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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Black widows, Irish invaders and the Duchess of Doom: The women of professional pool
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Black widows, Irish invaders and the Duchess of Doom: The women of professional pool
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BLACK WIDOWS, IRISH INVADERS AND THE DUCHESS OF DOOM: THE WOMEN OF PROFESSIONAL POOL by Andrew James Dalton A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (JOURNALISM) May 2003 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1416547 UMI UMI Microform 1416547 Copyright 2003 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695 This thesis, written by — A n /re*/ .Q aM w ------------------------------------------ under the direction o f h±£_ thesis committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Director o f Graduate and Professional Programs, in partial fulfillment o f the requirements fo r the degree of Director Date Mav 1 6 . 2 0 0 3 Thesis Committee Chair Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Body 1 Bibliography 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT The Women’s Professional Billiards Association is the oldest, most prestigious, and richest cue sports organization in the world, regardless of gender. Its players have a larger television contract, attract bigger crowds, win more prize money, and enjoy far greater fame than their male counterparts. This is mostly the result of superior organization and marketing, but the gap in skills between pool- playing men and women is smaller than in any other sport, and is quickly getting smaller still. Herein is an examination of the WPBA through a profile of its No. 1 player, Allison Fisher of Peacehaven, England. Some of her more notable rivals are also examined, as is the state of the sport and a woman’s place in it, through a close look at the organization’s season-ending national championship in Miami. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Jasmin Ouschan is 16 and covered with patches. Sewed to her black vest, they appear at first to be just a fashion statement, but it is clear on closer inspection that they are the names of sponsors: Elephant Billiard Balls, German companies whose name is hard to decipher. Ouschan (pronounced “ocean”) is Austrian, but if you didn’t know it you’d think she was a rural American teenager with her long blond ponytail and lightly freckled nose. She looks like she might love horses and strawberry picking. But she has the bearing, the swagger and the poise of someone much older. She and her pool cue have had the attention of the room’s 50 or so people today. They have noted how often, without seeming especially surprised, she slides one of the abacus beads across the overhead wire, marking a win. She has been beating older, more experienced women who look like they’ve spent much of their lives in barrooms. Now it is evening in this spacious but musty room in the bogs outside of Miami. The Native Americans who run the attached casino call it a dome, but it feels more like a circus tent. The star players, the ones with the funny nicknames like Striking Viking and Black Widow, have come out now. They are dressed more formally than the room calls for, as though a yuppie dinner party had suddenly broken out at the state fair. Eight tables-worth of matches are going on, but the focus is on Ouschan’s table, because she is playing Allison Fisher, who at the moment is the No. 2 player in the world and is already a legend at 34. Fisher used to be Jasmin Ouschan, a cocky teen-aged sensation in a vest. 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fisher is slow and methodical, but more silky than mechanical. She leans over the table slowly, with a sense of leisure. She doesn’t talk much during her matches, doesn’t engage the crowd the way some of her opponents do. Her face tells stories, though, mostly through variations on a signature smile, wherein her eyelids droop a bit, and the sides of her mouth curl, one more than the other. It is a sinister look—it has a touch of serpentine evil. “Go ahead, do what you will,” it says. “I’ve got you where I want you anyway.” Many of the player’s nicknames are silly and rather forced. The manners of “The Irish Invader” Karen Corr could not be milder, for example. But Fisher’s title, “The Duchess of Doom,” somehow fits when she flashes that smile. Fisher has short, feathery blond hair that has been mostly unchanged since the 1980s, though it has calmed down a bit. Her eyes are an icy blue. She looks more German, or perhaps Nordic, than English. She has a sort of urban glamour though she is not overly feminine. She wears the uniform of the modem pro pool player—gray button down shirt, sleeves rolled up, black pinstriped pants. She too is wearing sponsor’s names, but more subtly than Ouschan, a “Cuetec Cues” logo on her breast pocket, and the words “Sardo Tight Rack” on her back, which might appear funny or tasteless if worn by someone less classy. Fisher lacks the gaudy sexuality that would make such a term appear tasteless. She is having her way with Ouschan tonight, hardly letting her get to the table, winning the first seven matches in a race to nine. She is slowly letting her Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ruthlessness show. The teen-ager, sitting on a stool nearby, is clearly getting antsy, even a bit angry. Fisher misses a shot on the six ball in the middle of the eighth game—a rare miscue—and gives up the table. Fisher’s response to mistakes is a raise of the eyebrow and a twist of the mouth, as if to say, “Funny, who’d’ve ever thought such a thing would happen?” Ouschan quickly clears the table and waits for Fisher to rack the balls for her. In the early rounds, before officials are available for each match, it is customary for the loser to rack the balls for the winner. It is a moment of subservience and slight humiliation. Ouschan sends off an explosive break—matches begin with a thunderclap before settling into their rhythm—and methodically empties the table once again without a miss. Then she does it again. It’s now 7-3. Fisher still has the sinister smile on, but a hint of concession, and