Who is the person or persons that have had the most influence in your Pool Player life? What did this person do that made a difference?
Wow this thread has gone 6 pages now so I'm going to add mine.
Lots of people with a few main players. The first would Alfred "Smitty" Smith. He found me in 1983 and carried me around a few places to show me I wasn't all that.
Norm Pruitt who asked me to play pulling me out of Pool Retirement.
Third it was Frank Tullos who showed me a dimension of Pool I hadn't considered that caused me to want to look into it, explain it fully writing books on it. From this came the explanation of Side Spin allowances, which I think is pretty cool because I've got the only one like it in the world that I know of. Frank would play banks with me and occasionally I would hit a zone where I didnt miss much because he pushed me to. I didn't know I had that in me but he brought it out.
Third and most important was my good friend Anthony Arney. He and I became sort of road partners and shared a lot of long sets of every game there was including One Pocket. Anthony is a good player and will ring game with anyone alive and playing him made me strive harder than I've ever done so before. We fought and argued like two brothers and had verbal arguments in pool rooms from Pennsylvania New Jersey and down the east coast at various times and even got barred from places together and didn't speak for several months at least at one time, but we always made up eventually. At a point we finally grew up but man talk about some hot competition! Playing him stretched my abilities as a player and as a human being. Some good memories.
Wow this thread has gone 6 pages now so I'm going to add mine.
Lots of people with a few main players. The first would Alfred "Smitty" Smith. He found me in 1983 and carried me around a few places to show me I wasn't all that.
Norm Pruitt who asked me to play pulling me out of Pool Retirement.
Third it was Frank Tullos who showed me a dimension of Pool I hadn't considered that caused me to want to look into it, explain it fully writing books on it. From this came the explanation of Side Spin allowances, which I think is pretty cool because I've got the only one like it in the world that I know of. Frank would play banks with me and occasionally I would hit a zone where I didnt miss much because he pushed me to. I didn't know I had that in me but he brought it out.
Third and most important was my good friend Anthony Arney. He and I became sort of road partners and shared a lot of long sets of every game there was including One Pocket. Anthony is a good player and will ring game with anyone alive and playing him made me strive harder than I've ever done so before. We fought and argued like two brothers and had verbal arguments in pool rooms from Pennsylvania New Jersey and down the east coast at various times and even got barred from places together and didn't speak for several months at least at one time, but we always made up eventually. At a point we finally grew up but man talk about some hot competition! Playing him stretched my abilities as a player and as a human being. Some good memories.
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