Tell your life pool story

[Diamond69]

I posted this in Jay's thread. Then thought it might be a nice thread on its own for people to share their stories on how they got started, or a summary of their life of pool. Here is my story on how I started and who inspired me....

Dad (RIP) took me to see Willie Mosconi in Fox Lake, Il as I was a huge fan from Wide World of Sports. We bought a table that day and I took the tips I got from Willie very seriously as an 8 year old.

Played rotation with my dad whenever he was available, and I played much more with passion and continued to improve. Loser put a dime in the bottle bank. Thanks to dad for nurturing my gambling pressures, as it helped me greatly a few years later.

When my parents moved when I was 17, my dad gave me the dimes as he knew I won the majority of the games and declared me winner. It was around $800 in there, which means we played around 8000 games over the 10 years together! Great memories!

He knew I gambled to supplement minor income over the next few years and knew I was doing well. I did eventually mature and realize I needed a full time job with income/insurance. Even then, he still dreamed of winning the lotto and just traveling with me to any and all tournaments. Win or lose, he just wanted to live that life vicariously through me.

Fast forward 20 years after marriage, divorce, child, etc where I had given up pool and then taken it back up again. Dad accompanied me and my teams to Wisconsin championships and the VNEA tourney in Vegas. Looking back after he had passed, me and the team tried to figure out if we had EVER lost a match while he was in attendance and were hard pressed to think of one. We won 2 Wisconsin State championships in his attendance. He attended VNEA for 8 of the 10 days we were there. We didn't lose a match until he had to get on a plane and we ended up 7th.

He jokingly blamed himself for us not winning it all that year!

Love you and miss you dad. Thanks for putting me on my path of life with pool!

 

[Sloppy Pockets]

I'm actually working on my pool memoirs right now. The title will be, "The Long Road to Mediocrity".

 

[desi2960]

short version

at age 5 i played my first game on a rich cousin's table, at 70 i still play 5 - 6 days a week.

95 percent of my social life revolves around pool.

 

[peppersauce]

................

 

[Scott Lee]

Diamond69...What a cool story! :thumbup: Wow! 8000 games...that jar must have been quite heavy! LOL I bet there were a LOT of silver dimes in there too! RIP to your dad...I know you must miss him terribly. My own dad passed in Jan. 2006.

Scott Lee
http://poolknowledge.com

I posted this in Jay's thread. Then thought it might be a nice thread on its own for people to share their stories on how they got started, or a summary of their life of pool. Here is my story on how I started and who inspired me....

Dad (RIP) took me to see Willie Mosconi in Fox Lake, Il as I was a huge fan from Wide World of Sports. We bought a table that day and I took the tips I got from Willie very seriously as an 8 year old.

Played rotation with my dad whenever he was available, and I played much more with passion and continued to improve. Loser put a dime in the bottle bank. Thanks to dad for nurturing my gambling pressures, as it helped me greatly a few years later.

When my parents moved when I was 17, my dad gave me the dimes as he knew I won the majority of the games and declared me winner. It was around $800 in there, which means we played around 8000 games over the 10 years together! Great memories!

He knew I gambled to supplement minor income over the next few years and knew I was doing well. I did eventually mature and realize I needed a full time job with income/insurance. Even then, he still dreamed of winning the lotto and just traveling with me to any and all tournaments. Win or lose, he just wanted to live that life vicariously through me.

Fast forward 20 years after marriage, divorce, child, etc where I had given up pool and then taken it back up again. Dad accompanied me and my teams to Wisconsin championships and the VNEA tourney in Vegas. Looking back after he had passed, me and the team tried to figure out if we had EVER lost a match while he was in attendance and were hard pressed to think of one. We won 2 Wisconsin State championships in his attendance. He attended VNEA for 8 of the 10 days we were there. We didn't lose a match until he had to get on a plane and we ended up 7th.

He jokingly blamed himself for us not winning it all that year!

Love you and miss you dad. Thanks for putting me on my path of life with pool!

 

[thintowin]

shoot hard and draw your ball! is the title of my memior's.

 

[dr_dave]

My "pool story" can be found here:

Interview with Dr. Dave

Here's the earliest pool photo I have of me (I'm in the bottom-left with the white shirt watching my older brother shoot):

And here's a video interview dealing with how I incorporate my passion for pool into the engineering classroom.

Good thread,
Dave

 

[Diamond69]

Great story peppersauce! I found it was enjoyable for me to type up my story as to others who may read it. I hope yours brought back fond memories as well!

I was diagnosed at a young age with ADD and keeping me focused for any length of time was extremely difficult in my younger years. I was always acting crazy, getting into fights and getting put in detention and getting suspended at school. And getting in trouble at family gatherings for breaking things and...you get the point.

I was at a family get together at my uncle's house and was off doing random crap like always and stumbled across a bar box in a corner of the basement. There was no light, except for a window, but there were cues and balls so I threw the balls out and grabbed a cue. All I knew was you hit the white ball into the other balls and tried to make them go in the pockets, so that's what I did...for the entire day! As soon as I hit a couple of balls, I was hooked! No one heard a peep from me and for the first time that I can remember, something actually had my attention. I was focused! That was a totally new thing for me.

No one in my family knew anything about pool and it pretty much ended there for me until later. Every now and then I might shove some quarters in a bar box if there was one around and hit the balls, but I never knew what the hell I was doing. I didn't even learn how to rack the balls until high school.

I think I was about 8 then. So fast forward to my junior year of high school. I had moved back to my home state from California and had been there for about a year. My next door neighbor, who was a family friend since childhood, hired me on do help him add a roo on to his house over the summer. It was a big room with one purpose; to house the 5x10 snooker table he had in storeage.

