A funny, no real damage!
Living in San Pedro, Belize almost 30 years ago...
Local dive pool hall, two guys at the next table yelling at each other. One guy leaning against the table feels around behind his back until he finds a ball - ruh roh...
Whack on the temple! - other guy drops like a rock - discussion over. Everybody goes back to playing (except the guy on the floor). Never learned how bad he was hurt.
pj
chgo
I was playing pool with someone I knew but not well, a friend of my brother I had very recently lost. It was that time of year, days started very cold, got hot by midafternoon or a little later. I had started off with a lot of layers. Knowing a lot was going on top of it when I discovered the t-shirt that I grabbed out of a drawer was very small I went on and wore it, didn't usually get down past the work shirt worn above it anyway.
Playing pool in a crowded more pub type setting than pool hall I had gotten hot and was down to the t-shirt and blue jeans. For some reason Mike thought it would be funny to dump baby powder down my butt when I bent over to break.
These aren't the kind of liberties taken with me. Mike was a big ol' boy, six five and an oilfield roughneck. It took me a split second to realize what had happened then I picked up the cue ball and came around a hundred and eighty degrees with a blow planned that would have done major damage at the least. At the last moment I realized I didn't really want to kill my brother's friend and with it being too late to stop the punch I redirected things and threw the cue ball down into the mouth of the large beer mug Mike was holding after a wind up that would have made a major league pitcher proud.
The mug was almost full and the cue ball fit almost jam tight into one of those mugs when I checked later. The beer served as a hydraulic fluid and the mug shattered. The handle was still in Mike's hand, there wasn't another piece as big as a dime. We took a few swings at each other but bare handed with no real damage done. Not the kind of punch I usually threw but another round house right caught the end of his nose. Another half inch closer and his nose would have been sticking out of his ear!
Mike and I became friends and working partners on several of my day jobs. I also used him as weight sometimes playing pool. It was a lot easier to focus on pool when I had a bunch of unhappy strangers around me when Mike was watching my back. We played partners sometimes too. Mike was just banger level but I could usually carry him on the table with no problem, the partners game was normally each take a turn until you miss, not scotch doubles unless it was Jack and Jill. Funny, it was a long time before I knew that scotch doubles wasn't another name for Jack and Jill. When that was the game and I challenged a table when I was alone I just grabbed any girl out of the crowd as my partner.
Mike died young. I was living out of town when it happened and didn't hear about it for about a year and third hand. Never knew the cause of his death.
Hu
