Whose Number’s Up This Year? Reminiscing About Ghoul Pool

There once was a group of people in San Diego County who would make an annual wager on which celebrities would die within a twelvemonth.

I know because I was one of the group. Saints forgive me, I even won for the year 1986. Now the truth can be told: I had read (as my competitors had not) that Roy Cohn had liver cancer, giving me a one-person victory.

As far as I can tell, the ghoul game is no more. Or maybe it’s only gone underground. One of the rules was that no one would ever talk publicly of the game, upon pain of severe censure.

The game was called “86 in . . . “ Plug in the year: “86 in ‘86,” “86 in ‘87,” etc. The “86” comes from bartender’s lingo for someone who’s been cut off, as in “you’re 86 buddy, scram.”

By Jan. 15, each player would submit a list of 10 projected famous dead people. And $10 for the pool. Winner take all.

The months would wear on, and players would keep a loose tally. As New Year’s approached and the deadline neared, anticipation gripped the players. You’d be surprised how many celebrities die over the holidays.

This even required a rule called the Ricky Nelson Rule. Nelson, you remember, died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve. The rule stated that an accidental death like a plane crash counted in the year in which the body was recovered, not the year it occurred.

There was also the Donna Reed Rule. Reed died one Jan. 13. The rule said that no death counted until the official lists had been received by the list-keeper; postmarks weren’t good enough.

Players would go to extremes in compiling their lists. One called the advance obituary writer for the New York Times; others used computers to scan for hospital stories.

I once asked an award-winning science journalist for the name of an esteemed scientist whom I had heard was comatose; she refused to help me and said something snippy about my lack of breeding.

Some names were astounding. I will go to my grave wondering how someone knew months in advance that Malcolm Baldrige, the Reagan Cabinet member, would die in a horseback accident.

One year the “commissioner’s trophy,” given for the most prescient selection, went to Nancy Schlesinger, now a free-lance writer in Oceanside. She had predicted (accurately) that Dan White would not last the year.

Schlesinger remembers her victory: “It was a real special moment.”

One of the better players was Steve Hawk, then a reporter for the Escondido Times-Advocate, now editor of Surfer magazine based in San Juan Capistrano.

He says the game just sort of lost its appeal and is probably not played anymore. (Again, remembering the code of silence, this may or may not be true.)

“It was such a macabre thing, let’s just say I’ve outgrown it,” Hawk said. “I’ve matured now that I’m at Surfer magazine.”

One reason for the game’s demise may have been bad publicity from the 1988 movie “The Dead Pool,” with Clint Eastwood. In it, a player in a similar contest cheats by murdering people on his list.

The real game, it should be stated, had a firm rule that banned credit for any death you had a hand in promoting/causing/aiding/hastening.

Leave it to Hollywood to run a good thing into the ground.

The Law Takes Its Toll

Take it and run.

* The law of unintended effects.

The San Diego police mobile command van to help stop the rash of beatings and bashings in North Park-Hillcrest is nearly directly in front of an X-rated movie house: a discreet place that caters to a select clientele.

Attendance is said to be way down. Would-be patrons are reluctant to walk past the cops.

* If you’re shopping for a New Year’s Eve bash and a worthy cause: The rock ‘n roll dinner and Champagne at the Sheraton East on Harbor Island: bands doing hits from the ‘50s and ‘60s, plus celebrity impersonators.

Proceeds (tickets are $99 per person) go to the San Diego Center for Children, a residential facility for abused children.

* Bumper sticker on a Lincoln in Rancho Santa Fe: “Investigate Ted Kennedy Now!”