 Tips & shafts By George Fels Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.
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September: This Spine of Mine September 2025 [September from February 2007] There’s baggage and then there’s baggage, in terms of what most of us cart to the pool or billiards table. George Sutton, of the late 19th century, was born with nothing by stumps from the elbow down yet achieved billiards championship status by controlling the cue on the two crooks of his elbows. A generation later, Robert Cannefax, a sour-tempered three-cushion competitor, was a star despite having a wooden leg (which he utilized for one of the most creative sharking tactics of all time, stabbing himself in that leg while his opponent was at the table). And the late Harold Worst, a true genius in both pool and caroms, won tournaments while battling end-stage cancer, defeating some of the finest competition the world could find for him.
As with my playing talent, my particular malady pales in comparison to theirs. I have osteoarthritis and want to make it clear that this is no bid for sympathy. The vast majority of arthritis sufferers have it far worse than I do, my occasional discomfort no match for their very real and sometimes intractable pain. The only pain in my case has to do with what the condition does to my pool game.
Now, one of the very first secrets that comes to advanced pool players — which they may or may not share with lesser competition, depending — is that pool is really all about stopping the cue ball someplace favorable. Beginners, and sometimes intermediates too, think the idea is to know balls into holes, but that’s really just a requirement if you want another consecutive turn. The real object of pool, winning the game, is achieved by consistently stopping the cue ball in a good place for you or a horrible place for your opponent (or, in the case of one-pocket, both). And what my arthritis does is shut down the specific neuron path between the brain and the rest of my central nervous system (good luck tracking down exactly what that path might be) that governs my sense of ball speed.
And none of us, not even the eminent physics professor whose work graces these pages, measures his or her stroke in terms of miles per hour or pounds per square inch. A stroke is accomplished by instinct and feel. With the left half of your brain, you decide where you want the cue ball, while the right half takes care of deciding how hard to hit it. Then the command goes out to your body to execute those decisions. Unfortunately, the computer between my ears is sending that particular message to the Trash file.
About the only competing I do these days is a weekly 14.1 handicap league. The top three players of each session can win some hundreds of dollars, and I’ve cashed that way once, but mostly my record is pretty near .500, a measure of proof that the handicaps are equitable. So as not to embarrass myself in that competition, I see a really excellent chiropractor just before driving to the room. He tells me that any one of a hundred things could go wrong with me, although he’s using that number figuratively and it could easily be way higher. And “spinal misalignment” sounds far worse than it actually is in my case. I don’t look like a walking ampersand. However, of all the factors that can insult my condition, the biggest by far is sitting, close to a 6-to-1 favorite over whatever is second place (and, sadly, pool itself makes that list). I have to drive at least an hour to get to the poolroom. That alone could potentially undo the doctor’s good work.
Thus, I arrive at the poolroom with very little idea of which of my many bodies I’m taking into combat. Of all the ways I could misalign, not all work against my pool game, but the ones that do cannot be either quantified or qualified, and I have no way to predict which will surface. Generally, two hours is about the maximum period in which I can expect to play well. If not, my game is somewhat parallel to the semi-nightmarish “examination dream” that most of us have: We’re terribly late for an important exam for which we are ill-prepared to begin with, and circumstances keep thwarting us from getting there. I’m pretty much back to where I was after a few months at pool, a fairly talented shot maker reduced to sinking them one at a time, the only real difference being that today I at least know what I should be doing. I position the cue ball straight in where I need modest angles, widely angled where I need to be straight in. Break shots are a true adventure; if I overhit, mini clusters pop up like acne along with three surrounding rails, and if I under hit, the cue ball sits there the way a wart sits on a pickle, unavailable to the many open shots that await my salivating opponent, gaudily painted Easter eggs on a barren field. It’s like turning your kite loose without a string and hoping it finds its way home, as pigeons sometimes do.
If the condition leveled off where it is now, where I still at least maintain the hope of playing well, that would be acceptable, I guess. After all, I do have quite an accumulation of birthdays. But each of us is susceptible to putrid thoughts in moments of gloom, and I worry that I will turn into a human ampersand, ambling around the table in simian fashion, cackling with fiendish glee when that rare object ball does find its way into the subway. At that point, I anticipate merely completing two racks, as opposed to running them, within my allotted two hours. And I scuttle from the poolroom to take up my residence under a nearby bridge, where I can resume my new function as the demon troll who haunts the three Billy Goats Gruff. |
