In my case, when I was small, no one would ever let me play pool.
My first conscious memory of the game is when I was five or six growing up in the Mission District of San Francisco. When visiting our neighbors I was frequently relegated to sitting under their pool table and watching the balls fly down its wooden chutes to the ball return. When I asked to play I was told, "No, Luis, you'll rip the cloth."
Later, at a Boy's Club of America in the Mission, it was the older kids who monopolized the tables with their endless games of 8ball. When I asked to play, I was pushed aside and told, "No, you're too small. Besides, you'll rip the cloth."
Even as an adolescent, when one of the neighborhood kids spent his summer vacation in his dad's wood working shop building his own tiny six foot table in his garage, the older guys made it their exclusive domain. My attempts to partake continued in their futility -- I might as well have bee asking to play pool on the Shroud of Turin -- "Nah, you might rip the cloth."
It wasn't until one weekend afternoon that I accompanied a grammar school friend and his mom and dad to Redwood Bowl just south of San Francisco and, while his parents bowled, Jim and I banged them around on a snooker table. And that was it. Shortly thereafter we both bought pool cues and began to regularly play at The Billiard Palacade at Geneva and Mission. But unlike Jim, I became obsessed. The game, with the table's perfect dimensions, six pockets, and beautiful, multi-colored spheres got me where I lived and, other than a multi-year hiatus from the game while I worked at The Pentagon, I have been hitting them.
Lou Figueroa
