Donny opened up after a minute or so of us waiting, and even though it was a larger group than he was used to, he didn’t seem overly bothered about that either way. The club hadn’t been doing well recently so I’m sure he just made the call that they could do with the money; needs must and all that. Even if by the look of them three of the present entrants at least, would almost certainly have turned the place over in a heartbeat if the opportunity to do so presented itself. He pushed the door out so to let us in, scraping it noisily and gratingly against the concrete step below as he forced it out. We traipsed in in single file then with me going first, Paudge and his crew after that and then last but not least my three lads bringing up the rear. We climbed the stairs up to the pool tables then, with Donny following on up behind. In addition to his usual doorman/henchman duties, he was moonlighting tonight as a cashier also. The girl who usually looked after the hatch had gone off to the Coombe earlier that day for a pregnancy test, and even though she said that she'd be back by no later than 6pm, she hadn't as yet materialised. A positive reading perhaps? Or negative even, depending on how you looked at it.
“Nothing to do with fucking me,” Donny grunted, after we jokingly inquired as to his own personal input into the origin of the impending partus.
“She’s in fuckin’ tatters!” he added, leaving us in no doubt as to his overall feelings on the matter of past or future carnal liaison with the aforementioned teller.
By which I think he meant that he wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire. I’d seen her there before myself as it goes, and it’s certainly true to say that she didn’t have much going for her by way of saving graces. Someone got up on her though so there you go. There’s hope for us all right? She was absent today anyway as I said, so I slid the fiver deposit through the hatch to Donny and he handed the tray of balls out. With a half spent chalk balanced on top and two cues following out tip first afterwards. I grabbed the tray and the cues as soon as they were halfway through, and pulled them out the rest of the way. Donny pushed a switch down then from a panel on the wall next to the cash register, after which the bulbs in the shade over Table 1 flickered on slowly one by one, until the entirety of the pool table and surrounding area was illuminated. I wandered over and set the tray and cues down on the baize before taking my jacket off slowly and throwing it over a stool next to the back wall beyond the table.
The atmosphere was quiet and tense, with none of my guys or opponents’ guys even, looking overly keen to start their own games on any of the other tables; even though there were five or six available at least of the ten or so situated throughout the rest of the hall. The main attraction was too much of a pull to take them away apparently, so they all settled down in and around our table close, ensuring that their vantage points would be adequate enough to see the action properly once it got underway.
Donny exited the booth and glanced over in my direction. And followed this up with what I think was a nod of reassurance. Which was as much as to say ‘I know you’re in some kind of trouble here pal but don’t worry; I’ll weigh in when the time comes if required’. A good lad Donny.
Paudge was standing to the side and whistling away to himself nonchalantly. With one of his feet stomped on a footstool and an elbow resting on a thigh, he flicked a random coin cheekily up and down into the air. With the swagger I suppose you might say, of someone who believes that they’ve already won. He’d be in for a rude awakening though soon enough. Ballinasloe Fats was going down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TC3kqFUmqQ
OK so you probably know this already but I’ll mention it you anyway. The key to being a good pool player (besides jaw-droppingly outstanding flair and talent of course) is excruciatingly fastidious attention to detail. So in the same way as God given ability is crucial, so too is ensuring that everything you do has the potential to give you some or any form of advantage. Particularly if for some inexplicable reason your luck just isn’t in on a given day. Pool above all is about millimetres and fractions you see, so your preparation and approach must take into account every key and critical detail. When things are tight and opponents evenly matched to the point of being inseparable, keen and painstaking sedulousness will more often than not represent that imperceptible difference between ultimate glorification and dishonourable loss.
Let’s go through the nuances of what’s right and wrong then shall we?