a bit of admiration, have sneaked into it. Ouschan of course, knows everything about Fisher, but Fisher knows her opponent too. Though they have not played yet in competition, she has been following the Austrian’s burgeoning career from afar. She knows the young Austrian won the world amateur championship earlier in the year. She knows Ouschan is from a family that was bred to play pool by a devoted, some would say tyrannical, father, and that Jasmin has a 13-year-old brother who is just as good as she is. She knows, and will cite in great detail later in the evening, that her young challenger made 152 shots in a row during competition once in Europe. That’s 152 shots without allowing her opponent to get to the table. (There’s no playing defense 3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in pool). Fisher is thinking of this number now. A run of 54 will suffice tonight. Sure she has a big lead, but there are no guarantees she will get back to the table. Pool is one of the great comeback sports for this reason. Early in the 11th game, Ouschan is left without a shot on the four ball, and plays a safety, a shot designed to leave one’s opponent with no shot either. It doesn’t work. Fisher steps up and makes the four with a masse, a wildly curving shot that slides around the undesirable balls and sinks the four. She runs the rest of the table and wins the game quickly, then wins another, playing with more urgency than she had on her first run. She wins, her evil smile turns into one of sincere appreciation, and she turns to sign pool balls and other billiard ephemera for a line of mostly middle-aged men that has formed around her. Later in the evening, Fisher holds court in the lounge of the hotel where she had played. Like any modem professional athlete, she has an entourage, though her crew is softer and fuzzier than, say, Allen Iverson’s. It consists of fellow player Gerda Hofstatter, an Austrian who is often mistaken for Fisher; Mason King and Mike Panozzo editor and publisher, respectively, of Billiards Digest, the Wall Street Journal of pool; Jean Balukas, a player now in her 60s who used to play on the men’s tour in her youth, and Fisher’s mother, Christine. She is a small English woman wearing an overcoat (in Miami) that looks as though she were transplanted from the beginning of the last century, like an Agatha Christie heroine. Christine Fisher is so sweet and deferential that she tries to offer an able-bodied young man her seat at the 4 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. table. Fisher’s father, Peter, was part of the entourage for several years, but died of lung cancer in 2000. The table is crowded with empty Corona bottles. Fisher, having emptied a few of the bottles herself, shows far more emotion than she would ever dream of showing at the pool table. She begins crying out, with mock horror, about the young woman she had to play earlier in the evening, and all those like her. “They’re so young, and so fearless, and they just don’t care, they don’t care,” she says. “And all they think about is pool, it’s all they think about.” Heads nod in sympathetic agreement. “Did you know she ran to 152 in straight pool this year?” Yes, the crowd says, clearly having heard all of this before. “What about that other young woman?” one of the men asks her. “Which one?” Fisher asks. “The one from Ireland,” he says. Fisher is annoyed, but polite. “I make it a point not to think about her until Sunday,” she says. The Women’s Professional Billiards Alliance began in 1976 as a protest. The male- dominated unisex organization women had played in before required that they play in skirts. The group changed its name from “Alliance” to “Association” shortly thereafter and has been the governing body of women’s billiards, in various forms, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ever since. And rare is the a professional woman who has worn a skirt at the table since then. Television sports viewers, faced with a dull football or basketball game, sometimes wander to ESPN and run across a WPBA Classic Tour event. The all sports cable channel doesn’t try to compete when the networks are showing big time sports, so they downshift into B-grade fare: cheerleading competitions, world’s strongest man contests, and women’s professional billiards. Though the group puts on just six events a year, ESPN and ESPN2 play and replay WPBA matches so often that the tour and its women have attracted a small cult following. What viewers will not find is men playing pool on television. That is because the women of professional billiards have outdone their male counterparts in business, organization and self-promotion as in no other sport. The men’s professional billiards tour collapsed in 1996 when it lost its title sponsor, Camel cigarettes. (Such sponsorships became illegal for Camel.) Now the men’s game is just a scattering of independent tournaments, while the women have a relatively fat television contract and a tour that gets far more attention than the men. Their purses are far bigger too. Two events will have first prizes of $100,000 this year. No man can win a sum half that size. But the women’s success and appeal are not merely a matter of marketing and management. The gender gap in pool is among the smallest in sports or competitive games of any kind for that matter. 