Now, of all the silly things I've heard you say... this is not one of them.
The following missive will surely get scoffed at, but screw it, might as well add more stuff for folks to get outraged over. Lol
During those rare moments of pool genius I have, those times when suddenly making shots seems ridiculously easy and I think I might be getting ready to enter a few tourneys before I die, there is something about my stroke that makes me feel incredibly connected to the ball. The feel is solid, even on soft shots, the sound is more clear and penetrating, the balls in general seem to react differently, and that damn CB doesn't seem to have a mind of its own anymore. Conversely, I have never felt and hear the balls sound like that when I was shooting like crap. Seems one goes with the other, or at least it's true for me.
Even non-players can hear this, as evidenced when my youngest son (who rarely plays) was visiting last month and I was showing him a few things. I watched what he was doing, and then showed him how I wanted him to stroke the ball. His first comment was that he could hear the difference on strokes I said he did correctly. I told him to go home and practice listening for that sound, and if it didn't sound right, he wasn't hitting it right.
I've heard great player/commentators talk about this on video, and I forced my mind to deny these comments because I
do know and understand the physics, and I
do believe that the physics explains everything that some folks want to ascribe to magical special techniques. And yet, there is just something different about my stroke that gets me directly connected to the balls and the table when I am playing at my very best. So at those times, I try to forget about the truth of the physics and just get deep into that feeling of "hitting the ball well". How else would one enter the zone, by reasoning their way into it?
BTW there are many ways to listen, as I'm sure you are well aware of. I'm a retired musical instrument maker and restorer. With the few jazz guitars I've built, I held the wooden plates at the nodal point and tapped them for tone, but I know I was using the sensitivity of my fingers to feel the vibrations and much as I was using my ears to actually hear the tap tone. When the tone and vibrations reached a certain point, I knew that the plate was at the final thickness. There is some woman who supposedly figured out how to do this with a sound generator and metal fillings sprinkled on the plate to show distinct nodal patterns. Pretty cool, but I never heard of anybody great playing on one of her instruments, though.
In all the great violin bows I made, I chose my wood by holding the blanks at the nodal point and tapping up and down the stick to "listen" for its tonal characteristics. If it didn't have what I was looking for, I just didn't use the stick, not matter how expensive it was. You can't even hear these vibrations with your ears, you must use your fingers. Most makers today purchase $3000 "Lucchi meters" to measure the sound velocity of their wood and make their determinations that way, but that kind of science will not give you the type of feedback I was looking for, like the duration and strength of the vibrations, the resonance of the sample, the absence or presence of interfering nodes, etc., feedback I continually listened to throughout the entire time spent carving the bow from a rough stick to a finished instrument. All I can say it that great players universally liked the way my bows played and sounded, working strictly by feel and experience.
Sometimes, though, it helps to have good ears as well. When I was a kid there was a deaf guy who was said to be the best marine mechanic in the area. He couldn't tune a motor by ear, so he "listened" with his fingers. They say he got those 2-strokes running smoother and with more power than anybody. Then one day, a heavy piece of machinery was falling off a lift, but being stone deaf he couldn't hear it and it fell on him, crushing his hip. He walked with a bad limp for the rest of his life. I met him in a bar when he was in his 70s, and he was still fixing outboards every day.
Maybe Shane's secret is listening with his fingers?