To begin with it’s imperative that you use a cue that isn’t warped. To ascertain whether it is or isn’t, you must first lay it on its side on the table and roll it then back and forth with the palm of your hand. To see how it reacts basically with the surface. If it bobbles all over the place it’s a dud, so replace it back on the rack as quickly as you can and choose another. Once you’ve found one that runs smoothly and by and large remains stuck to the baize below as it rolls, then this is the one for you. Ensure that the tip is undamaged also, as this could be the difference between a perfectly executed shot or embarrassing miscue. It may be difficult of course to unearth a suitable implement of purpose in a public pool hall, so you’re usually best to just go with one that’s closest to what I’ve described above. It’s obviously not an ideal starting point of course, but if your decision to play was impromptu (as indeed it was on this occasion) you’re probably unlikely to have your own personal cue with you on the day. You may therefore not feel as relaxed or comfortable as you usually do, but don’t forget that it’s exactly the same for both of you. If you choose a reasonable enough cue from what’s there however, you can be rest assured that you’ve at least given yourself the best opportunity available under the circumstances; whether your opponent had been bothered to do likewise or not. Don’t worry if people are shaking their heads at your meticulousness as you go about your business; it’s you don’t forget who’ll have the last laugh in the end. In the Hideout the cues they handed out were usually decent enough, but if they weren’t to your liking for whatever reason, there were generally one or two other good ones to be found on the racks attached to the walls throughout the hall.
The next thing you need to consider is the break off. If it’s at all possible do try to get to the table before our opponent does, so that you can ensure that the balls are appropriately racked and sequentially exact. Even more importantly in fact, is the precise moment that you take the triangle away from the balls. You must ensure that that every one of them, fifteen in total, are touching off each other directly and are as tightly packed as physically possible. You may lose the toss for the break off also of course, but if you’re fortunate and you don’t, you’ll know that at the very least if it is your turn to give them a smash and you connect with them well enough, there’s a pretty good chance that one, two, or even more of them might go in off the break, leaving you with an excellent chance to put yourself in an imposing position for the rest of the frame. Who knows, you might even finish them off if the balls end up in promising enough positions once they’ve settled. The same might apply if your opponent wins the toss also of course, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes. Every now and again in life you just have to apply yourself correctly and then when an opportunity presents itself, you’ll be far better positioned to avail of your advantage if you’ve prepared yourself correctly.
That’s exactly what I was endeavouring to do so now, and it was the work of no more than a nanosecond for me to remove the balls from the tray and position them correctly in the triangle on the table. Paudge’s goons’ interest had waned now also, and they’d wandered off to an area to our right’ where they were deriving great amusement from a picture of cartoon dogs playing billiards http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Hustler-Posters_i416678_.htm?aid=236523&LinkTypeID=2&PosterTypeID=1&DestType=7. Horses for courses I suppose, but for the life of me I couldn't see the humour.
Paudge was indifference itself. I sauntered over to him as confidently as I could, and even though I was feeling reasonably bullish about my overall game and chances, his aggressive demeanour still had the propensity to make me feel uneasy. Which was probably related to the fact that he was six foot four and three foot wide, and in case I haven’t mentioned it before, built not unlike a brick shit fucking house! His overall disposition also (as I’m sure you’ve ascertained already from my portrayal of him to date) was one that would go a long way towards disinclining anyone in his general acquaintance to bestow upon him ever, the moniker of ‘gentle giant’. He was clearly a psychopath, which when considered next to his previously described physical attributes, made for a considerably trying time for anyone unfortunate enough to ever end up on the wrong side of his temper.
“So Paudge,” I said, handing him a cue (not the good one) “are we ready to rock and roll or what?”
“We feckin are boy, we feckin’ are!” he said, accepting my offer of the cue.
And then very regrettably I really must say, following that up with,
“And if ye tink I’m playin’ wit’ thet pieca shite stick ye jest hended me, ye can get fecked as well, ye snotty nosed lettle bollix ye!”
