The Mosconi Cup
I would like to offer some thoughts as to why the United States is not winning Mosconi Cups. There are many reasons of course and for one person to pretend to have all the answers would be presumptuous. Of course we can win again but how?
First of all, it must be acknowledged that the coach is hugely important. Do the names Lombardi, Hayes, Wooden and Gable come to mind? John Wooden won TEN NCAA titles and the year after his retirement, the championship team he left behind did not even make it to the final four the next year. THAT says something about the importance of the coach if anything does. There is something ineffable about what a coach does but whatever it is, it is important. Some coaches are former stars like Lenny Wilkens and some, like Dick Motta hardly played the game at all but each brought something special to their coaching. Coaches are sort of like conductors. Once I asked a famous musician who he would rather hear: a stellar orchestra such as the New York Phil conducted by a mediocre conductor or a mediocre orchestra such as the Tacoma Symphony conducted by a great conductor and he said unhesitatingly, “Tacoma”. A great conductor can bring things out in each musician to make a beautiful, unified sound. Same with a great athletic coach, they get us to do things we might not have known we were capable of.
Pool is unique among games/sports in that there are very few coaches. Pool players, certainly not any professionals I have hear about, do not play for coaches like almost all other athletes including professional tennis players. Venus Williams and Rafael Nadal have coaches. EVERY elite tennis player has a coach. Once Tiger Woods spent an entire year with a coach to develop a new stroke. American pool players almost seem to eschew the notion of coaching. I heard that one year Thorsten spent an entire month, eight hours a day, training with his coach in Germany. There is an excellent article in the New Yorker (October 3, 2011) about a Yale Medical School surgeon who, at the peak of his career, got the idea that he might be able to get even better so he asked his old surgery professor to come in the operating room and observe and then discuss what could be done better. I recommended this article to several pool players and they were not interested. There isn’t an athlete or pool player on the planet who cannot get better; but often we need guidance. Supposedly, Jerry Breiseth helps out a few pros now and then but I have never heard of a regular coach such as the tennis players have.
Needless to say, a player has to have absolute confidence in his/her coach. So I was surprised that Mark Wilson was not able to pull off a MC comeback. He is an excellent player himself and has been coaching now for several years at LIndenwood University so I fully expected that he, of all people, would be able to establish rapport and build a strong team. So what happened? Sometimes it is just a matter of chemistry and no amount of skill on either part, player or coach, can result in victory. Plain old luck cannot be discounted altogether. And of course Jupiter has to be lined up with Saturn just right to make the balls drop in the right holes. I think Corey would be an outstanding coach.
Then, I would posit that the game is played quite differently in the UK and Europe than in the US. Here it is ALL about gambling. I do not know of a single top American player who does not gamble. The European player aspires to win tournaments while the American player aspires to win tens of thousands of dollars “on the road”. I remember when Justin Bergman came through town about ten years ago after winning the world junior championship and he had some fake name but Vince Frayne figured that out but Justin went on to beat Todd Marsh in a race to nine for five hundred dollars. It seems de rigueure for American players to “hit the road” once they have proven their mettle in their local milieu.
And of course there is Billy Thorpe coming up here a couple times to play John Schmitt for ten grand last year. The mythologies built around most of the great old timers are rife with accounts of guns, drugs, alcohol, fights and narrow escapes through small bathroom windows as these guys traveled around the country robbing local yokels out of hard-earned cash, hence the title of one of the most widely read pool books: The Bank Shot And Other Great Robberies, “robbery” being the key word. These are not men searching for nirvana or some transcendental peace of mind. I recommend watching Jimmy Mataya on YouTube instructing us on “how to hustle pool”. Every young pool player in America wants to be like the young “Pretty Boy Floyd”. C.J. Wiley even had a series of total bulshit stories in various pool magazines about all his “narrow escapes” after fleecing truck drivers, military personnel, construction workers and anybody foolish and inebriated enough to play for a wad of Franklins. Gambling is in the DNA of American pool players and the discussion will probably go on forever whether this is a good thing or not.
The thing about gambling is that it engenders a lot of things that have almost nothing to do with tournament play. Take sharking for example; AKA, cheating. Once when I was driving Steve “The Lizzard” Smith back to his lugubrious “weekly rates” motel room he said, “I can show you a thousand ways to shark a guy”. Why would I want to know how to cheat? Maybe that is why he never got past high school. All the little bulshit stuff that goes into setting up a money game has nothing to do with tournament play. This is a unique feature of pool and I don’t think it is unrelated to Mosconi Cup preparation. Weight, for example. The ONLY reason there is such a thing as “weight” in pool is for the gambling. I am not a money player so I could care less about “weight”, but all these top American players know the odds of 9-6 versus 10-7 or 12-6 or whatever in One Pocket. . .and then they get to London and suddenly there is no bulshit, no weight, no sharking; just pool.
