Ready for Her Close-Up

Since April, though, Herndon has been downsizing. Right after the breakup from her boyfriend of nearly seven years, she went on a health kick: She joined a high-tech gym, began eating better, and, for a while, stopped smoking. "I felt I was in a rut," she says. "I wasn't enjoying anything, including pool, and I wanted to start anew." For the longest time, she resisted, as she puts it, "playing the game." She didn't feel she had to dress like everybody else or be waif-like to get noticed or reach her goals. But as lesser talents began getting more attention than she, she came to the conclusion that she needed to reassess her game plan, especially if she wanted to attract a sponsor. She started dressing to the nines and taking extra care with her makeup. "What I like most is, she's classy, not slutty," says Ewa Laurance, who's always managed to balance that line well. "She looks like something between a sexy businesswoman and a knockout plus-size model."

And now she's dropping the poundage and reshaping her body, working out three times a week for an hour-and-a-half each day and altering her starchy diet. "I don't know how much weight I've lost, because I don't weigh myself, but I can definitely see that my body is changing," she says. "But the best thing is, I think it's helping me mentally, developing a stronger focus." She says she doesn't have any goals for weight loss. "I just want to be in better shape and healthier. I don't want to have a heart attack when I'm 50."

She became The Dragon Lady long before she joined the professional tour, when she was just a local hotshot in Southern California. She got the tag partly because of her Asian heritage (she's half-Japanese), partly because of her hellish temperament in those days. "I'd get so mad when playing at times that people would say it looked like I was breathing fire," she says. What made the nickname stick was a friend painting a ferocious-looking green-and-yellow dragon taking a bite out of a 9 ball on her light gray cue case. The image fit her perfectly.

During those early years, Herndon didn't just wear her emotions on her sleeve but on the whole damn shirt. "I was bad," she admits sheepishly. "Real bad." Even one of her best friends, fellow pro Stefanie Boch, says, "Melissa definitely has a history around here. She was kind of a mean, negative person. Her temper would flare to the point where she'd start cussing and being nasty toward her opponents. She was overly competitive, couldn't stand losing. If she lost to you, she'd sometimes not congratulate you or shake your hand but would just storm off." Privately, after a particularly hard loss, Herndon would often cry alone in her room for hours.

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