The fact that he called the cue a ‘stick’ was a reasonably positive thing I suppose. The optimistic feeling of positivity that this linguistic aberration instilled within me initially however, was I’m sorry to say, very short lived. He placed the cue I’d handed to him back on a rack and grabbed another four or so at least from there, before bringing them back to the table and checking their rolls and tips even more fastidiously than I myself had done moments earlier.
‘Shit,’ I mused worriedly. ‘Maybe this fucker can play?’
Not only that, he came over to where the balls were racked and had a quick looksee to see if they were all touching tightly together as of course they should be. Fuck it anyway.
“Heads or harps!” he grunted.
He flipped a coin into the air with his left thumb and caught it then in his right hand, before slapping it down again then on the back of his meat cleaver left. He kept his right in this same resting position to cover the coin before I made my choice.
“Harps,” I answered tentatively, after which he removed his covering hand to reveal the upturned coin. A smug smirk crept over his features gradually, as he realised that the Gods had opted for him on this occasion.
“Ha!” he shouted triumphantly, raising his cue into the air as if he’d won the contest already. “The start of yer feckin’ feckin' downfall, ye jackeen feck!”
I think it’s fair to say that a not inconsiderable degree of swagger was emanating from his general persona at this specific juncture. And I'm not gonna lie to you either; I was a good deal more concerned than I had been before. Maybe he was half decent?
But pool is my game. I’m good at it. I resolved then in a moment of surety, that I'd just have to trust in my own ability and fight through these limp wristed qualms like a man. Deep breaths and effortlessly executed shot making were the order of the day here, and I’d done it thousands of times before as well so why not now? There was no reason to believe that today would be any different. I knew the Hideout tables well enough also, so local knowledge would almost certainly be to my advantage.
For example on the table we were playing on now. Table 1 that is. There was absolutely no way that the right-hand pocket at the baulk end of the table would ever take a ball in at pace. If that is, it was ever going down along the right-hand rail towards it quickly. They just never went in, something about the way it was manufactured I don’t know; but if you wanted to take one on down that cushion, it had to be cozied on down there nice and slow, otherwise there was just no way it was going in, not in a million fucking years! If you needed to get out of there for another ball also, and had to play it hard and fast with left-hand side for the shot to come off, well you just had to forget about it and look at other options. It just wasn’t dropping, not at pace, no way José. Simple as that.
The Hideout tables were in decent enough shape and of a more European style than American, which I liked. Those blue-baized tables with the big pockets don’t do it for me at all; call me a maverick but if your shots are missing by more than an inch then they don’t really deserve to go in now do they? The tables in the Hideout were bog standard six by three green-baized Riley’s, and in relatively good condition also as I said. The owners maintained them on a reasonably regular basis as well, with new cloths going on to all of them every three or four months or so and the slates changed once a year perhaps too. They weren’t to a totally professional standard of course, but it wasn’t amateur hour either. The slates remained true for most of the time, and with the exception of the odd imperfection here and there, balls would more often than not stay on a steady and straight course as soon as they were sent in their way.
So on to the break-off then.
Paudge steadied himself over the cue ball and took aim, whilst I myself stood a few paces further back and hoped for the best. His stance looked decent enough to be honest, and besides the fact that he was almost half the size of the table, his overall gait appeared to be a text book version of the way it should be. He brought the cue back and forth on an accurate and true axis and after three or four swings, drew it back for a fifth time before hesitating for just a millisecond and then letting rip.
And what a break! The cue ball hit the lead ball with such ferocity that it jumped up into the air fully six inches, scattering red and yellow balls to all corners of the table at a truly unfathomable rate. It was difficult to ascertain where everything had gone initially, but at least three or four balls had almost certainly been sunk. I wandered around to the side of the table to see what had dropped but before I even got there Paudge had already thrown his cue down, with the remainder of the stationery balls strewn here there and everywhere as a result of the action. ‘Foul shot?’ I desiderated with pitiable and unfounded optimism.
