What got you interested in pool?

justnum

Billiards Improvement Research Projects Associate
Silver Member
Pool is different then major sports because there is no age limit.

Learning to play play doesn't depend on your age, there is no peak age for pool.

However what I liked about playing pool recreationally when I started is entirely different now.

In the beginning it was about winning as much as possible. Now its lately been about enjoying the game more.
 

MattPoland

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Running around a pool tournament at a Holiday Inn as a kid every year while growing up. At some point I would always watch some matches.
 

Baxter

Out To Win
Silver Member
I was fascinated by the game the first time I ever threw a cue ball around a bar table when I could barely see over the rail. I'm still fascinated by the game. I have an intense competitive streak in me, and after several injuries in my late teens and early twenties ended my participation in more physical sports, I turned to pool as an outlet for my competitiveness.
 

Kiwis11

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Right after I saw the movie "The Hustler" in 1961. My dad bought me my 1st cue a Brunswick Master Stroke for Christmas and I was hooked. A couple years later I found a very old Brunswick Willie Hoppe in a trash pile and sent it to AE Schmidt in St Louis to have it rebuilt and a new shaft. I still have both of those cues today...although I don't play with them. I play with a 1999 Russ Espiritu.
 

BC21

https://www.playpoolbetter.com
Gold Member
Silver Member
On Saturdays my dad would take my two brothers and me to McCoy's Tavern. He'd drink whiskey and bet on college football games that ran on a small black and white TV at the end of the bar. I was around 10, one brother a couple of years older and the other a couple younger. The three of us would eat red-dyed pistachios and drink Coca Cola from those little glass bottles that are now labeled "Classic" coke. We'd sit on old wooden barstools and watch grown men, mostly coal miners and railroaders, smoke cigarettes, drink beer and whiskey, gamble, curse, spit tobacco, and best of all....play pool.

My dad wasn't much of pool player, so when I'd ask if I could play he was quick to tell me that it was not a place for kids to play pool.

Within the next few years dad starting hanging out with a black man named Tommy Newkirk. They became drinking buddies, gambling partners and such. And though I was only 15 then, I became their unofficial designated driver, hauling them from bar to bar on Saturday nights. That's when I finally started playing pool. And that's also when I found out that Tommy was a hell of a pool player, probably the best around.

I learned of Tommy's skills in a place called Eddie's, a basement bar off an old brick street in Montgomery WV. There were three 8ft tables and I was learning how to play crazy 8 with four or five grown men at $5 per person. I quickly learned how to lose $20 (all my grass cutting money), and then I quit. Tommy wanted in the game and the other men said he had to use a cue with no tip or a broom handle if he wanted to play. I thought it was a joke. Dad said, "Just watch." Tommy chose the broom and cleaned house.

Watching Newkirk shoot pool with a broom handle, the straw end brushing his side with every shot, well....I was hooked. I wanted to play pool like Tommy Newkirk. Over the next couple of years he taught me so much. I fell in love with the game and have loved it ever since. It was never about money or pride or ego, though each of these creeps it's way in at some point. Still, it's the enjoyment of playing the game that keeps me coming back to the table.
 
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jimmyco

NRA4Life
Silver Member
My girlfriend plays and is quite accomplished.

I wanted to share her interest and am quite mediocre.
 

RiverCity

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I started playing at the tender age of 4 or 5 years old at a bar called the Oasis, in Ironton, OH. My alcoholic grandparents, who used to watch me before I started school, would belly up to the bar, and give me some quarters for the pool table. It was early in the day, so we were usually the only ones in there. I remember being entranced by the sounds of the balls and how they moved. Grandpa saw the gleam in my eyes, and being an old "61" player himself, taught me how to hold a cue, bridge, stroke etc.

Other than being puked on frequently, and going home smelling like whatever rotgut well whiskey they were drinking..... It was good times! :thumbup:
 

Wieguns

Banger
Silver Member
My Dad had played pull as a kid, and when we bought a house in 1988, it had a 9 foot anniversary in the basement. From that moment on it became a regular form of entertainment for the family.
 

