Thanks for all the posts and laughs! If I had known I would get all those pictures, I would have posted this ages ago.
To the poster about the women players. Not sure how you meant that post, I'm certainly not sexist, but there aren't many female players that I watched as a kid or follow much today. I think I'd consider Allison Fischer on that list. I think my wife would find that creepy!!
The well understood troubles in pool also provide for a rare opportunity. Imagine if I wanted to hang out with a pro golf player. Good luck with that. Not going to be throwing a few pass routes, hitting grounders, shooting hoops with highly paid professional athletes. Pool is one of the very few sports where this would even be possible.
About the creepy part. I get that. You'll just have to trust me that I'm a normal guy with a wife and kids. I have three college degrees and have worked the same corporate job for 15 years. Living in suburbia in Minnesota. If I were the pro, I'd want to talk to me before agreeing to anything, including a $10,000/rack game at my house.
Think about some other field of excellence. Music let's say. What would a hobbyist guitarist pay to host Clapton at their house for a few days and jam. Hendrix? Rock and roll not your thing? What about physics? $2,000 to chat with Einstein for a couple of days? Feynman? Probably. The pool players on that list are comparable in their fields to those above in theirs.
But the point is that those scenarios are not even possible. Those folks are too highly paid for it to even be interesting to them (not to mention several of them are dead :embarrassed2

. Some pro billiard players might not think the offer very interesting either. But because of the financial realities of billiards, it might make someone think. I imagine if I were that pro and that money was meaningful to me, I'd certainly think about it and not dismiss it outright. Someone willing to pay me for my time and professional talent that I have spent my entire life honing? That's just American capitalism.
And I got to tell you, if I got a PM from Mike Sigel telling me he wants to take me up on that and shoot some nine ball over the weekend at my house, I'd just about shit my pants. And right after that I'd have to think about just how serious I am. Right now, I'm just curious if it's even possible.
I suppose it would look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67d_MYqcwnM