New story about Loree Jon
- Thread starter gerryf
- Start date
Good on her.
Yow!
I used to see Loree around LA in the early 90s - I was impressed, but didn't know then how impressed.
pj
chgo
I booked Loree Jon on the TV show That's Incredible when she was only 15. She made this amazing balancing act shot using three cues and the cue ball. It blew everybody away! I wonder if that program is on Youtube or has just disappeared.
I read she sold her Gus in Japan ( I think ) because she received an insane offer .
I really wish the women still had an ongoing tour. It was a joy watching the great ones on ESPN.
They were paying 10K for a Gus in the 90's. I sold mine too.
From Sports Illustrated:, Feb 1985
vault.si.com
LOREE JON OGONOWSKI HAS BEEN A POOL SHARK EVER SINCE AGE FOUR
LOREE JON OGONOWSKI HAS BEEN A POOL SHARK EVER SINCE AGE FOUR
Loree Jon Ogonowski scans a pool table, its 15 numbered balls scattered about, and visualizes a boldly colored constellation. Then, stroking the cue ball, she
vault.si.com
From the New York Times, Aug 1995
One of the most successful professional pool players in the world carefully lined up a shot. Loree Jon Jones placed her cue in the bridge of her left hand, her thumb raised intriguingly.
The 29-year-old champ's light-brown hair fell across her face and her blue-green eyes narrowed as she eased into striking position.
Even now, barefoot, wearing a short print dress and playing a casual game of 9-ball on the green-felt table in the basement of the home she shares here with her husband, Sammy, and their children, Jonathan, 3, and Jessica, 4 months, Jones scrunched low behind the cue ball, like a lioness about to spring on an unsuspecting prey.
"My eyebrows go down, my lower lip kind of curls and I get this glare in my eyes," was how Jones described herself when about to strike the cue ball. "It's bulletproof concentration," George Fels, the columnist for Billiards Digest, had once perceived it.
At this point of the game in the basement, the score was tied, 1-1, after Jones, the slender, 5-foot-7-inch champion, broke the rack, knocked in one ball, and then improbably scratched. Her opponent, a visitor for the day, had followed by sinking the 2 ball, and then, not improbably, missing the next.
"Game's over," Sammy said nearby, Jessica in his arms.
It seemed he had barely spoken before the seven numbered balls remaining on the table suddenly disappeared. Three-ball corner pocket. Bang. Four-ball side pocket. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang!
This is exactly what the rest of the field in the Brunswick New York Classic, the seventh stop on the Women's Professional Billiard Association's 1995 tour, will be confronting this weekend. Play began Friday and concludes Sunday at the Amsterdam Billiard Club on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.
All the best players on the tour will be there, including Vivian Villarreal (called the Texas Tornado), Robin Bell, Jeanette Lee and Ewa Mataya-Laurance, ranked from first to fourth, respectively, going into this year, with Jones fifth.
Jones has won four of the five women's tour events she has entered so far this year and is the leader in earnings. But she is ranked fifth because the 12-month rankings include tournaments from the previous year.
And 1994 was forgettable, unlike 1993, when she was spectacular. Jones had gone undefeated in five of six tournaments in 1993, setting a W.P.B.A. yearly purse record of $62,300 (she is only about $10,000 short of that for this year) and winning the national and the world championships back-to-back.
She had been a standout player for years, winning her first world championship when she was 15, and pushing Willie Mosconi out of the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest billiards player to ever win a world championship. He was 17.
Loree Jon had been a child prodigy, picking up the game at 4 from her pool-loving father, John Ognowski, in Garwood, N.J. By 7 she was playing trick shots in a charity exhibition in New York City with the legendary Cue Ball Kelly. She won her first national title at 11 and has won about 60 championships in her career.
So in 1994, the year after her greatest year, she went into a strange slump. She won nothing.
"And I cried," said Jones. "I admit it. I cry. I know some people say, 'Be tough. Don't cry.' But I bawl my eyes out. Then I get mad. Trust me."
By the end of the 1994 tour, however, she didn't know what to make of the sudden change in her fortunes. "I came home," Jones said, "and thought, maybe God's humbling me. If He is, I'm definitely humbled. I said, 'You've humbled me. I'm so humbled, You can't imagine.' "
So, every night last December and January, after putting Jonathan to bed, Loree Jon, then pregnant with Jessica, and Sammy, a former ranked men's pro tour player and now her coach, went to the basement and she practiced until her hands and back ached.
Sammy had given up his pro career because pool was "in Loree's blood" and not necessarily in his. He was more of what is called a road player, one who played big-stakes matches against various comers in billiards halls. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it was all, he said, "easy come, easy go." No road player saved for the future, and the life that he and Loree Jon, then his fiancee, lived in the mid-80's was a life of two weeks of partying in Las Vegas, Nev., and expensive dinners and, well, it wasn't conducive to the family life they both wanted.
And now they have it. Loree Jon, sponsored by Meucci cue sticks and Olhausen billiards table manufacturers, and Sammy, who is a distributor for Meucci, are moving into a bigger house. Others on the tour say they appear "still like honeymooners."
And, yes, she still cries, but now more for the emotional joy of victory. After rallying to defeat Villarreal in the finals of her first tournament this year, she ran to hug Sammy, hugged her parents, "and I cried and cried and cried," she said.
"But I let everything out. And then I was O.K."
