Hu, in your perfect score night, when you took yourself away between rounds, was there any other pep-talk or planning, or was it just the quiet and visualization, then back to shooting in the way you normally do?
The book is "Shooting From Within" by J. Michael Plaxco. The duck might be just the ticket for marking a pocket on APA night though!
No pep talk, I knew the stages were within my limitations. I just went down there and worked on visualization. At first it was pretty crude, I just tried to see the stage. Then I kept expanding that. See it, feel the recoil, hear the shots, smell the primer and powder, I made the visualization as real as possible. Of course you never miss visualizing either so I shot each stage perfectly dozens of times!
The longest I dropped into the zone shooting pool was one weird night. I was a long haired bearded stranger but my partner was known and willing to fight or cut as required. Bobby isn't big but I have seen him step in between guys with knives out and open in the same place! The place was a country honky-tonk that had a band on the weekends and really thumped with guys and gals coming out of the piney woods from many a mile around. On a weeknight there were two females in the place and the pool table, an old nine foot junker, was the only thing going. We went inside in bright sunlight. To stir up action if needed Bobby went in and then I came in five minutes or so behind.
Bobby was on the table at five a game, as good as it usually got in these places and most of these guys were working for forty to sixty a week, some as little as twenty and a room on a farm. I wandered over to offer the ladies a drink and await happenings. "Little Miller please." Cool, cheap dates! After about an hour I recalled that Bobby didn't always remember the split and I put my fifty cents up, quarter stacked on quarter as was the norm. I beat Bobby and he sat with the ladies. Eventually they moved to the rail along with everyone in the place including the bartender.
The guys were pissed to lose to a stranger but by now I was tossing the occasional five to Bobby to buy the four of us a round of beer so it was obvious we were together. A stranger in there cleaning house would have probably meant a fight at least, very possibly a cutting, but Bobby was no stranger and held them in check! There might have been fifteen or twenty people with money on the table at most but after a few hours they knew there were only maybe three or four guys that stood a chance of beating me, the others just wanted to be the one on the table when I pocketed an eight ball early or scratched on the eight. Some were putting up five or ten dollars in challenges at a time and at the busiest not counting pocket irons there were quarters the length of one long rail and three-quarters of the way up the other. Not counting the waxing and waning as the night went on that was about 120 challenges on the table at one time. I was out of work and each of those challenges represented five bucks, the slaughter was on!
Most of these guys were awful and I had the few that could run out on that old bucket pocketed table spotted. They got a different game than the others although I often ran out because it was just so easy playing eight ball on that table. Eventually things started slowing down with the final players breaking off to go straight to work the next morning. Bobby and I escorted the ladies to my truck in bright sunlight and the last few guys in the place that had quit on the pool table or went broke followed us all out to my truck. They weren't happy but nobody wanted to be the one to start the show.
Funny thing, although I had played all night and had won over eight hundred dollars five dollars at a time without a loss, it felt like I had played for maybe three hours at most! I was good for another twelve or so. With other people doing all of the racking I had sank deep into the zone and was just breaking and running balls, resting a little sometimes when a real banger was on the table. Might have drank a dozen cans of beer too, I was just drinking to alloy thirst!
This place was only about an hour from my home but it was in a generally dry direction so I seldom went that way. I tried it about a month later. Won two or three games and everybody took their money off the table. Tried again in about another month, I put my money up and everyone else took their money down! I had killed the cow that first night when I could have milked it for months or years. A dummy move on my part but I had my net assets of forty to sixty dollars in my pocket when I walked in that place and the twenty or more challenges on the table when I started play looked big. When challenges went past the side pocket on one side of the table I cranked things up to just get the money as fast as I could. Instead of scaring off the bangers they just kept getting madder and madder and putting up more money.
Very difficult to maintain the zone playing pool because of all of the starting and stopping as the balls have to be racked. Other than that night I think 20-30 minutes might have been the maximum I ever stayed in the zone shooting pool. That was a magic night for a lot of reasons, never to be repeated!
Edit: One thing about visualization, it tends to run through your mind very fast. While it didn't seem to hurt to have it a little faster than real time, having the visualization run close to the same time as real time is better than flying through it as happened when I didn't deliberately slow it down.
Hu