See, unbeknownst to me, my family friend, who I always knew as Paul the barber, was actually a road player way back in the day. We finished the room, set the table up, and started playing. He taught me all the basics of the various games but we mostly played snooker.

Paul taught me various things and entertained me with war stories from his years on the road. I think that last year of high school is when I really fell in love with the game. I was mesmerized by the things he was able to do with the cue ball and how he was able to just run out on such a tough table. I had never seen a good player and didn't realize that what he was doing was even possible. Every time he played position or made a tough shot it was like watching a magic trick I had never seen before.

After high school I joined the Army and traveled some more. I didn't really start taking the game seriously until I was stationed in Korea up by the DMZ. We were seemingly always on lock down with crazy curfews and special rules for leaving post, so I started to buy pool books and practice on the 9-ft in the day room. By the time I arrived at Ft. Hood, TX, I was a decent shot and there were weekly tourneys at the 2 pool rooms and at the bars in town for me to frustrate myself with so I started competing.

That's the start and it has just gone on from there. I never had natural talent for the game, so it has been a long hard road to get to where I am today. I've lost money to better players and lost matches to a lot of people I shouldn't have,but I've been lucky enough to finish high in some tournaments with tough fields and beat a road player or two in cash games when I wasn't supposed to win.

It's all part of the process for me. I'll never reach perfection, and I think that's what still has me hooked. I've come a long way though and I'm always looking for new knowledge and skills to strengthen my game and keep inching up that mountain. :grin:

 

[Diamond69]

Diamond69...What a cool story! :thumbup: Wow! 8000 games...that jar must have been quite heavy! LOL I bet there were a LOT of silver dimes in there too! RIP to your dad...I know you must miss him terribly. My own dad passed in Jan. 2006.

Scott Lee
http://poolknowledge.com

Thanks Scott. Not sure about the silver since we started in around 1976 or so. I remember bringing it to the bank to cash in with my dad. And I do think gambling those dimes did help my pressure pool later in life. A dime was a lot against my allowance for taking out the trash!

 

[nobcitypool]

I had played pool occasionally and very casually from my teens. Played one apa session on my son's team around 2007. We expanded our company by opening an office in Birmingham in 2010. I spent 3 months there in the beginning and started playing pool almost every day with some of the other guys that came down. Took a lesson from Scott Lee but really didn't put in the practice.

Didn't play too much for a couple of years as I was working lots of hours building the business. Took another lesson from Scott and started practicing. Then took a lesson from Stan Shuffett around January 2012. I immediately saw the benefits of CTE/Pro One.

We had also opened an office in Charleston, SC. I took a couple of lessons from Stevie Moore when traveling back and forth to that office and coming through his home town of Spartanburg. Stevie helped me further with CTE and really drilled in me the absolute importance of a straight stroke. I was hooked at this point.

After the lesson with Stan, I started practicing at home at least 2 hours per day. Upgraded to a 9 foot Diamond in January 2013. I've had around 6 lessons with Stan since the first. I'm now a 6/7 S/L in apa and should move up to 7/9 in the next 3 to 6 months as I continue to improve. I'm guessing I've put in 3 or 4 times as much table time in the past two years as I did the previous 55. I love pool so much I actually enjoy practicing every day.

I think it is the vast knowledge related to the game that has me hooked. I know of no other sport that involves so much knowledge. Stroke, pre shot routine, alignment, vertical english, side spin, throw, deflection, banks, kicks, caroms, speed control ... The more I learn, the more I realize what I don't know. And what a great game that at the age of 55, I can start playing seriously and have endless opportunities to compete at my skill level. Other than golf, I can think of no other sport that provides those opportunities. And what other sport had such an eclectic cultural mix? Every week at league you see everything from college kids, lawyers, doctors, bikers, blue collar workers, business owners, men, women, etc.. It's a shame, pool should be the most popular sport in the world by far with all it has to offer.

 

[Zphix]

When I was about 8 years old, the bowling alley where I played on a league had pool tables. I was too young to understand the complexities of the sport then but I sure loved to watch my older brother, dad, or teammates parents play on the bar tables. At 8 years old I was just smashing balls around but every week I saved up a few quarters to play after leagues were over and I did this until I was about 12 or 13 and then bowling leagues stopped for me and I stopped playing pool.

A few weeks went by and I had all but forgotten about the game that I love today. My growing teenage mind became focused on Runescape, chess, sudoku puzzles, math, school and all that other jazz. That is, until my aunt and uncle moved just one town over and in the basement my uncle put his pool table and my love for the game blossomed again. About twice a week we'd go over to there house to visit. The adults would drink around a bonfire while I was in the basement smashing balls around with my cousins. More often than not though, the adults would come in and we'd team up to play some cheap games - and for the first time I saw my dad bank a shot and I was fascinated with how it worked, how the shot could've been anything except luck.

Eventually, they moved again and the pool table became nothing but a memory. 5 years go by without me playing at all until somebody got the bright idea to open a poolhall/club in my dying town to revitalize the place and I fell in love with the game (for good). At 18 I was able to appreciate the game, understand the systematic approach behind it, and I studied and studied the game. Everyday after college classes got done I'd get home and hit up YouTube to watch matches where I familiarized myself with the likes of Earl, Shane, Efren, Justin Hall, Buddy Hall, Keith McCready, etc.

Fast forward a year and half later and you've got the gentleman whose spent the better part of $1000 playing in league matches, or buying table time. The same gentleman who is typing this story, and the same gentleman who remains just as hungry to learn today as he did when he first started to dedicate himself to the game. I'm currently being mentored by the best shooters in Wisconsin and my goal is be one of the best in the state. My journey is only just starting and I'm looking forward to the days when I'll be able to turn around and see the steps I've taken with those who have been by my side.

=)

-Richard