In the fall of 1993, my haunt was the Tiger Den, a sorry- looking dormitory lounge with a lone pool table and a mop-proof accumulation of beer and ashes. Going to college in the middle of nowhere, I had three primary distractions: One was generally mind-altering, one involved latex, and one was pool, which sadly was the most easily indulged in. During those first few months of school, my friend Steve and I all but trod grooves into the Tiger Den's floors and stained its walls with a constant torrent of blue trash talk. But of the countless games we played, only a single precious moment has stayed with me. I was what polite circles call snookered and we called screwed: The table was bare, save for the eight ball hugging one end rail and my cue ball the other. Medium speed, plenty of left English. The cue ball hit the rail just to the right of the eight, and spun back directly into the black pearl, driving it into the corner pocket. "Christ," Steve said.
Fast-forward to this past summer, a ghostly poolroom in downtown Manhattan, nearly as forlorn as the Tiger Den. Steve and I had eaten dinner nearby, and beer and his innocent "Hey, remember how I used to humiliate you when we played pool?" had sparked a fierce rematch. As soon as we started knocking the balls around, though, I realized my game was shot. I was overreaching on everything, whereas his shots--all stroked with the same maddening slowness that over the years had led me to dub his style the Pussyfoot Offense--were dropping like e-commerce sites. There was a eureka moment, though, as I was paying for table time amid Steve's gloats, I recognized the veiled blessing of my abominable performance: self-knowledge.
THE EPIPHANY
I'd played a lot of pool in my twenty-six years. Yet despite the hours with my nose to the felt, I'd always hit a wall. I may have been good in a relative sense, but I'd never been a real shooter. I'd never run a rack of nine-ball, never relieved a man of his bankroll, never snared a curvaceous brunet on the strength of a bank shot. Well, maybe that last one, but one out of three does not a Fast Eddie Felson make. Pros have a term for the zone when everything's falling: dead stroke. And that's what I wanted--nearly as much as I wanted to kick Steve's ass. I needed a sensei. From where I stood as I walked out of the pool hall into the night, the road to dead stroke looked straight enough. I'd buy a cue. I'd take lessons. I'd play a match against a professional. And maybe, as a treat to myself, I'd dismantle Steve with studied aplomb, pocket his money and lord my superiority over him for the rest of our lives.
THE EQUIPMENT
A good mercenary is nothing without a weapon, so I head to Blatt Billiards, the venerable supply store in New York's Greenwich Village. While pros use custom-made cues that can run more than #3,500, an amateur can get a good entry-level cue for less than $300. I opt for a Viking standard two-piece, somewhere on the high side of the low end, and throw in a tip shaper/rasper. (The tip should always stay roughened to accept chalk, and most players keep the tip at the circumference of either a nickel or a dime.)
THE GURU
Fran Crimi isn't the kind of person you think of when you hear pool legend. Despite her Queens accent, she doesn't have a hardened way about her, and she doesn't have a nickname that would have lent her extra credibility in the smoke-filled pool halls of the past. (As pool continues to swell in popularity, its seamy-underbelly reputation has steadily atrophied; poolrooms these days are import-beered and plush-sofa'd within an inch of martini loungedom.) No one calls her Frantastic or Smooth Crimi-nal or anything similarly regrettable. She happens to be a damn good pool teacher, though: one of twelve Billiard Congress of America Master Instructors in the country She's also a trailblazer in the increasingly upmarket game of women's pool-- actually, she's the reason you can watch nine ball on ESPN, having negotiated the original TV contract back in the 1980s Oh, and she's patient: Fran has undertaken the (colossal) task of rebuilding my game from scratch.
THE INITIATION
A pool hall on a workday afternoon has an appealing adagio about it; the only sound at Corner Billiards is the periodic click-thunk of pocketed shots. After I introduce myself to Fran, she spreads the balls on the table. "I'm going to grab a cup of coffee," she says. "You just warm up, hit some balls around." She leaves, I shoot, she comes back. Not thirty seconds later, I hear, "OK, I've got you pegged." Going to be a long month, I think, and I have a feeling she's thinking the same thing. But it's the only time I have, because in a month I'm playing nine ball against Tony Robles--the Silent Assassin, widely viewed as one of New York's top three players. Today my bridge is weak, my stance inconsistent and my stroke shaky, and since the cornerstone of any billiards game, from snooker to three cushion, is the harmonious combination of the three, I'm going to need all the help I can get.
Fortunately, there's no single objective "best" way to shoot. Some people stand nearly upright, some bend low at the waist so the cue nearly grazes their chin on each stroke, Many people use a closed bridge (palm firmly on the felt, fingers spread for stability, index finger curled snugly around the cue's shaft), but there are a number of open-bridge devotees who simply prop the cue between their thumb and index finger. Some hold the cue loosely with their middle and ring fingers; others favor a firmer grasp. There is one unifying principle, though, regardless of individual styles: Stay down, follow through.
Predictably, I'm doing neither. Instead, I'm jumping up after each shot, which causes my cue to stop short and seriously compromises my accuracy. "Stay down until all the balls stop moving," Fran says. "it sounds strange, but what feels like too long is actually just right." And your cue should travel through the ball until it has gone at least the length of your backstroke, six to nine inches. These are things my mind knows but my body has for some reason never fully translated. I'm no stranger to this brain-body barrier-it happens to dictate my personal life-but with some conscious effort, I'm able to force myself to adopt a better follow-through fairly quickly and am ready to move on to the rudiments of position play.