“Rack ‘em up boy!” Paudge said with calculated venom, so even before I glanced in the direction of the glass slot where you could see what balls had been dropped from the break, I knew in my heart of hearts already, that one of them was of course the black.
And so it was. Two reds and a yellow and nestling in between them as contemptuous as you like, that treacherous orb of obsidian hue. Sitting there smugly, laughing at me even. A figure of eight eyeing me through the slot like a jauntily placed numerical hat perched on a sneering confidence trickster’s crown. And a rare occurrence also indeed as you probably know if you've ever played the game. Every now and again (maybe one in a thousand perhaps) a player will pot the black directly off the break. It’s difficult to do of course, which is mainly down to the fact that when the balls are racked, the black ball is always placed at the centre of the pack; so is surrounded therefore by a host of other balls that are statistically and mathematically a lot more likely to disappear before it. With the power and speed that Paudge had smacked the cue ball into the pack though, any one of the balls in the formation could quite plausibly have dropped just as easily as the next one. Including the black. There was a sharp intake of breath around the table as onlookers slowly realised what had just occurred. I came to a stark realisation then also, that there was a very serious possibility that my finances might very soon be a good deal less robust than they presently were. To the tune of approximately four hundred of the best as it goes. A sobering and chastening realisation.
I tried to make light of my deteriorating situation so, as one does, but as I gathered the balls out of the pockets and pulled them in towards the triangle with my forearms and hands, I entered into what can at best be described as inane and drivelling small talk.
“Good man, Paudge. Good man yourself,” I said, dropping the balls into the triangle as I went.
“So anyway yeah, what’s the plan for later, more gargle? Might give it a miss meself to be honest, it’s been a long night and sure anyways, these suits are fuckin’ ridiculous, wha'? Although now that I come to think of it we wouldn’t look that out of place on ‘Pot Black’ would we, ha ha http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZe0nl5cr5w. Jaysus that’s gas, I never thought of that until I thought of it! I might even put the old dickey bow on again actually, just to look the part! What do you think? I have it here in me pocket. You don’t think so? OK, fair enough, maybe you’re right. So anyway, where are yiz from yourselves? The bog… sorry, somewhere down the country, is it? I used to love goin’ down the country meself when I was a kid, oh yeah, absolutely loved it. Loved the smells actually, the wide open spaces; the morning dew dropping silently off a near expired autumnal leaf and a stooped farmer leading a lame old nag down a deserted laneway. Clip clopping its way ploddingly along, with steam rising from the old mare’s nostrils as they transport their sods of turf to the early morning mart in the neighbouring townland. Actually, talking of horses Paudge, what kind is the one…”
“RACK DE FECKIN’ BALLS, YE JACKEEN PRICK!”
OK, so it would seem that Paudge was not in the mood for pleasantries. Which as an approach to the contest in question, was totally and unequivocally on the money. I needed to be taking a leaf out that book myself. Focus and discipline were required here, so fuck farmyard scenes and dew on leaves - it was time to get serious! This culchie fucker was one up on me already in a ‘best of five’ match, so I needed moving on things quick smart. He may not have realised it himself at the time, but his bolshie attitude actually galvanised my overall determination, and inspired me to dispense with the bullshit and buckle down to the job at hand. I settled the balls correctly into place so and lifted the triangle. Throwing it nonchalantly under the table I raised my forefinger and index finger both, and pointed them fixedly towards my eyes. After which I glared pointedly across in his general direction and pointed the same two fingers at him. And then back to the table and then to my eyes again and then back to him again. As if to say, ‘I have my eyes on you now prick, so go to the table and break off before I fucking break you! Bastard!’
I didn’t use those exact words per se of course; I'm not a total idiot! But the implication was there alright, ohhh yes. He knew what I meant. Nothin’ surer.
