When Hal lived in Garden grove, Calif he had business cards with the name Colliding Spheres. He would show up occasionally at Hard Times and I knew him from his stopping in at Yankee Doodles in Long Beach during the weekly Saturday tournament run by my friend Jack Ide for over 22 years. I spent 1 1/2 hrs with Hal 2 weeks in a row. This was probably early 90's. Hal was not teaching any version of CTE at the time although he did allude to "something" he was working on. Hal was teaching what I, for lack of another term, call fractional aiming. Edge to edge and increments across the OB. People can deny its effectiveness all they want but once he made an adjustment to my stance I seldom missed for the next 3+ months, Then I had to go to Germany for over a month during which time I was unable to play pool at all. When I came back I had lost something of what he had taught me and he had moved to Burlingame in No. Calif. I was counting on getting together with him again as each year he made a trip across country and So. Calif was a stop on his way home. However, on his last cross country trip his legs gave out on him and he was unable to drive or ever again make that annual pilgrimage. We still kept in occasional contact by phone until he moved back to Pa.
Once this CTE started I was over at my cue makers (JoeyInCali) house and we decided to call Hal. Joey's table was in his dining room so when we were talking to Hal and he was trying to explain this new system the echo of the balls really bothered
him and it was simply not possible to really learn anything.
Three tings about Hal everyone should know:
# 1 He was an intelligent "Gentleman."
# He never charged me or anyone I knew for any of his extensive knowledge,
# Yes--He was a ball potting machine--pockets covered or uncovered. Not as
sure about his constant shape,
PS: JoeyInCali is also Joey Bautista and I sure hope this is not the Joey Bautista you
are hammering on because that would be 150% wrong on your part as I know his respect for the game and his overall integrity.
Sorry for length but Hal was an especially good human being and goodness knows I wish he was still around to make that simple adjustment that would put me back into the special place Hal helped me to find.
Thanks for this Gary. I never met Hal but several close friends of mine have and they couldn't stop talking about him and his wife and what great people they were.