“Been playing pool checkers since I got started, that was in the fifth grade,” he says. “I never strayed away from it. I have played straight checkers, but never caught on too good with it. It interfered with my pool checkers ability.”

At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Barnett was an athletic teenager, later training to play basketball professionally, but he always made time for checkers (with the exception of a year or two spent at the University of Colorado, where he received a full basketball scholarship; to his dismay, there were no pool checkers players there). For hours, back in East Point, he would battle other players in the projects, sometimes in the basement of a man named George Few, otherwise in a parking lot outside.

Eventually, he grew to be a good player, so good that he exhausted the men in his neighborhood. Needing new competition, Barnett made his way up to Atlanta. He wound up at the newly formed Georgia Pool Checkers Association, on the corner of Griffin Street and what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Vine City, just down the street from Atlanta’s hub of historically black colleges and universities.

Inside the club too, it was mostly old men, Barnett remembers. The first time he dropped in, he says he surprised them all by winning several games from the start. They asked him, only 19 years old then, where he was from, and forgot about his name. From then on, they just called him "East Point."