He ignored me completely of course and shuffled his lumbering frame from his stool to the table. His break off was as spectacular as before but the black thankfully remained above ground on this occasion. A red and a yellow did drop however so he had a choice of either for his next colour. Electing to take a red on down that dodgy right-hand rail I told you about before near the baulk end, I could see by his set-up that he was planning to give it a lash.
‘Alright then,’ I thought to myself confidently. ‘My chance at last!’
I knew that the ball would juggle in the jaws if he gave it any kind of serious welly, so I edged closer to the table in preparation for my long overdue appearance. He pulled his cue back and let rip into the cue ball then, with said ball hitting the cushion and object ball at exactly the same time (which as I’m sure you know, is the only way you’ll ever get to pot any ball that’s stuck limpet-like to the side of a cushion. A fraction out and it just isn’t going in). As I watched the red ball travel down the rail towards the pocket, it came to my mind that I’d probably never seen a ball struck more cleanly or with better precision before in the short life I'd lived up until that point. It was a thing of beauty to be honest, with my only saving grace at this point being that dodgy pocket I've referred to before. To which the red was now travelling towards. So as I said; this pocket didn’t ever take balls in at pace. Never had done, never would do. Not in a million fucking years.
Until now of course. Fuck me it flew in there like a fucking bullet! Never even touched the sides! Bloody hell! Under ordinary circumstances of course I’d have been fairly pissed off, but being an ardent admirer, actually no, a lover even I would say of the game, I couldn’t help but appreciate and admire the beauty and perfection of the shot’s execution. Perhaps providence herself stepped in so, as reward for my laudatory and benign views on the matter.
Just as I was making my way back to my seat I noticed the cue ball out of the corner of my eye careening its way back across the table, before slamming eventually, forcibly, into the opposite pocket at the same end. Paudge had apparently used way too much right-hand topspin side, but could still consider himself very unlucky at the same time with the way the cue ball had avoided what must easily have been at least three or four other balls as it cut a curved path directly through these to the pocket on the other side of the table. Thinking back on it now, you’d probably find it difficult enough to trace the cue ball’s eventual path if you were to attempt to do it yourself with just the tip of your finger. He must have missed some of the balls by literally no more than a millimetre.
But there you go. Thems are the breaks. I was in now at last, with two of the best at my disposal. Freakshow was ready to rumble!
Right then, so here’s where my legendary fastidiousness came into its’ own. First off (and if you’re a pool player of note, this probably won't seem anal to you at all) it is of vital importance that you chalk your cue before every shot; and not just the tip but the sides as well, especially if you’re deliberating over a shot that requires any kind of spin to be applied. You must ensure that your stance is as perfect as it can be also, that is that your trailing leg is as straight as a pole as you’re bent over to the shot, and absolutely parallel to the upright legs of the table. The other leg that's closer to the table should be bent in such as a way as feels comfortable to you as you draw your cue back and forth, and you must ensure also that your head stays down for the entire duration of the shot, with your chin resting ideally on the shaft of the cue as it’s pulled back and forth on its meticulously ‘pendulum-like’ frontwards and backwards plane. You should only lift your head when all of the balls have come to a stop after the shot has been executed, with the object ball ideally now, resting in the belly of the table’s innermost workings. You may stand up then and review the terrain and regard how well your positional play might have worked out for you. And chalk your cue again of course. All local distractions must be blotted out of your mind and you must settle into a semi trance-like state. The cue, the table, the balls and you must become one. In short, and much as it pains me to say it; you kind of have to become Steve Davis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgnAIsPY8hA. If you want to fulfil all of the above however, but add flair and panache to the occasion also, then that’s OK too. But only under certain circumstances. The first being when you’re so far ahead that it will probably make no difference at all to the eventual outcome or result. And the second being when you’re so far behind and clutching at straws, that you’ll do literally anything to get yourself back into the game.
I reviewed what was in front of me so and ascertained that things looked decent enough. It wasn’t perfect of course and a few balls would probably have to be dislodged from difficult spots here and there. All in all though, I reckoned that I cou