The Future’s Now

IT’S NOT too often that Jasmin Ouschan gets caught off guard. The Austrian has spent more than half of her two-dozen years trying to exert control over a 2 1/4-inch ball on a 5,000-square-inch table. She’s in complete control of where she is and what she’s doing, meticulously planning her yearly schedule to make sure she balances her travel time (upward of eight months) with time for practice and relaxation. She constantly strives to improve her self-discipline, her “mental game” — that amorphous label for pool’s game between the ears, which pretty much covers everything outside of the physical action of bringing cue tip to cue ball.

So, in Ouschan’s world, where the amount of control is equally proportionate to the amount of success, it was surprising that, upon receiving an e-mail from Billiards Digest in early January notifiying her she’d been named Player of the Year for 2009, Ouschan was completely shocked.

“I just thought, ‘Wow! That is so cool,’” she said. “I know a lot of players accomplished a lot, so I didn’t even think of it. It was the perfect ending for this year.”

But the case for Ouschan’s storybook finale for 2009 was hardly open and shut. With a host of surprises in international competition — such as previously unknown 16-year-old Liu Shasha blazing a path to the World 9-Ball title — the WPBA Classic Tour proved to be the stage for two candidates to make their auditions for Player of the Year.

Ga Young Kim, a two-time world champion at the age of 26, won a pair of WPBA events and finished second in another. By the slimmest of margins (26,500 points to 26,000), Kim edged Ouschan for the top spot in the year-end rankings.

Ouschan, meanwhile, captured three titles on the Classic Tour, taking June’s Great Lakes Classic before going back-to-back at the Pacific Coast Classic and Tour Championship to close out the year. Along with the WPBA hat trick, she also took a silver medal in the quadrennial World Games and a pair of golds at the European Championships (in 8-ball and 9-ball).

Without one player distancing herself from the other in international competition, Ouschan collected more hardware and finished with an exclamation point to prove she was story of a year in women’s pool.

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