For your Pleasure, best personal Memory, Why

Pool, anytime, anywhere, that I could get near a table. Playing or sweating -- did not matter. Never, ever, found any sport, game, or recreational pursuit, to beat pool. Turkey hunting and fishing come close, but they are a different deal. Pool has always been on its own separate level.
 
In the beginning I think it was the sound of the cue ball hitting the object ball and then it goes into the pocket or close to it anyway .
Then as I became older ( legal age to drink ) I decided that there were more old pool player's than old drunks so I quit drinking and saved up the money I would've spent on drinking and bought myself a fancy pool cue and that started my real addiction to the game .

If other's feel the need for a drink to play pool that's their deal , I'll have a ice tea or water ha ha
 
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Rusty in Montana said:
In the beginning I think it was the sound of the cue ball hitting the object ball and then it goes into the pocket or close to it anyway .
Then as I became older ( legal age to drink ) I decided that there were more old pool player's than old drunks so I quit drinking and saved up the money I would've spent on drinking and bought myself a fancy pool cue and that started my real addiction to the game .

If other's feel the need for a drink to play pool that's their deal , I'll have a nice tea or water ha ha
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I went to a Legion and would play for .25 cents for the meter box ( 20 minutes) if I won and if I lost I'd buy them a beer. I played for free most days
 
A dive bar called The Rusty Nail sponsored my dad's soccer club. They had a bar box in the back where the team would go after matches. As a little kid, I'd crawl around on the floor looking for coins until I had the $.75 to make the balls come out. Used a milk crate to get up to the table. Loved the game ever since.

One time I found a $50 on the floor, which was cool. Kept me in pool for ages.
 
I had a relative that had a pool table when I was very young probably about 8 or 9 years old. Thought it was pretty neat aiming at a ball to knock other balls in a hole! A year or so later we got a table but it was just a thick plywood table. Had a lot of fun on it but never got past just screwing around on it. Myself and other kids didn't know what we were doing but had fun. We had to move a couple times so the table was gotten rid of after a couple years.
My ex wife's parents had a pool table later on when I was about 20. It was a nice "piece of furniture" kind of table. We played a lot but it wasn't long before I could beat everyone so they wouldn't play anymore.
There was a table at the community college I went to near the lunchroom. I played on that pretty frequently. Later on I went with a friend to a tavern. He liked pinball. I was drawn to the pool tables. About that time it really hit me. And away we go!!
Seems like there was always a pool table around back then. I don't really know where the interest came from, it was just there.
 
It was an old school pool room in the late seventies. The smoke, the spit cans, wooden benches, the gambling pinballs and the allure of what in the world is going on in this mysterious place. Old men pushing balls around, coins flying around, a leather bottle of round numbered balls in it.
Laughter and fun looking stuff caused me to want to know more…then I did. Nearly fifty years later, I miss that stuff!
 
My dad liked to play, when I was 10 or 11 we would go the local pub and play, I loved just banging the balls around. Fast forward to when I was 16 and a buddy invited me to free pool at the local pool hall. I was hooked, he and I would be at the hall every day after work and almost all day on Saturday or Sunday. That went on for 5 years, then I got married and joined a league.

To me it's the math, the science, the angles, etc. Nearly 40 years after walking into that pool hall and I still just love throwing the balls on the table and having fun just banging balls around.
 
My dad bought a house in 1969 and the 11-year old SJM began to play on the Brunswick Gold Crown 1 in the basement. Some of my fondest memories are the straight pool races to 50 that I played against my dad.

Still, it was something that happened years later that really made a pool nut out of me. I met and got to know Irving Crane in 1977 and 1978. His poise and flair at the table made me his biggest fan. I had breakfast with him when he was in New York for the World Championships in 1980 and we became good friends, although we didn't see each other very often.

Crane's style and demeanor as a player explain both a) my enduring love of pool, and b) my lifelong fascination with the defensive part of pool.

It's equally true, however, the pool always makes me think of my late father and all the good times we shared over the glorious green felt.
 
The year was 1962 or 63 my father owned a liquor store directly across the street from Sequoia Billiards owned by Jimmy and Dorothy Wise.
I must have been 12 years old or so at the time and I spent quite a bit of time at the liquor store waiting for my father to close and take me home.
At some point I'm not exactly sure when but seeing all the people going in and out of this place across the street and hearing all the clicking of the balls lured me over to see what all this was about. As soon as I entered (there were no age limits for entry) I discovered another world and I was hooked.

It was there that I got to see, Mosconi, Caras, Joe Procita, and many other really good players and characters. I got to know Dorothy very well, she always treated me nicely in a motherly way. Jimmy showed me a lot to get me started. Both he and Tugboat were great fonts of information.

Great memories, dem' were the days!
 
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It was 1952 and I was 16 - sort of a fairly bright loner - and deep into astronomy and building my own telescopes and needing a few things that were only sold in a shop on Liberty Ave in Queens. While cruising the shelves I kept hearing loud blasts coming thru the ceiling. The owner told me there's a pool hall upstairs.

I climbed the stairs looked in and immediately -- as others have said -- like the familiar smells of smoke and beer I knew from all adults in my nearby borough-line Brooklyn neighborhood. Most important, I was oddly moved by my first sights of the colorful layouts after continuous nine-ball breaks, which were then new to my eyeballs.

Then it struck me why it all seemed to be calling out to me: "This sight is like our solar system's nine planets seen from above !!!" And these men (I learned) were uber-skilled old gamblers who had honed their strokes and strategies feeding their families with their winnings just 15 years ago during the Depression years of the '30s. And here they were -- gods at the tables magically manipulating those planets . . . into newer, amazingly precise orbits.

I've stayed completely hooked by the sport for all of the ensuing years. Still feeling so blessed by the same level of initial teenage joy after these 72 years of watching and playing one of the most pleasurable and psychically rewarding sports ever invented.

Arnaldo ~ And still thrilled to see what each new iteration of space telescope adds to our astronomical data and predictions about the known Universe.
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My uncle had a pool table and was a physics teacher. He had MS and couldnt play once he was in a wheelchair, table was in the basement, but when i visited in the summers i would bang balls around for hours not knowing anything about the game. That would be 40+ years ago.

Picked up the game around 28ish years ago with a friend who traded me a nice ebony/maple dufferin for my old computer. Played off and on with friends for a few years and we thought we knew what we were doing. Looking back we didnt know anything. Than 10-12 years ago i started playing again, became a regular a hall, and learned just how poor a player i really was ;)

Now i play weekly, and collect equipment for fun. Still think back to my late uncles table in his basement and how much fun i had not having a clue about anything pool related.
 
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