BILLIARDS; A Top Player Survives That Sinking Feeling
One of the most successful professional pool players in the world carefully lined up a shot. Loree Jon Jones placed her cue in the bridge of her left hand, her thumb raised intriguingly.
The 29-year-old champ's light-brown hair fell across her face and her blue-green eyes narrowed as she eased into striking position.
Even now, barefoot, wearing a short print dress and playing a casual game of 9-ball on the green-felt table in the basement of the home she shares here with her husband, Sammy, and their children, Jonathan, 3, and Jessica, 4 months, Jones scrunched low behind the cue ball, like a lioness about to spring on an unsuspecting prey.
"My eyebrows go down, my lower lip kind of curls and I get this glare in my eyes," was how Jones described herself when about to strike the cue ball. "It's bulletproof concentration," George Fels, the columnist for Billiards Digest, had once perceived it.
At this point of the game in the basement, the score was tied, 1-1, after Jones, the slender, 5-foot-7-inch champion, broke the rack, knocked in one ball, and then improbably scratched. Her opponent, a visitor for the day, had followed by sinking the 2 ball, and then, not improbably, missing the next.
"Game's over," Sammy said nearby, Jessica in his arms.
It seemed he had barely spoken before the seven numbered balls remaining on the table suddenly disappeared. Three-ball corner pocket. Bang. Four-ball side pocket. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang!
This is exactly what the rest of the field in the Brunswick New York Classic, the seventh stop on the Women's Professional Billiard Association's 1995 tour, will be confronting this weekend. Play began Friday and concludes Sunday at the Amsterdam Billiard Club on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan.
All the best players on the tour will be there, including Vivian Villarreal (called the Texas Tornado), Robin Bell, Jeanette Lee and Ewa Mataya-Laurance, ranked from first to fourth, respectively, going into this year, with Jones fifth.
Jones has won four of the five women's tour events she has entered so far this year and is the leader in earnings. But she is ranked fifth because the 12-month rankings include tournaments from the previous year.
And 1994 was forgettable, unlike 1993, when she was spectacular. Jones had gone undefeated in five of six tournaments in 1993, setting a W.P.B.A. yearly purse record of $62,300 (she is only about $10,000 short of that for this year) and winning the national and the world championships back-to-back.
She had been a standout player for years, winning her first world championship when she was 15, and pushing Willie Mosconi out of the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest billiards player to ever win a world championship. He was 17.
Loree Jon had been a child prodigy, picking up the game at 4 from her pool-loving father, John Ognowski, in Garwood, N.J. By 7 she was playing trick shots in a charity exhibition in New York City with the legendary Cue Ball Kelly. She won her first national title at 11 and has won about 60 championships in her career.
So in 1994, the year after her greatest year, she went into a strange slump. She won nothing.
"And I cried," said Jones. "I admit it. I cry. I know some people say, 'Be tough. Don't cry.' But I bawl my eyes out. Then I get mad. Trust me."
By the end of the 1994 tour, however, she didn't know what to make of the sudden change in her fortunes. "I came home," Jones said, "and thought, maybe God's humbling me. If He is, I'm definitely humbled. I said, 'You've humbled me. I'm so humbled, You can't imagine.' "
So, every night last December and January, after putting Jonathan to bed, Loree Jon, then pregnant with Jessica, and Sammy, a former ranked men's pro tour player and now her coach, went to the basement and she practiced until her hands and back ached.
Sammy had given up his pro career because pool was "in Loree's blood" and not necessarily in his. He was more of what is called a road player, one who played big-stakes matches against various comers in billiards halls. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it was all, he said, "easy come, easy go." No road player saved for the future, and the life that he and Loree Jon, then his fiancee, lived in the mid-80's was a life of two weeks of partying in Las Vegas, Nev., and expensive dinners and, well, it wasn't conducive to the family life they both wanted.
And now they have it. Loree Jon, sponsored by Meucci cue sticks and Olhausen billiards table manufacturers, and Sammy, who is a distributor for Meucci, are moving into a bigger house. Others on the tour say they appear "still like honeymooners."
And, yes, she still cries, but now more for the emotional joy of victory. After rallying to defeat Villarreal in the finals of her first tournament this year, she ran to hug Sammy, hugged her parents, "and I cried and cried and cried," she said.
"But I let everything out. And then I was O.K."
Another story from the New York Times, March 1987
www.nytimes.com
NEW JERSEY JOURNAL; Pool Champion
NEW JERSEY JOURNAL; Pool Champion (Published 1987)
LEAD: When she was 15 years old, Loree Jon Ogonowski won the women's straight pool title in a world championship tournament held in New York City. Last year, at 21, she won it again, in Philadelphia, and also the Motor City Open in Lovonia, Mich.
I first saw Loree Jon play when she was just thirteen, first at her dad's poolroom in Northern New Jersey and also at the PPPA World Straight Pool Championships. I aslo saw her in many WPBA events. I can't say enough good things about Loree Jon. A BCA Hall of Famer, an ambassador for pool, and I'm pleased to say, a friend.
On a side note, Loree Jon has seemed to defy the aging process. She barely looks older than she did twenty years ago, and might, perhaps, make a few dollars sharing her beauty secrets!
On a side note, Loree Jon has seemed to defy the aging process. She barely looks older than she did twenty years ago, and might, perhaps, make a few dollars sharing her beauty secrets!