The Hustler

We had a leaving do for a colleague at work last week. The do wasn’t actually at work of course, but in a bar just down the street. At 4:30 all pretense of toil stopped and en masse we headed out for a couple of hours of beer, munchies and pool. These are all pleasant diversions in themselves, but even better when paid for by the company. Eating and drinking are two skills I have long since mastered, mainly due to long hours of dedicated practice. Pool on the other hand remains something of a mystery.

Not in the sense that I can’t play or even that I can’t play well, sometimes I play superbly. The crucial word here however is sometimes. And therein lies the mystery. Most of the time, I’m every bit as hopeless at pool as I am at everything else. But sometimes, on extremely rare occasions, when the stars are in alignment and the dice are rolling, I play as though gifted by the Gods themselves.

This was such a night. While my first three or four trips to the table were the usual humiliating display of mile-wide misses, appalling blunders and balls bigger than the pockets, all of a sudden it came together. I was Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and Jackie Gleason all rolled into one. Cuts, banks, combinations, the full length of the table and back. Everything I attempted went in. As I knew they would even before I leant over the table and took aim. I was in the zone. This wasn’t just pool, this was poetry.

People lined up to challenge me and I slapped them down one after another. Conversations stopped. People from other groups came over to watch. I was on fire. I didn’t bother to explain that I hadn’t picked up a pool cue in months; what was the point? Nobody would believe me. In fact they probably all assumed I had a pool table in a hypothetical basement at home, and practiced for hours every night. But I knew when it was time to stop. After sinking my umpteenth black of the night. I calmly handed the cue to someone else, walked back to my beer and took a seat.

“I’m done” I announced. “Someone else can have a turn”.

Beer has never tasted so sweet and in my rare moment of triumph, I reflected how I haven’t always been this wise.

Lakes Entrance is a tiny fishing village on Australia’s Victoria Coast. The curious name stems from its location on a small river which leads from the sea to a network of natural lakes. The ocean beaches are wide, long and largely empty while the lakes are a veritable playground for water sports of all kinds. As such Lakes Entrance is popular with holidaymakers and day trippers. However, once the sun goes down it has to be said, there’s not a whole lot to do. I discovered this in the company of two Australian girls, Lee and Cheri whom I’d met in the local backpackers’ hostel. We were trawling the streets looking for somewhere, anywhere we might sit and enjoy a quiet beer or six. It wasn’t that Lakes Entrance was lacking in hostelries, quite the reverse, but they were all what might be termed...shitholes. After searching fruitlessly for some time, we finally settled on in which the absence of broken glass on the floor suggested it might be less threatening than others.

Australians as a whole are a wonderfully friendly and sociable people but even though I’d only been in the country for a couple of months, I was well aware that in certain circles, my English accent could be a hindrance to social advancement. The fishermens’ bars of Lakes Entrance were just such circles and I was anxious to avoid drawing attention to myself. This was something of a challenge in the company of Lee and Cherie, who were extroverts to the max and wanted to talk to everyone. Cherie’s sprayed on Levis and Lee’s pink fur hat were drawing just the notice I hoped to prevent, contrasting as they did with the rubber boots and rain slickers worn by most of the other patrons. That and the fact that the three of us had more teeth than the rest of the bar put together.

“Let’s play pool” chirruped Cherie, at a point when the stares were becoming most uncomfortable. If I had wanted to distract attention from myself, playing pool wasn’t the method I would have chosen but she was already setting up the table. With a sigh I made my way over, lined up the break, closed my eyes and muttered a silent prayer. Three stripes went in.

And that was just the beginning.

Shot after shot, ball after ball, game after game. Everything I attempted went home. Lee and Cherie were quickly replaced as my opponents while one after another, the local hotshots stepped up to take their turn. Every one retired defeated. Nobody could touch me and they were lucky if they visited the table more than once or twice before I cleaned up the balls. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” wasn’t playing in the background, but it might as well have been. Far from being bothered by my Englishness, those people worshipped me. At the end of the night, I left that bar a legend.

Weeks later, I met up with Lee and Cherie in their hometown of Melbourne. I stayed with them for a few days and on the weekend, tagged along to a birthday party in a local hostelry. A number of people were there, all friendly souls and before long, someone suggested a game of pool.

“Oh Andrew will play with you” chorused Lee and Cherie, “He’s great at pool!”

While it might be good for the ego to have two cheerleaders boasting of your skills to all and sundry, it makes the inevitable fall all the harder to take when reality sets in. The shark from Lakes Entrance was long gone. Today we were back to the normal Andrew, the real Andrew. I couldn’t hit a barn door at 5 paces with those pool balls. People had come from all areas of the bar to watch this famous pool wizard from Britain and were now standing in puzzled silence as ball after ball refused to go anywhere near where I wanted them to. How embarrassing. The sense of letdown was tangible.

One the way home, Cherie asked me in puzzlement. “So why did you play so well in Lakes Entrance, yet so badly today?”

What could I tell her? “Pool” I said, “is something of a mystery.”