Dear Cocobolo Cowboy,
Many, many, many years ago there was a straight pool tournament on black-and-white television. It had several of the legends in it, such as Irving Crane. The tournament went on for several weeks, and it was won by a then-unknown player named Frank McGowan. In the interview at the end, the commentator asked the severe underdog McGowan how surprised he was that he had beaten all these great players. McGowan calmly replied, “I don’t get in any pool tournaments I don’t expect to win.” I have remembered that all my life, and frequently violated it. But as I have gotten older, I have shied away from being “dead money.” I do not think it is fun getting steamrollered by a far superior player, and I do not believe it helps your game. In fact, most sports psychologists will tell you to follow Frank McGowan’s philosophy.
That being said, pool is still the only sport in which a rank amateur can buy his way into a major tournament. Could you imagine being able to play in the upcoming British Open golf tournament by just showing up at the course and paying a modest entry fee. My non-pool-playing friends are always shocked when I mention to them that I am going to play in a tournament in Vegas. They say, “You must be really good.” My answer, completely truthful, is, “They don’t ask you if you can play. They only ask if you have three hundred dollars.”
Some of my friends find some sort of “souvenir value” in having played a famous player. I do not. I love having seen the best pool players of three generations having played, but I never wanted to win the local tournament and get to play Mosconi in the exhibition. I knew what was going to happen in the exhibition. I was much happier watching from afar, like standing on a cliff and watching a ship sink in a distant storm. I had no desire to be in the undertow.
I think you would be better off by far to take the entry money, the “dead money,” that you would invest in playing in a tournament you can’t win and doing one of two things with it. Either find some player who is only one or two notches superior to you and seeing if he would play you some games cheap, or investing the money in instruction from a qualified instructor. When I played golf, I played seldom but I occasionally took a lesson. My friends would buy new clubs and hit buckets of balls. I improved more than they did by going to a course pro and having him help me on the practise tee occasionally. For as little as I played, I played fairly well, on a social level. If there is a pool teaching pro who can do for you what that public golf course pro did for me in golf, run to him and give him that dead money.