THE FINERIES
While the physics of pool are nuanced enough to merit entire dissertations, the basics are these: Imagine a clock face printed on the cue ball. Hit in the exact center, a cue ball shot straight into an object ball will transfer all its force to that ball and stop dead. A cue ball shot at an angle into an object ball will roll away on a path ninety degrees from the object ball's trajectory Struck above center (12 on the dock face), a cue ball will roll forward after hit- ting an object ball; hit below center (6), it will succumb to back- spin, reversing its direction once it hits the object ball.
But the subtlety of pool really becomes clear with spin, or English--the boon of the expert, the bane of the novice. Hitting the cue ball at 9 or 3 affects its path, the object ball's path, the angle at which a ball comes off the rail and the way the cue ball caroms off the object ball. For instance, hitting the cue ball with high right English (1:30) to cut a ball into a corner pocket and hitting it with straight draw (6) will make that cue ball wind up in two totally different places. Not to mention that for all pool shots involving any kind of spin, shot speed plays a crucial role in determining how the cue ball reacts to the various forces imposed upon it by the cue. Got it?
Being able to exploit these differences is the key to position play. Watching a pro like Fran, I begin to realize how much computation is involved. In a game such as nine ball, in which you have to pocket the balls in order from 1 to 9, you're always thinking at least three balls ahead. The overriding concern is where to leave the cue ball. Stop it cold, or bring it back six feet? Swerve it around another ball, or bring it three cushions through traffic? Most beginning and intermediate players have a basic understanding of the physics involved but find the flesh weak where the spirit is willing. This is why pool, like golf, reduces amateurs to weeping schoolgirls.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Slowly, my long hours with Fran begin to pay off. Constant practice has inured me to the skittishness I used to feel looking at a long-range cut shot, and my new stroke has made the cue ball much more responsive; at times, it's as though I'm leading it by a string. Important as execution is, pool is equally a game of psychology, Fran is fond of saying "The key to being a champion is to overcome reality" Confidence is little more than forgetting the possibility that you might miss. That doesn't mean shooting carelessly but instead suggests that a certain degree of abandon can help your game immeasurably. And while I'm no threat to the men's pro tour, I find myself beating my friends a little more easily. I even snake a game from Fran every now and then.
Once I recognize my concrete improvement, the game takes on a whole new meaning. Pool is everywhere, sometimes to the point of distraction. Walking down crowded streets, I find myself calculating angles: if I carom off the blond in the sundress, I can knock the fat guy into that manhole and break up that cluster of nuns at the same time! Subway cars whisper Staydownfollowthrough staydownfollowthrough. I find myself sitting happily through The Color of Money, for God's sake. Something's got to give.
Three weeks into my makeover and a week before I play Tony Robles, I find myself entertaining fantasies of an upset. The mano a mano nature of pool makes every contest a matter of pride, and even the knowledge that I'll be playing someone who earns his living at the pool table isn't enough to override my male ego. A recurring vision of myself, hands clasped over my head A la a 1940s prizefighter, haunts my dreams. I'm obviously drunk with optimism.
Sobriety comes in the form of Corner Billiards' nine-ball league, my dress rehearsal. My first match ends in tragedy, nine games to two. More disheartening than the score, though, is my play. I'm intimidated by my opponent's high rating (every player gets a handicap rating-mine was a novice's 5 to his expert's 9) and fast style of play, and I find myself rushing my shots in turn. With my mental game gone, my physical game goes to--and I think this is the technical term--shit. I need Yoda.
What I find is Sid, the slight older man I play in my next league match. Later that night, I'm to play Tony, and I'm hoping another warm-up match will get me in the swing of things. I'm not nervous, mostly because of Sid-he shuffles a bit when he walks, sounds a little like Walter Matthau and reminds me of a low-key Mel Brooks. "We're here for fun, aren't we?" he says when we meet. Self-confidence proves to be the difference. Despite his being rated a couple of balls better than I am, I trust my ability instead of marveling at his.
More important, I'm not expecting to play position beyond my modest abilities. A week before, when I had botched an easy cut shot because I was too concerned with the next shot, Fran had said, "Every professional player started out as a great shotmaker who played lousy position." At the time, I thought, Great--so I'm a terrible shotmaker who plays lousy position; now I'm giving myself over to each shot, and they're falling. My stroke kicks in, and I pocket some tough cuts. In the end, Sid nails a couple of good combos to take the match, 9-7, but I'm not crushed. Far from it: I'm hitting that anything's -possible bravado Fran spoke about. And Sid is more than complimentary: "I'm lucky to pull that one out. The longer you spend at the table, the better you're gonna get." You got that right, Sid. Now bring me Tony Robles!
THE BATTLE
Dreams are great, but reality's a bitch. What happens with Tony is best described as a lesson in how to sit and watch your opponent run racks. When he doesn't have a good shot, he plays a safety (in nine ball, if you don't drive the object or cue ball to a cushion, your opponent gets to shoot from anywhere on the table; thus you can screw the other guy by playing a legal shot that leaves him stuck behind other balls). Final score? Eleven-one, and the one game I manage to take is only because he barely misses a shot, leaving the 9 in the pocket's jaws. But somehow, watching him play, I don't feel too bad. I make some good shots and for the most part avoid humiliation. After the match, Tony shakes my hand and says, "You know, before you showed up, Sid walked by and was raving about some 5 player he'd just played. You've definitely got potential." Fran, of course, is smiling--I'm her creation, after all--and I have to admit I'm feeling a little optimistic myself. I just fear for poor Steve.