nobody's complaining.
Built in 1988, the Super Dome is part clubhouse, part sports
stadium. Monroe County is dry; there's no local bar to belly up to,
so for the Marble Club regulars, the surest way to find their
friends - and their regular attendance makes it clear that most
want to find one another every day - is to frequent the Super Dome.
Though there are a few younger players (the sons or grandsons of
the regulars), most are in their 40s to 70s. "We can't hardly get
the young people to play. I'm afraid it's going to play out," says
Rondal Biggerstaff.
It's as though the Little Rascals stayed together for life and just
kept adding on to their clubhouse. And for three days in March, I
got to be their Darla.
•••••
THERE ARE THREE ways to determine if you're
talking to a marble player: the telltale click-click of
marbles coming from his pocket, the callus on the back of his
thumb, and the dirt embedded on the knees of his pants. The marble
yard literally loses several inches of dirt every year to the
players' pants.
Rolley-Hole looks pretty easy to follow when you're standing
outside the boards and all the guys are running you through the
how-tos. The goal: for each team of two to go up and down the
marble yard three times, landing their marbles in each hole while
keeping their opponents from doing the same. It's not just about
the shooting. It's about the strategy. Players can shoot, roll,
toss, flick, or even tap their marble forward with the tip of their
shoe. Hit an opponent's marble and you get to take a second shot.
There aren't many rules to break. The first duo to take 12 holes in
order wins. You just have to be careful that you don't go out too
early, or your partner will be left to fend off the opposing team
on his own.
"You coming up for the dog? He's getting his rover; he's ready to
go out," says Biggerstaff as one player takes his last hole.
None of it, especially the game jargon, seems straightforward once
you step onto the marble yard.
Almost all of the players favor white-flint marbles. For newcomers,
figuring out which marble belongs to your teammate - and which
belongs to your opponents - is harder than keeping your second
cousin twice removed's identical twin babies straight. You just
can't do it if you don't see them all the time. Even the regulars
spend a fair bit of time asking, "Whose marble is that?" Shoot for
the wrong marble and you could send your teammate sailing out of
the marble yard. That is, if you can manage to shoot the thing in
the first place, and shoot it straight.
"When we were kids, before learning to shoot, we would shoot it off
the thumbnail and wear the nail to the quick and have to stop
playing until it healed up," says Colonel Bowman (yes, that's his
real first name). To keep your thumbnail out of harm's way, you
have to use your thumb like a slingshot. Hold it back with your
pinkie, middle, and ring fingers, and lean the marble against the
back of your thumb, pointer finger lightly curled around it. "Lay
it in there till it feels right," says Bowman, one of seven
brothers who grew up playing. "You don't have to squeeze the
marble." Once it's settled in, you slam it forward with your thumb
knuckle. "That's your trigger finger right there," adds Bowman.
"That's what throws the marble."
"If you can make the marble spin, it's like a bullet flying true,"
says Davis.
To make a straight shot, you have to line up your rump with the
marble and your target. "Some people squat, some people kneel, some
people get down on both knees," says Davis. But even then, no
matter how much I tried to line up and put correct shooting
technique to work, my shot usually fizzled or traveled an
embarrassingly far distance (in the wrong direction). This isn't a
game of muscle. A drop of extra power in a toss makes you feel like
a fool. Luckily, newcomers don't get ribbed quite as much as the
regulars. They'll even let some stuff slide.
But one thing they won't let slide: the opportunity to poke fun at
the day-after pain first-time players endure. It isn't easy to get
out of bed the day after a game. You constantly squat, stand, walk
around, and squat back down again during a game. "Anybody who says,
'How can marbles be good exercise?' has never played Rolley-Hole,"
says Biggerstaff. Bad knees or a bad back can sideline a player
permanently.
•••••
WHILE MOST OF the marble games are friendly,
there's a bit more competition - though still friendly - among the
marble makers. Just a handful of Monroe County guys turn raw stone
into polished marbles, and they'll drop their wares into your hands
to show off their work within moments of meeting you. "They're very
hard to make and get them true and round," says Davis, who sells
his white-flint marbles for $15 to $20 each. Since flint is one of
the hardest rocks around - it has a scratch hardness of about 7,
while diamonds are a 10 - a good marble can last for years.
When marble makers get going, the dust flies. After carving small
squares of flint out of hunks usually found in nearby riverbeds,
they grind the edges off. The flint is held tight between a rough
rock form and a grinding wheel. As the flint spins, it glows bright
red with heat - up around 250 degrees. "If you get the flint too
hot, it'll just crack and bust," says Davis.
Most marbles are about three-quarters of an inch thick. Without
measuring as he goes along, Davis can make a marble that's within
three one-thousandths of an inch round. Though he sends finished
marbles through a tumbler to put a shine on them, it's the time
marbles spend in their owners' pockets that really puts the best
finish on them. "The longer you pack them in your pocket, the
slicker they get," he says.
•••••
"HAH! MAN."
The long shot hit. The opponent's marble goes flying.
"You finally hit one, did ya?" a whittler razzes from the
sideline.
The whittlers are the Super Dome spectators, and they work on their
hunks of wood no matter what happens in the game. When Colonel's
brother, Michael, who is acknowledged as one of the best players,
sends a marble arching into the air and to its intended place in a
display of skill and precision, the wood shavings keep falling.
They're not carving anything; their hobby is one of deconstruction.
They whittle just to whittle. By the end of the evening, the piles
of cedar shavings they've dropped will make the Super Dome look
like a hamster's paradise.
Then, quietly, the game is over. Michael stays out on the marble
yard practicing while everybody else takes up a chair, waiting to
see what's next. But, on this night, there's another sport that's
going to win out.
"The game starting?"
"Yeah." And just like that, the potential for more games fades away
as players peel off to go home to watch the semifinals of the NCAA
basketball tournament.
Last one out shuts off the lights.