Back in the late 80s when I took up 3c I played almost nightly in a complete dump of a room whose only virtues were 2 Brunswick billiard tables and a 6x12 snooker table, the first I'd ever seen, with a perpetual golf game on that I enjoyed watching while waiting to play. I was a smoker back then and so, it seemed, was everyone else in the place but I didn't give it a second thought.
Then I decided to quit smoking, and back then the Schick method was pretty popular and widespread so I decided to do it. Part of the deal was that you had to go to the facility for 5 consecutive evenings, so for those 5 days I went there instead of the billiard room. The method worked for me, and for the last almost 50 years I've not been tempted to light up even a little. At least not tobacco, if you know what I mean.
But the real eye-opener was going back to the billiard room. The second hand smoke didn't bother or tempt me. But at the end of the evening when I got in my car something stunk. I quickly realized that it was my clothes, which had absorbed the smell. Fortunately a month or two later I met my future wife and married her 5 weeks later.
Having an actual life, I stopped playing billiards until years later when we were scouting places to retire to and we wandered into the Senior Center in Greeley CO and found a lovely heated Gabriel billiard table. We were already leaning towards Greeley, but that cinched it for me. And best of all, the Senior Center was No Smoking. And there were some great guys to play with who were just as bad as me, except for
@12squared who was the clear 'best in room'. Good times.
