Sometimes life takes you down roads and you have no idea how you got there. Sometimes a road diverges and you aren't even aware you are taking a branch that is making a lifelong impact or commitment.
I think that happens for a lot of pool players. Many come from dysfunctional families and the only place where they could escape or had a sense of family was the poolroom. Pool does not differentiate in color, wealth, or age...only skill.
Mike escaped school because back then, there were no advanced classes for gifted students. He was clearly bored. His stepfather beat him mercilessly. He went to the bowling alley his parents owned and saw that a guy there was making fistfuls of cash on the backroom pool tables and decided he could do that too. He also lost all of his allowance playing a 3 cushion player. The money came easily and pretty soon he could beat those guys and went on the road with one of them.
Ironically, I think Mike chose a pool career, because it afforded him so much easy cash in the beginning. Much more than his peers. He went out and bought his brothers go-carts and his sisters clothes...all as a teenager. Did he make the right choice, given the climate of pool now? Maybe not, but I think it would be a shame to not have shared his talent for pool with the west coast.
You have to wonder if pros picked pool or if pool picked them. Some are gifted with the propensity for playing pool. Blessed with attributes like good eyesight, hand-eye coordination, spatial reasoning and perception, strategic planning, and a great stroke, many players fall into the sport because they got good early at a sport they were drawn to.
Russ, you say that if you practiced 12 hours a day, you could become a champion, but I don't think that holds true for everyone. I don't think I could become a virtuoso at the violin or piano, no matter how long I practiced. Sometimes career choices are just not so cut and dried.
I remember back after high school, 3 of us friends decided we wanted to get into Radiology. I had no burning desire to do that, but I knew I wanted to go to college. I really wanted to be a teacher but there was a hiring freeze and my ability to become hired after school scared me away.
I knew I did not want to be a nurse because they had to do enemas, and instead became a Radiologic Technologist and had to do barium enemas anyway! I did not really decide that I was going to become an RT, it happened because my friends decided to do it too. One is now a medical transcriptionist working from home and one is high up in Digital Film at 3M.
Back then, careers like lawyers and doctors for women were unheard of and I was certainly not a maverick. Held down by my parent's discouraging belief system that I could never do anything more than be a nurse or teacher, I never tried.
However, I was one of the few technologists trained to do lymphangiograms, a procedure that involved me prepping, injecting anesthetic between the toes, and then making incisions in the top of people's feet and injecting dye into their lymphatic vessels...about the size of a strand of hair. One miss and you blew that vessel! The doctor that trained me made 1"-2" incisions and used blue dye to localize the lymphatic vessels to differentiate them from blood vessels. It became a challenge to me to do it better, for my patient's sake, and I got so I could make 1/4" incisions and locate the lymphatics by sight and feel alone...without the blue dye. So I think I could have gone on and become a good surgeon. By the time I believed that though, it was too late to go back to medical school.
I went into Sales, and then Sales management and now work out of my home doing Sales. So yeah, even though I 'decided' I wanted to go to college and worked my way through on Work-Study and had loans to pay my own way, I know I played pool a good majority of the time after my first year of college. If I had known there was some kind of 'career' in it, I probably would have quit college then and there, lol.
