What was the moment that got you involved in pool?

Rio19

Rio19

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
Hello Friends.

I was shooting around last night with friends, and after being on the table for an hour or so a young man asked how came to be a good pool player. So I thought it would be cool to hear some of the more seasoned players story of there introduction to the game.
Here is my story....

My earliest memory was when I was about 12 one weekend sitting at home trying to find something to watch. I came across a Jennette Lee and Alison Fisher match. Now I did not watch the match because I was interested in the game but because I was a preteen (most likely horney ) and Jennette Lee looked really really good in that one strap black shirt and tight leather pants. And the Dutchess had more elegance to her beauty. Either way my eyes were glued.

As the match went on and the competive nature in which these two giants wet back and forth at one another my interest swiched. It was no longerabout the.
women on the T.V. but trying to understand how they seemed to command those balls to bend to their will. After that match was over they had segment in which Jennette explained the break.
I ran out of the house and went to the only place I knew had a pool table. It was a simple building were the older men in the neighborhood went to gamble playing cards or just to hangout( literally 4 walls with one pool table).

I remember racking the balls just like I saw my wife in my mind do and break just as she said and I was hooked.

So thats my story I would love to read how others got into the game....
 
I banged the balls around at the teen club, but I joined the service and it was there I watched a guy named Henry Fortier run a rotation rack and thought to myself I want to learn to shoot pool like that.--- Smitty
 
My dad had won a local pool tournament when I was a kid. The trophy always sat near the fireplace. It was about 4 foot tall and was a beautiful carved wood trophy, not that cheap junk you see today. It had the little 8ball figures and the same little gold guy playing on a table you see on the plastic trophys today. He used to play with a McDermott D series cue and ended up selling it for $100 around the mid 90's. He bought me a little table to play on as a child, but I didn't start playing seriously until I got into college. The university pool hall had nine 8ft Brunswick drop pocket tables. I went out and bought a McDermott (all I knew of, from my Dad) and began my journey.

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When I got to college, Nick Varner put on a show and ran 100 and out against the best guy at The U. I have been hooked ever since.
 
He had a pool table in your university dorm, we started to play day and night, I went and bought myself first cue- cuetec for 50$ which broke over my drink friend's knee in 2 months or so. After that I decided to try snooker and started buying cues every months to try the all haha. Get bank into pool after a year of playing just snooker. Now I play both and still buy and sell cues to try the all and find that special one
 
Near death experience got me into pool. I've always loved extreme sports; learning a new trick wakeboarding I had a bad fall and spent couple of days in a coma in the hospital. After I was released from the hospital the Doctors told me that I should pick up a less high impact sport as a hobby because if I sustained similar injuries again I would probably die. As a joke some friends took me to a pool hall where I picked up a cue for the first time. This was almost 3 years ago and The rest is history, the pool hall manager then asked me to join APA league, which I did right then and there, I fell in love with the game almost instantly and I've played pool almost every day ever since.
 
When I was a kid we would go to a rec center after school. It basically consisted of a basketball court and a game room with ping pong, carom, and pool. I remember the line that formed to play on the pool table and the winner kept the table. I also remember being in the second grade and being able to beat and earn the respect of the sixth graders. Good times.
 
a dime to play

Rio19 said:
Hello Friends.

I was shooting around last night with friends, and after being on the table for an hour or so a young man asked how came to be a good pool player. So I thought it would be cool to hear some of the more seasoned players story of there introduction to the game.
Here is my story....

My earliest memory was when I was about 12 one weekend sitting at home trying to find something to watch. I came across a Jennette Lee and Alison Fisher match. Now I did not watch the match because I was interested in the game but because I was a preteen (most likely horney ) and Jennette Lee looked really really good in that one strap black shirt and tight leather pants. And the Dutchess had more elegance to her beauty. Either way my eyes were glued.

As the match went on and the competive nature in which these two giants wet back and forth at one another my interest swiched. It was no longerabout the.
women on the T.V. but trying to understand how they seemed to command those balls to bend to their will. After that match was over they had segment in which Jennette explained the break.
I ran out of the house and went to the only place I knew had a pool table. It was a simple building were the older men in the neighborhood went to gamble playing cards or just to hangout( literally 4 walls with one pool table).

I remember racking the balls just like I saw my wife in my mind do and break just as she said and I was hooked.

So thats my story I would love to read how others got into the game....
Click to expand...

When my father gave me a dime to put into a bumper pool table in 1955...
 
Two years ago, at age 58, I happened to walk by the billiard room at our local rec center. A couple of my fishing buddies were in the room playing pool so I went in to chat. They put a cue in my hand and it's barely left it since.

It took me a year to run a 9-ball rack and I've only had a few since then. But I really enjoy the challenge and what I consider the "beauty of the game."
 
I think I was around ten years old (I'm 62 now). One of my friends had an old 9-ft Brunswick table in the basement and we would play on it all the time. When we got to the point where we could make three shots in a row, and could also stop the cue ball, we thought we were real players. Then, when the movie The Hustler came out, I really got hooked!

