Ready for Her Close-Up

Now less temperamental, Herndon can still cut an imposing figure. (Photo by Carla Bonner)

Her ugliest moment occurred during the finals of a WPBA qualifier in February 2000, against an unknown. "Because nobody knew this girl, she was the Cinderella story of the tournament, and obviously the underdog against me," she remembers. "So, during the match, I started noticing that everybody was applauding for her when she did something good but not for me." Or so she perceived. "It actually wasn't the case," says Boch, an eyewitness. Herndon nevertheless seethed - until she passed the boiling point. Upon running another rack to zero applause, she suddenly turned to her boyfriend, sitting in the front row, and, with a flushed-red face, snapped loudly, "Clap for me, motherf---er!" The moment seemed to hang endlessly in the air, amid stone silence, and with the mouths of the crowd collectively agape. Her boyfriend's reaction: He got up and exited the arena in a huff. "It was a total meltdown, I lost my mind," she explains. "As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I regretted it." She played horribly from that point on, lost 9-7, and, worse, felt humiliated afterwards. "When I got home that night," she says, "I looked at myself in the mirror and promised myself I'd never do that again, that if nobody clapped for the rest of my life I'd be okay with that." She also apologized to her opponent the next time she saw her.

Herndon never took any anger management classes, or read any books about it, but worked on the problem by herself. "The thing is, I never walked around angry at the world all the time. It was just in pool, for some reason," she says. "But being that way was so mentally wearing, and I also realized it was alienating me from people in the poolroom, including Stefanie. There was a distance between us after that incident." Says Boch, "I just waited for her to cool down. You didn't want to be near Melissa when she was like that. Her anger was huge back then. It was getting the best of her and getting in the way of her game. I knew that she'd never go anywhere in pool unless she got rid of it. And I was right, because the second she stopped getting so angry, her whole game changed for the better."

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