Tag Archives: cue ball

Cue Ball

Cue ball: (n) the ball a player strikes with the cue, as distinguished from the other balls on the table.

I insisted it was not fair.

Every time I played pool with my friends—Eight Ball—I did a great job clearing the balls on the table.

That is, until I got down to the cue ball and the eight ball.

Then it was time to put the eight ball away, naming the pocket where I planned to place it, thus closing the game with a slam-dunk.

Here was my problem.

Every time I got to that stage, I either hit the eight ball and it would go into a pocket I did not name, or more often, the cue ball followed the eight ball into the pocket, thus making me a loser.

I argued.

After all, I completed 90% of the task of winning the game. How could I lose the 90% over a 10% mistake?

It was unrighteous.

It was a plot.

It was un-American.

My friends didn’t care. “The rules say…”

That’s how they began every discussion, declaring me a loser.

I got to the point that I hated the cue ball. I feared it. Once I began fearing it, I was afraid to strike it with my stick.

Of course, if you can’t strike the cue ball with your stick, you won’t have a very good break at the beginning of the game. So I stopped wanting to have the first break—which certainly robbed me of an advantage. So I sat around, hoping someone would miss a shot since I had passed on breaking the balls.

All at once, a game I had been very efficient at playing I now despised.

All because of the cue ball.

That damned cue ball that followed the eight ball into the pocket.

Or the eight ball which refused to go to where I declared its home to be.

At no time did it occur to me that I could practice and become better. Why would you want to practice something that was unfair?

So I pouted.

After a while, when I went with my friends to play pool, I just sat and watched.

Soon I wouldn’t go along if they were going to play pool.

They, on the other hand, could never guarantee that pool wouldn’t crop up in the evening’s activities. So I started staying home.

I soon became a recluse. Nobody wanted to be around me.

Since I wasn’t going to be around people, I stopped bathing, didn’t shave and only occasionally brushed my teeth. My breath was repugnant, even to my own mouth.

Pretty soon people were praying for me instead of visiting me.

I went into a mental hospital and was diagnosed with a personality disorder.

I had to stay in my room, though, because the recreational area had a pool table and it sent me into a fit of rage.

I tried to overdose on aspirin but failed miserably.

You see? This is what can happen when you are viciously attacked by a cue ball.

Epilogue

By the way, everything I shared after the word “un-American” was completely made up—seeking your sympathy.

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

 

Billiards

Billiards:(n) a game usually for two people, played on a billiard table

Dictionary B

I grew up in a small village that was close enough to a nearby larger town to make all of the young folks feel out-of-step and inadequate.

We had to go to the bigger city to be entertained or to absorb any available culture that might accidentally trip through mid-state.

So when we drove our cars in the direction of the nearby metropolis, we felt a combination of empowerment mingled with humiliation. We certainly were convinced that everyone in the larger burg was aware that we came from smaller digs and therefore lacked the social graces to be able to hold our own with the natives.

But we went anyway. It was the nearest bowling alley.

Bowling was very important. It gave you a safe, cheap way to go on a date, where conversation could be channeled into laughter over the lack of ability to roll a ball down an alley.

Now, in the back of this bowling alley was a small pool hall. It was a new addition, and some of the young folk from our town were a little bit afraid of going to play this game of billiards because it was associated with lower-class or “hoodlum elements.”

So I had great trepidation the first time I went into the billiard section of the bowling alley, picked up a stick and tried to hit the cue ball.

Yet I quickly became addicted.

Matter of fact, almost every weekend I went to play billiards, which we called pool, with my friends, until we thought we had become so good that we believed we could actually compete with other “stickers.” (That’s what we called them, even though I’m sure no one else did.)

One night five guys from the big town came in, saw us playing, and challenged us to a tournament, the winner to take ten dollars.

We were gambling. We felt so grown-up. And ten dollars was all any of us would have for the next two weeks.

But we were confident. After all, we had already played two months worth of Saturday nights.

We lost.

Miserably, horribly and ferociously, as balls banged into each other, going in all directions, causing our heads to spin, eventually exposing our choke factor.

We left.

We were ten dollars poorer and more certain than ever before that “small-town Johnnies” need to be careful when playing with big-town bullies.

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