 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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April: The yips April 2026 [Reprinted from November 2007] Not long ago a friend brought up the old-time New York player Joe Bachelor, and the first thing that came to mind about the man is what a brilliant practice player he was — especially as compared to what he could do competitively.
The man’s real name was Bachel; the first time the inevitable erroneous syllable was added, it apparently stuck. (The misnomer may or may not have been prophetic; Joe Bachel was actually married three times.) Before he showed up in Chicago as the night manager at the old downtown Bensinger’s, he held the same job at the famous McGirr’s in New York; after Chicago, he did the same thing at Palace Billiards in San Francisco, where he died. In any of those rooms, his routine hardly varied; upon completion of his shift, he would bring out a personal set of well-waxed balls, rack them perfectly with his bare hands, and commence to run hundreds. In this sense, he was a somewhat lesser version of New York’s better-known Mike Eufemia and Ohio’s barely known Tom Parker, each of whom claimed practice runs longer than Willie Mosconi’s much heralded 526. Joe Bachel attested that in his prime, the immortal Mosconi would spot him no more than 125-105 for the money. And yet it was tough to envision him ever having wagered as much as $10. By his own admission, “When I bet $10, I can’t make a ball.” Indeed, the most I ever saw him play for was table time, and he got beat at that by far lesser players.
When the Golden Cue in Queens was New York’s central action room, there was a nightly standing bet that Eufemia could run 200 balls before the joint closed, so long as you gave him at least two hours. There were few takers and even fewer winners; most of the losers agreed that it was worth the $10 or $20 just so see a guy run that many. Insiders also knew that Eufemia was a fine money player. Rusty Miller, one of the game’s all-time stakehorses and who has seen some of the best money pool ever played, has said, “If Mike was betting $500, you wanted in. And yet when it came to tournaments, he might as well have been a 12-year-old playing at the local YMCA.” “He taught me everything he knew,” fondly recalled the late shortstop Vince “Pancho” Corelli, “and then when I saw him play in a tournament, I wanted to cry.” Maybe it was the lack of poolroom chatter; maybe it was the neckwear; but in formal, refereed competition, this nightly 200-ball runner was lucky if he ran 20.
Why this monstrous gap between a player’s performance and his potential? The entire sports psychology industry — books, seminars, therapists — was ultimately founded to answer such questions, and yet no definitive answers exist. The first known athlete to use the phrase “the yips” in reference to sports nerves was golf’s Ben Hogan, and while dictionaries to include the slang phrase will restrict its use to golf, it’s way more universal than that. I’ve heard it used in coverage of Wimbeldon, and in major league baseball too. As the mental game’s aspects of golf’s putting are virtually identical to pool’s, the phrase ought to apply there too.
A good mental game analyst could probably get a year’s worth of columns out of this. Noted teacher Mark Wilson would probably take the Occam’s-Razor approach (which holds that the simplest solution is usually correct) and counsel you to control your body and your cue, produce the best stroke you can, and let the balls take care of themselves. The entire issue is as elusive as your dreams after awakening.
The first author to seriously tackle the subject was probably the 1970’s Timothy Gallwey with his celebrated “The Inner Game of Tennis” (later expanded into a cottage industry that addressed golf, skiing and business). Gallwey’s theory, not far removed from basic left brain/right brain psychology, suggested that we divide our mental selves in two, and favor the half that merely observes rather than judges. Just about everybody in Christendom advocates deep breathing as a technique for staying in the here-and-now. And many, many players have taken to memorizing brief “triggers,” or catch-phrases with special individual meanings: “Free the ball.” “Visualize the follow through.” “Follow the cue ball instead of the object ball after contact.” “Play your game.”
So, exactly what is it that players fear so, and why? The late Gene Nagy said, “It’s funny, I’ve seen pool change a guy’s personality completely, like a light switch. I’ve seen guys who I know for a fact are killers; as soon as they bet $10, they look like they’re in front of a firing squad. It’s something you gotta learn to shake off. It’s the guy who takes the pressure best that wins. He may even be a weaker player.” Do we really care all that much about what the jerk slouching against the wall will think if we miss or lose? Don’t we like ourselves enough to provide a positive foundation? Are we actually dumb enough to gamble in hopes of losing?
And what bleeping good are all the books, authors, columnists, seminars and catch-phrases when your bleeping panic causes you to forget everything you’ve learned in the first bleeping place?
To borrow from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s timeless “The King and I”: “Is a puzzlement.” |
