I really miss playing pool. They gradually took out all the "real" pool tables/places in our city. I learned to play at the Y when I was 13-18. This was a YMCA that had rooms for single men (usually old guys down on their luck). They had a game room with some monster ancient Brunswick Balke Collender 5' x 10' billiard tables. Those old guys could hardly walk but boy did I get schooled on how to shoot and not be a fuck up.
Yeah, I understand. I live in a reasonably sized city and there are only 4 pool halls that have legit pool tables and a bunch of bars with a couple quarter boxes, maybe. The 4 pool halls have league night every single night, they have maybe 4 hours a day that every table isn't taken by league. The city lost 2 smaller, but less populated pool halls to Covid, the one I went to is now a gym.
My mother was a higher-up manager at a retirement facility when I was exactly my daughter's age. They had a small rec room with a nice pool table for the residents, it was a really well kept table. The old guys took it upon themselves to educate the next generation of hustler, so when my mom took me to work on weekends they kidnapped me and made me run billiards drills.
That only lasted a few years, then I played at the Boys Club in town, then after that the local Teen Nightclub in Dallas. Little did I know that club was actually a religious organization's front to recruit yungin's to their mega-church. Makes me a little gleeful that I was hustling pool as a 14 and 15 year old at the local neo-evangelical hunting grounds and making pretty good bank.
In high school we moved out to the mid-west and the one thing the town did have that I liked was a legit old-school pool hall. When we moved there I walked in and there was a sign on the door that said "Age 16+ only, with parent approval." I was 15, but walked in with my own cue (thanks Christian kids.) The owner looked me over and let me have a provisional day, if I behaved I could stay. I ended up taking lessons from the top player in town for next to nothing because she thought I was a funny, if a bit weird, kid. I played there until I was 25. After ramming around college, mostly playing pool for 6 years, my future wife and I left immediately after graduation. Since then we've maybe been to a pool hall 20-25ish total times in the 21 intervening years. When we left college I flat out said that we would not live in a town that didn't have at least one real pool hall, career, life, kid, all took away from ever keeping going like we did in college. A few years ago I found that my wife's cue developed a really bad bend in the shaft, the tip of my cue is shot as is the winding and it's not worth repairing but it'll make a good break cue for a year or two while I run the drills the old guys taught me with my daughter in the 4 daytime hours before the leagues take over the local pool hall.
Feels weird leaving a pool hall before closing, it's opposite of what I did all through college, but I'm no where near good enough anymore for the leagues here, so I'll just train with my kid. Other guys closed the bars, I closed the pool hall while hustling drunk college kids with my future-wife and best friend as wing-men. It's part of how we all paid our tuition. When my daughter asked me to take her to the pool hall I almost tackled her from across the room with a hug. It also motivated my wife to let me spend a little account I had hidden away on cues & cue repair for the family.
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