Recent content by Tobermory

I struggled with choking for years. I decided that I needed to create the same condition somehow in practice that I was under in tournaments. I came up with this idea. I made a wager in my mind that if I didn’t run fifty balls in, say, ten attempts, I would send a contribution to some...

As for Hennessee’s recent “improvement,” I followed Hennessee’s Derby City play up close, literally, for several years. I became fascinated by how unlucky he was in crucial moments. I mean TRAGICALLY unlucky. At decisive moments! I thought to myself, “If this dude ever gets a decent roll...

Fargo rating? Number of WNT appearances? Popularity? Team Spirit? Fuggedaboudit! For winning the Mosconi Cup, you need pool players with a high John Rocker Quotient. Think Jason Shaw, but not so reserved.

I can tell you how mine was. I live two hours from the Derby. I am a pool nut. I have been to the Derby about twenty times. As usual I entered the one pocket and the nine ball. (Dead money.). I bought an arena seat. I reserved a room in Caesar’s for seven nights. I made sure I prepared...

Perhaps one problem with the nine ball scheduling is that nine ball isn’t so fluid as it used to be. Since the Filipinos introduced a more complex concept for kicking, it has become more tactical and, as a result, slower. Five hundred entries doesn’t help either.

Thanks for the “Like.” I had sensed a whiff of condescension in the first comment and thought I would clear that up

I think this may be an appropriate string of comments in which to raise the name of Andre Gillier. He was a French industrialist who worked with the French tennis star Rene Lacoste to invent the fabric that goes into polo shirts. So if you are wearing a shirt that “breathes,” he was the one who...

He’s really kinda smart about pool and billiards. Just the other day he explained something in his commentary I had often observed but had never had an explanation for. It pays to listen to him.

Dear Cocobolo Cowboy, Some years ago I suggested, almost as a joke, that, if we really wanted to get big corporate sponsors interested in pool, we wouldn’t care about how the players dressed. We would worry about how the SPECTATORS dressed! So at pool tournaments we would have to have a...

Dear Jimmy-Betmore, I got curious whether one can smell testosterone, so I looked it up on Google and AI. Basically you can’t smell testosterone, BUT testosterone heightens the effect of related hormones, such as androstenone, which DO have an odor, and AI specifically mentions that many women...

I haven’t been to the Derby since Covid. Before that I had been to every one except the first one, which I missed simply because I hadn’t heard about it, and missed one later because my brother was having his second open heart surgery at Mayo Clinic. I think that counts as an excused absence...

If you Google “Ralph Greenleaf” up pops a photo from Getty Images of Greenleaf playing a side pocket break shot. (That’s you.) And he is so close to the object ball that he is liable to foul. (That’s Mosconi.) And the table is a 5x10. On getting jacked up, or avoiding it, Mosconi seemed to...

In the late Sixties I had the chance to play regularly on 5x10’s. No, they are not easier than 4.5x9’s. You very rarely have the chance to play stop-ball position. You’re always having to GET position. In his autobiography, Mosconi talks about the very long string of exhibitions he and...

I have proof that I do not yell at kids crossing my lawn. I bought my house in the Seventies. It has a wide, flat front yard, and I was careful about the grass. But my corner was designated a school bus stop. Each morning in the fall, the boys who were waiting for the bus would take one of...