Raj to Riches

Beating Yang Ching-Shun, Hundal arrived on the international pool scene at the 2005 World Pool Championship.(Photo by Lawrence Lustig)

Life can change in an instant. Careers can pivot on a dime. In sports especially, history can be altered by a matter of inches, if not fractions of inches.

For Hundal, after establishing himself as the best 9-ball player in the U.K., his turning-point moment began on a Wednesday night in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with a living legend and a plain black glove.

It was in July of 2005, at the World Pool Championship, and Hundal was not only about to play the biggest set of games of his existence but against someone who utterly dominated Asian events, the pre-tournament and hometown favorite Yang Ching-Shun.

"So I'm on the practice table with Earl Strickland around 10 minutes before the match, and I wasn't hitting the ball very good, not clean at all," Hundal remembers. "I mean, any time I hit a shot with power, it wasn't coming up."

The room was humid and sticky, and Strickland noticed something awkward about the way the cue was moving through Hundal's bridge hand.

"You know what's wrong with your stroke?" Strickland said finally.

Says Hundal now: "I have a lot of respect for Earl. He's one of my idols and a guy I'll make a point to go out of my way to watch when I'm not playing. I see him as a pool genius. So when he tells me something, I have to listen."

"What?" Hundal asked Strickland.

"You need the glove. You need to wear a glove and free up your stroke."

Hundal quickly proceeded to get a glove from a nearby accessory stand, and though he'd never worn one before, not even in practice sessions, he immediately slipped it on, no questions asked.

"You make that glove look good," Strickland said glowingly.

All of sudden, recalls Hundal, "I started smoking balls in," something that carried over from the practice table to the main arena. With his new piece of essential pool equipment strapped onto his left hand, Hundal steamrolled to a 7-0 lead before crushing Yang, 10-4, and knocking him out of the tournament.

"The match started with a gazillion people rooting for him and only three for me," Hundal says. "But by the time it was over, they were all clapping for me. It was a robbery. I felt so good I didn't want to leave the arena. I said to myself, 'Who's next? Bring on everyone.'"

Hundal eventually lost a hill-hill match to Rodney Morris in the next round, finishing respectably in 17th place. But a couple of months later, he exacted his revenge by coming back from a 7-1 deficit in a race-to-8 and beating Morris in the final of the World Pool Masters. At 23, he was the youngest ever to win that event, not only putting him on the map for good but obliterating any lingering doubts among his peers about whether or not the Yang match was a fluke.

Once, after blowing an 8-2 lead and losing to Johnny Archer, Hundal was so sick that he told someone on his exit out of the playing area: "Right now, I feel like jumping off a bridge and catching my eyelid on the way down." And another time, after an equally horrid loss, he said with a straight face: "I'd shoot myself if I wasn't so pretty."

It's these kinds of outrageous - albeit hilarious - comments that have, in a way, come to define Hundal's persona. It's of little surprise that one of his heroes is Muhammad Ali, whom he admires for pulling off "his cockiness with grace."

"I'm a bit of a joker," says Hundal, who has never met a punch line he didn't love. "I've always been able to make people laugh. I have a good charm about me. A positive energy. Everybody wants to be at my table."

Hundal has a dark, handsome, goateed face that subtly, curiously, seems to split in the middle at the nose, telling two different stories. While his mouth forever appears on the verge of a wiseass grin, his eyes remain still and hard and with a decided burn. "I think I'm a cross between my high-strung, hot-headed mom and my easygoing dad," he says.

He'll bop along to Biggie Smalls and 2Pac, or groove to Marvin Gaye and Kool and the Gang, or chill to Miles or Coltrane. His favorite flicks are the gangster classics: "The Godfather," "Goodfellas," "Scarface," and "A Bronx Tale." But, please, no books. "I don't really have time to sit down and read and things like that," he says. "Right now, I'm always on the move, always on the hustle, but not [pool] hustling. I'm betting on my life. I'm trying to get paid in this world."

Like buying real estate in India and the U.K. Or going into business, trying to market an energy drink with Rodney Morris, "my brother from another mother."

He says he wants to "roll big," live life in the "fast lane," as if every day were his last.

At least for the moment. Until, one day, off into the distant future, he slows down, suddenly swipes off his trademark black bandana, and replaces it, among other things, with something new.

"Raj won't always be this pretty," he says with a curl of the lips that's beginning to form that famous grin of his. "He'll grow old and his hair will go white, his eyebrows will go white, his beard will go white. I might even go bald - although nobody will ever know it because I'll have the bandana on." He laughs heartily. "You see, my vision is this: We're going to keep the same style, but what we're going to do is switch it all to white.

"White bandana. White suit. White Rolls Royce."

And he stops to laugh a laugh to end all laughs, timing his punch line.  

"Even my boxer shorts," he says, "will be white."

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