Hey, “Positively Ralph,”
Go back and check your place out and make sure it hasn’t disappeared into the Irish mist.
Your pool room is “a real dump.” One of the poolrooms where I learned to play had a limited number of chairs. But at one end there was a pile of disused tires with a heavy canvas spread over it which you could manipulate into an improvised bleachers. I would weep tears of joy if I could hang out in that room again! Players whose names came up in “Billiard News” played there.
Of course I could go after 5PM tonight to MY local poolroom—I would have to park up the street in a grocery store lot because there is such limited parking at the actual poolroom and hope I don’t get towed—and play on one of the fifteen 7’ tables, a few of which are Diamonds and not Valleys. And perhaps I should go soon because the newspaper says that the city is going to tear down the building in the next couple of months to provide parking for an as yet unfinanced convention center.
Or I could drive an hour and a half to a city with a poolroom which changed owners two years ago. The new owner got rid of half the 9’ diamonds and replaced them with 7’s so he could concentrate on league play and not cater to the sporting life’s who used to occupy the place afternoon and night. They are mostly gone now.
“Positively Ralph,” remember Lear ranting on the heath in Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child!”