Secondly, I think pool is learned/taught differently in the United States than abroad which has something to do with the Mosconi Cup. Here young men learn to play through a combination of auto didacticism and haphazard instruction; that is to say, we do not have ANY semblance of a national project in teaching/learning pool. Boys and girls have to learn to play pretty much on their own. As a country we care about as much for pool as we do for curling or cock fighting. Once in awhile a kid gets interested in learning how to play pool and perhaps he is lucky to have a friend with a table, or as we see in many of our better players like young Landon Shuffett, Shane and Max Eberle, they had family support from an early age. I do not pretend to know the pool histories of most players but I don’t think I am too far off the mark when I aver that many guys just learned on their own (I know for a fact that the best player where I live says he had no mentoring whatsoever).
So then, even if a kid does have talent where is he going to find an alcohol-free room where he can play all day? There was a VERY promising kid named Chuck Holyoke in Seattle around the 05’s, taught largely by Dan Fitzsimons, but when the only serious “dry” room, Dr. Cues, closed, the kid suddenly had no legal place to play so he took up golf. Did anybody care? One day, when Chuckie was about 14, I saw him take five hundred dollars off Jason Klatt. This was a kid who was clearly destined to be a top player and not a single organization stepped up to nurture him. In wrestling, table tennis or judo a kid with that much talent would have ended up at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs.
For some reason, American pool and beer are like peanut butter and jelly. I bought my table from a guy who said he gave up drinking so he “didn’t need his pool table any more”. I say what? If there is money involved I LOVE it when a guy says, “I always play better after a few beers”. Hey, buy this man another beer! Come on; would we really like it if our brain surgeon said, “I always operate better after a few beers”? Good pool is as delicate and demanding of ALL our faculties as brain surgery. A cursory glance at the advertisements in any pool magazine will attest to the symbiotic link between pool and pilsner in America. I have never heard of such a link between beer and any other sport. This is not good for pool my friends. As an aside, I did try going to wrestling practice once in college drunk and it was not good. I might have a wee bit “looser” but certainly not smarter or stronger. Anybody who thinks they play pool better after a few beers needs to read about the effects of alcohol on various parts of the brain. It makes about as much sense as smoking cigarettes for a long distance runner. If alcohol really made one play better then I would expect every brain surgeon, diamond cutter and Rolex maker to have a flask of Jack Daniels in his back pocket. I do not mean to totally discount the phenomenon that SOME people SEEM to play better pool after a few beers but I would strenuously argue that that is a psychological issue.
Many of our top players, if not all of them, play a lot of pool for a lot of money. Practically every week we read about So-And-So playing So-And-So for ten, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars! I happen to know two very fine pool players, guys who have gambled for many, many tens of thousands of dollars. Both of them are unfamiliar with the word “fun”. They never just play for fun. Playing pool “is work”. These are players just one rung below national caliber players, that is to say, on any given day they would beat anybody if their game was “on” and John’s, Shane’s, Justin’s or Thorsten’s game was off. I am talking about guys who play One Pocket for five and ten thousand dollars on a regular basis. I showed one of these guys my money belt (an actual belt that holds up my pants that I have been wearing for ten years) which holds about thirty hundreds folded lengthwise and he laughed and said, “Its not big enough”.
I know another top player who has given up pool and sells cars now. I said, “Well, don’t you ever want to play just for fun, you know, a few games of eight ball with friends”? He said, absolutely not. Pool is work, not fun. He sounded like Don Schollander after wining a bunch of Olympic gold medals; never wanted to see a swimming pool again.
I think that playing pool at this level is comparable to being able to play all the Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms piano sonatas in front of appreciative audiences in large metropolitan areas. Most top violinists and pianists drop out of normal society at about the same age as top pool players. The big difference is that the violinist who starts thinking about Carnegie Hall when he is fourteen, has already been taking lessons for ten years and goes into a small soundproof room and plays arpeggios, scales, solfeggio’s and works on various pieces of classical music all by himself while guided by a professional teacher over-seeing the progress week by week.
The 14 year old pool prodigy, on the other hand, usually takes up residence in a local pool room where, if he is lucky, he gets mentored by a few of the local top players, who very likely are not necessarily good teachers and do not necessarily give good advice. Then, very likely he is told, as I was told by my first pool instructor, “You have to play for money Arthur if you want to be any good”. (What if the eight-year-old wrestler or pianist was told that he must only play for money?) How did these older good players learn? The same way, but worse because until the last twenty years pool knowledge was as secret as the combination to the safes at Los Alamos. It is much better today but still there is some of that old depression-era guarded attitude about technique and strategy.
The music teacher on the other hand, has learned through a disciplined system of pedagogy passed on generation after generation; this guy studied with So-and-so who studied with So-and-so who studied with Brahms etc. Perhaps this is an analogy, American pool is like jazz and European pool is like classical music. It is only very recently that jazz has become a staple in university music programs. In the past one just found an instrument, hung out with some musicians in New Orleans or Harlem and hopefully, learned some technique. Classical music allows for very little improvisation and mischief and the early years are seldom described as fun. So it is ironic that in pool the early years are fun and later on it is work but in classical music the early years are work and the later years are fun.
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