336Robin

Multiverse Operative
Silver Member
At age 12 someone asked me to play for a dollar a game. I ended up with 4 of his dollars. My next step was partners 8 ball for a dollar a man on a barbox. On Friday and Saturday nights there would be 50 kids in rec center playing pool, pin ball and foosball. Everyone wanted to take a crack at the kids on the doubles table. We raked in so much money we quit cutting grass. I was hooked. People were just giving me money to play!
 

RichSchultz

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
At age 12 someone asked me to play for a dollar a game. I ended up with 4 of his dollars. My next step was partners 8 ball for a dollar a man on a barbox. On Friday and Saturday nights there would be 50 kids in rec center playing pool, pin ball and foosball. Everyone wanted to take a crack at the kids on the doubles table. We raked in so much money we quit cutting grass. I was hooked. People were just giving me money to play!
Beer , and a pool table there.
 

lfigueroa

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Pool is different then major sports because there is no age limit.

Learning to play play doesn't depend on your age, there is no peak age for pool.

However what I liked about playing pool recreationally when I started is entirely different now.

In the beginning it was about winning as much as possible. Now its lately been about enjoying the game more.


Loved the game from the get-go.

Something about perfect spheres, sitting on a perfect rectangle, and making them do your will got me where I lived. Simple, yet maddeningly complex with endless variations.

Later on, seeing Willie Mosconi shoot in person and seeing "The Hustler" I was completely and thoroughly on the hook.

Lou Figueroa
 

Inaction

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I think it started on a Wednesday night in 1971, when my brother & I played a game of carom on a carom board. A few years later, I would ride with my Dad to the local hangout where there was a quarter valley table.

My uncle had a snooker table in the basement with not enough room for a 7 ft table. There was a very short stick to use on two sides and when close to the two posts right next to the table. The different age groups of male cousins would take a turn at the table before the adults came down.

In high school, I started to be a fair shot maker, but didn't learn cue ball control until leaving the area.

And I was drawn to all the pretty colors.
 

Chopdoc

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
From the age of 5 until 18 I lived next door to a family with a pool table in their basement. Me, my brother, and a couple of neighborhood girls used to play around on the pool table, sometimes we played pool too.

Then later, in my first year of college, there were pool tables at the student Union. I played as often as I could. The next year I got my Joss/Fellini while playing in my friend's basement. I got the cue and case for $35.

That was the beginning of my disease.

.
 

boogeyman

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Pool is different then major sports because there is no age limit.

Learning to play play doesn't depend on your age, there is no peak age for pool.

However what I liked about playing pool recreationally when I started is entirely different now.

In the beginning it was about winning as much as possible. Now its lately been about enjoying the game more.

For me, it's the competition. Not against the other player, mind you, but the table.
To navigate a run out successfully is satisfying.
I don't play pool because I love pool per se, I play pool because I like the challenge.
 

babyboy70363

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
I've always been competitive by nature. Growing up, I had a buddy that had a valley bar box on his back patio. We'd end up banging balls around in the afternoons after school......I was about 9 years old. Fast forward about 7 years, I was 16 and chasing my uncle to a local bar, about 6 months in I won a weekly tournament. From that point forward my goal was to win every tournament I entered, and gamble from time to time...........yea, I make my living in the oil patch, but still love the game nonetheless! LOL

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
 

SuperVocSV7

Registered
My aunt had a table in the basement of her condo, too young to remember dimensions or branding, as I could barely see over the edge of it. Clearly remember being about four years old, and in a gap of lacking supervision I started moving around the balls on the table back and forth with my hand before my mom promptly turned around and chased me off telling me I would damage the table.

After that I asked to play on the table every time we were there, until my aunt moved out a few years later.

Didn't realize the bug still had me bit from the first go until I encountered the 2nd pool table I'd ever seen while vacationing in AUS having my first legal beer at 18 while inside a pub not even a 5 minute walk from where we were staying. I kept going back to that pub, not to play pokies, not to drink (that) excessively, but to play on that dinky barbox between outings as much as possible.

To my delight when I returned stateside and moved onto my campus, our dorms had a few 8 footers in the commons outside the cafeteria. The tables were an Olhausen and a Valley, both in horehounds shape albeit free to play on for students.

Those commons are where I developed my first taste, and subsequent infatuation for billiards into something that's become my dearest hobby.

TL;DR >> not allowed on aunts table in youth, rekindled in bar on vacation, developed love for cuesports living on campus
 
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