The former Secretary of State's pool game

[Derek]

Not very good, I would guess. Here's a blurb that came out of our local paper:

A chilly Boulder night couldn't keep former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright from getting a warm reception Wednesday.

"It's good to be back in Colorado, even in a snowstorm!" Albright told a crowd of 1,800 people at the Coors Event Center on the University of Colorado campus. Albright is a former Colorado resident, whose family arrived in the state in 1948 after fleeing Czechoslovakia.

"A lot of people think of diplomacy as a chess game," Albright said in a press conference before her speech. "It's more like pool. You hope the ball goes where you want and it can hit a lot of other balls along the way."

Yikes. Hopefully she bets some so she can be taken for easy money. Maybe she was thinking of lawn bowling or croquet.

 

[arsenius]

Uggh, I just threw up a little bit...

Just kidding;-)

Now, how many posts can we get along the lines of "Well, that's just what the typical American thinks of this game, and it's why there's no money in it..." I'm guessing 9, but I think I may have just tainted the odds.;-)

Thanks for the quote Derek, it was interesting!

 

[MikeJanis]

On a side note:
http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/floor3/game-room.htm

The White House Museum

Eight Ball, Corner Pocket, Mr. President

The third floor is also home to the game room, where a pool table resides at least since the George HW Bush era. Today's Map Room was once home to a White House pool table; and even as early as John Quincy Adams, a pool table has inhabited today's Vermeil Room or some other corner of the mansion from time to time. The Nixon White House had a pool table, although it's not clear which room it was in.

At least through the Kennedy era, this room was a bedroom. The Game Room has its own lavatory.

According to Brunswick:

Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a self-confessed ?billiards addict.? He described the game as a ?health inspiring, scientific game, lending recreation to the otherwise fatigued mind.? It is quite possible that critical issues of national interest?slavery, international relations and the civil war?were handled over the slate of a Brunswick table.

Teddy Roosevelt?our Secretary of the Navy and the hero of San Juan Hill, the President of the United States and, later, a distinguished wild game hunter?owned a Brunswick table.

There was a Brunswick table in the White House during the administrations of several recent presidents. And when President Eisenhower established Camp David, it was furnished with not one, but four Brunswick tables. Every President since Eisenhower?Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Clinton?has used those tables. A stream of notable visitors, including Winston Churchill, Nikita Krushchev, Charles de Gaulle, Anwar Sadat and King Hussein, all knew those tables. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were known to be pretty good players.




Game Room around 1985, looking northeast (Reagan Library)

 

[Scott Lee]

Interesting to note that Brunswick did not mention that the FIRST table in the White House was installed by President Grant (years after Lincoln's term in office). It was purchased with taxpayer funds for a couple of hundred dollars, and caused such a ruckus that, iirc, Grant repaid the gov't out of his pocket. This info is in the Billiards Encyclopedia.

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com