Roger
 
My Father took me to an Aunt's basement, when I was around 10,and he let us knock balls around on their table. When I got to junior high I started playing in the local bowling alley on a little 6 footer and liked it. In the middle of my freshmen year of high school we moved to the country, 4 miles from the new town. I walked or rode my bike to town to play at the pizza shop if I had change in my pocket. When I turned 18 I got my license and started playing at a club/bar with real competition and that got me recruited in the APA for the next 12 years.
 
Sears honeycomb-bed table.

Sears how-to-play brochure that came with the table had about 5 or 6 shots shown. One was when the object ball was on the rail and it said, "Hit the ball and rail at the same time."

I did and....it worked!!!! happy happy joy joy...

That was 50 years ago or so. My game might last longer than Sears will.


Jeff Livingston
 
When I learned that my stepdad played pool with Willie Mosconi, Joe Balsis, Ralph Greenleaf and some other Brunswick touring pros back in the 30's.

The the two of us bumped into Mosconi at Ames while the Hustler was being filmed. We played at Ames most Saturday nights so we knew the times the film was being shot at the pool hall.

The encounter was just amazing. I had no idea my stepdad was a pool hustler during the great depression......he played mostly in lower Manhattan's Bowery district or in Brooklyn where we lived. I knew he could shoot great pool but I had no idea how good he was in his younger days.

It was as if two old "paisonos" from the old neighborhood met after decades and were trying to catch up on years worth of history in ten minutes conversation........Willie told me as we parted that my stepdad was one of the best hustlers he ever saw. He said to me "Your dad could steal the money out of the other guy's wallet gambling on 9 ball while it was still in his trousers' back pocket."

That very moment got me hooked on pool for life and I've been serious about the game for the past 52 years.
 
My dad's version of quality father & son time was takings to bars.

He would set me up with several dollars in quarters and iced down cokes.

He sat at the bar, drank beer upon beer or red draw after red draw, and flirted with anything of the female persuasion.

It was some years later when I was 13 that I stopped going into the bars with him and just say in the truck.

I remember one summer when it was a very hot day in my small town in Oklahoma that I was just sitting in the heat with the sun beating down in me while I was perspiring a lake of sweat that I walked into the bar and told him that I was going to walk around on Main Street and cool off.

Just around the corner from the bar....lo and behold, there was a pool hall. Six 9' gold crowns and two 5 x 10 American snooker tables.

The old timers sat in the back and played dominoes (probably Moon) and gambled.

Paid by the rack a whopping sum of $.15 a rack on the nine footers and $.25 a rack on the snooker tables.
 
Learning to make long straight-ins on my dads home table. Then learning really basic position/english from Jeanette Lee's video clips in Virtual Pool 3.
 
I've played on and off my entire life. When I was a kid, my father was in the Air Force. We'd go to various officers clubs and he'd watch me play and laugh at me. All the places we traveled to had a game room for the kids. I've always loved pool. I remember getting quarters to play and anxiously awaiting my turn to play. In my 20's I hung out at a pool hall and played every night for years. I've never been very good but I always enjoyed the game. I now have my own table in my house and play everyday. I'm still not that good, but I still really enjoy the game.
 
To be a decent player...

I don't remember how I first started playing pool, but I remember the exact moment I decided to become serious about it.

I was playing in a doubles tournament on bar boxes in a little dive called "The Texas Trap". This was a small neighborhood hangout on Peavy road in Dallas that had a strong biker contingent as well. At the time, I played pool semi-regularly, just banging around with friends. This was my first foray into tournament play and between my nervousness and lack of skill I didn't play very well. My partner was fairly good and carried us through to the final, where I missed a critical shot (a fairly easy one) that cost us the championship. I thought finishing second wasn't too bad, but I was mortified that I cost us the win. After the tournament, a railbird was talking to my partner and said, "if only you had a decent partner, you would have won easily". Up to that moment, I had felt a little ashamed of my performance. After I heard that, I was pissed. I decided, right then and there, that no one was going to be able to say that about me again.

On my next free day, I went to the book store and bought two books on pool, one by Steve Mizerak, the other by Willie Mosconi. I absorbed those books from cover to cover and began spending every free moment I had practicing at a place in the old Lochwood Mall called Carousel, an arcade with a separate billiard room.

At some point, I'm not sure exactly when, during those countless hours spent in Carousel, pool became a labor of love and a passion that burns to this day. And all because I wanted to prove to some stranger that I was a decent player.
 
Irving Crane

My mother always had a table in her house when she was growing up although food was a little less certain. She shot a few set ups with Willie Mosconi during an demonstration he was doing in a room in Massapequa Park.

I played a lot in college at NYU's old Loeb Student Center, but the real "hook" moment was seeing Irving Crane in the Hotel Commodore do an impossible kill on an inherited key ball to set up a great break shot and a run out. That seven ball trickling down the rail and the White Rabbit settling perfectly into place was irresistible beauty.
 
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