The Beginning

Hi, welcome to my inaugural post. The primary purpose of this blog is to records random observations I have while making my way through life primarily as a pool player. I will from time to time make comments about current events and other things that have captured my interest. It's my blog, I'll write what ever I want OK?

Note to self: perhaps it's time to start carrying around my little digital camera to help with my observations.

While I don't often admit it, I run a pool league. Well, I'm the president, I didn't ask for the title, it was just hung around my neck. We have a few other directors that assist in the operation of the league. There's nothing like running this sort of organization to find out what people are really like. Enough... on to this weeks observations....(oh yeah, I'm going to try posting on twice a week / weekly basis)

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I play pool. Ask one of my friends what I do in my spare time and I have confidence each and everyone of them will say "Oh, the Slough Shark, he plays pool".

Last night I was at the pool hall with my team playing a match, we have an odd number of teams in our division so instead of teams getting a bye and having to sit out one week we've arranged the schedule so that one team in the division will play two teams in a night. The rest of the teams will only have to play one team. It turned out that last night we played the team that had to play two matches last night, this is the first time this season that this has occurred so it was a bit of a gong show. In the end everybody played everybody they were supposed too and it all worked out. I found it amusing that some players on the other team that was playing the team we were playing were in quite a hurry to get things started as they figured this would be a long night. This was not to be the case, we had arranged for 4 tables to be used for this double match and things went along quite smoothly.

Anyways, I played and won my first game, then went and sat down with my buddies to eat a very fine buffalo chicken wrap prepared for me by the chef at the Cue Club. Things are moving along quite quickly and everybody seemed to be in a good mood until I heard my buddy whom I'm going to call from now on The Official Score Keeper state " you guys better pick it up, we're getting smoked". The Official Score keeper is thus named as he is very enthusiastic when it comes to keeping score. So enthusiastic he won't let the team captain or myself anywhere near the score sheet so as we won't F_ck it up.

This came as quite a surprise to me as I had won my game and had assumed everybody else on my team was doing all right. I decided that this was a good time to get up and take a look at the score sheet. I discovered much to my dismay that I was the only one that had won my game in the first round. YUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I knew that we were going to have to play our best tonight in order to gain some round points. The team with the most round points at the end of the season is the winner.

I said to anybody that was in the immediate vicinity "Hey, don't worry about this round, we can always win the rest of them". Ha ha, that's a good one. It was after discovering our dismal score that I took a good look at the team we were playing. We've played this team before and it's always been challenging, but I'd say we've been pretty evenly matched in the past. Not anymore!!! They had picked up a couple of new players and one of their younger players has improved quite dramatically. Of the new players they had picked up I recognized one, while not being the best in the city, he certainly could be numbered in the top 5%. I took a few minutes after that to watch the other new member of their team.

I've never been the type of person to judge a person by his cue, any D player can go out and drop a couple of grand on a new cue, that won't make them a better player. The first thing I noticed about this player though was that he did indeed carry a high end cue. The problem was, he also knew how to use it and was using it effectively against my team mates.

OK, a little background. At the start of this season we (the directors) had decided that there was a Grande Canyon sized gulf between the level of players in our league. Because of this we had decided that we would run 2 divisions, one labelled the Rec Division, and the other labelled the Open division. My team plays in the open division. Technically we have one "open" player whom I'll call The Tiger on our roster, but because of personality issues I extremely doubt he'll be playing for our team again. I'm not sure why, but The Tiger had expected my team to pick up his registration and weekly dues. Ok, the first week he played we knew he was a bit short on cash so we as a team figured we'd put the money up. The problem started when The Tiger scored an ERO (an 8 ball run out, meaning he broke and ran all 8 balls). My team has a policy that when a player gets an ERO the remaining team members all pay him two dollars. This is just our way of saying good job!!!

So, The Tiger gets an ERO and therefore receives $8 (which just happens to be the amount of our weekly dues). Our captain asks him for the dues. The Tiger then states he doesn't have it. WTF!!!!! Thus The Tiger is person nongrata.

Back to yesterday. The captain of the other team comes over and talks with me. Him and I have known each other for a long time and are friendly towards each other. He states that his new player whom I'll call The Mini Tiger wants his team to pick up his dues and membership fees. I ask him why The Mini Tiger would be so brazen. He states that The Mini Tiger was talking to The Tiger and The Tiger told him that his team was paying his way.

Wow!!!!! This left me speechless. I told my friend that this was not the case and that The Tiger would no longer be playing with us as he didn't share the same idea of what a team was the rest of us had.

Anyways, the night progressed, we got our asses handed too us by our new and improved opponents but we ate some good food and had a good time.

That my friends is what it's all about.

I suppose you can expect my next post on Wednesday unless something happens between now and then. Cheers and good health.

The Slough Shark