6 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “It’s absolutely very close,” said Jan McWorter, a longtime player and president of the WPBA. “Allison has played in events with pro men players and won. Karen Corr entered a tournament in South Carolina and won both the women’s and the men’s divisions.” “I don’t think the gap is big,” said Tom Ross, a teacher and coach from Denver. “I think it’s definitely there. But it’s smaller than ever and getting smaller still. When you look at newcomers women, outnumber men two to one,” Ross said. “In the poolrooms of my youth you certainly wouldn’t go in there to meet girls. Now that’s one of the perks.” The game doesn’t require the sorts of physical skills that might give men an advantage. The only time raw power comes into play in billiards is on the break. “The power doesn’t come from strength anyway,” Ross said. “It comes from balance and technique, and these women have plenty of that.” Fisher would likely be a top-10 player among men, if she were to compete against them regularly. But she doesn’t have much reason to, barring the need for more of a challenge. She can win much more money, get far more notoriety, and get more attractive sponsorships playing on the women’s side. The most prestigious of the WPBA’s six annual events is The National Nine Ball Championships, held in Miami each December. It is far from the most glamorous, however. Annual tournaments in New York and Las Vegas are classy affairs, but “The Nationals,” or the “Miami tournament” as the players call it, held at the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Miccosukkee Resort and Gaming Complex, feels like of one of the casino’s bingo games. It also functions as the WPBA’s annual convention. The event starts with an awards banquet, complete with tears and motivational speakers. The group’s public relations people spend the week primping, photographing and consulting the ladies during breaks in play. I arrived in Miami on Wednesday night before last December’s tournament, which ran from Thursday through Sunday. I checked into the Miccosukkee, walked downstairs to the coffee shop, and was immediately surrounded with pool players. They looked like a group of office workers on a Vegas vacation. Sweat suits were the evening’s costume. Many talked on brightly colored cell phones. They were planning a club-hopping trip to South Beach on Saturday night, knowing that most of them would be eliminated from competition by then. All were anxious to talk, telling me that the organization had given them media training the night before, instilling them with athlete’s cliches and reminding them to always mention their sponsors. Every comer of the United States and every conceivable race and ethnic group—except, I later realized, black—was represented. Here is a random sampling of players: -Vivian Villarreal (nickname: The Texas Tornado), 37, the loudest and oldest in the group, is from San Antonio, Texas. She learned the game as a small child in her grandmother’s bar. She was a world champion in the early 1990s, and remains among the world’s top ten players. Between prize money, exhibitions, and sponsorships, she is moderately wealthy and has bought houses for both her mother 8 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and her grandmother. She will win her first several matches in this tournament and finish fourth, which is about as well as she does these days. -Angelina Paglia (nickname pending), 22, sits quietly next to Villarreal. A thin and thoughtful Italian American from Tucson, Ariz. Paglia has no world ranking and has a 9-to-5 job as a bank teller. She has a college degree, rare among her peers here. The game is still a hobby for her; she makes virtually no money playing pool except for the $100 or so that players win in local pool hall tournaments. She pays her own way to these functions after earning her way in by winning regional tournaments. She has no sponsors. She is hoping this will change soon. She will win her first match at this event, then quickly lose twice when she hits the real competition. -Ming Na (nickname: The Empress), 25, is somewhere between Villarreal and Paglia in the pool pantheon. A Korean-American from Encino California, Na learned the game, and developed a pretty stiff drug habit, while a girlfriend of an Asian gangster. She used professional pool as a sort of rehab, an exit from her habit and her boyfriend, though she still uses a lot of Asian gangster jargon. Na is No. 16 in the world. She has never won a tournament, though she makes a fair amount of money playing. Like Paglia, she’ll win her first match then quickly be eliminated, and the weekend will become just a party. Allison Fisher was bom in Cheshunt, England in 1969. She grew up in the small English town ofPeacehaven with doting parents and two brothers. 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As a child, Fisher watched hours and hours of snooker on television. Snooker is a billiard game that is popular mostly in the United Kingdom and its former colonies. It involves several colored balls without numbers. Different point values are attached to different balls and players win games not by clearing the table but by amassing points. It is on BBC-TV constantly. Fisher was transfixed at first by the game’s colors, then by its players. Her parents, who, she concedes, spoiled her terribly, bought her a table when she was 7. She began competing at 13, and by 15—one year younger than her first- round opponent in Miami, she won the women’s national snooker title in England.. By 17 she won the women’s snooker world championship and would win it again almost every year for the next 10 years. The one thing Fisher did not do at the snooker table was make money. Men’s snooker players were quasi-celebrities and made comfortable livings in Britain, but the women’s players earned virtually nothing. Fisher spent most of her snooker years working as a bartender. She had accepted that her work and her passion for snooker would be separate. Cue sports would have to remain a glorified hobby. Then the WPBA, and America called. Fisher was invited to compete in a nine ball event in Charlotte, North Carolina. She had never played the game before. She liked the idea. She finished ninth out of 54 women, and cashed a bigger check than she had ever made playing snooker. She decided that nine ball, and the states, would provide a far more fruitful life, and began to learn the game in earnest. 10 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nine ball, the “Cadillac of pool games” is seldom played by amateurs. Professionals love it because it is a fast, economic, and vexing game, which also makes it perfect for television. Straight pool, the game previously played among pros, often took until dawn to finish. Each game of nine ball takes about ten minutes, and can take as little as thirty seconds, making them nice digestible nuggets to fit between commercial TV breaks. In nine ball, balls numbered one-through-nine are placed in a diamond shape on the table. A player breaks and spreads the balls out. The player is required, at all times after the break, to hit the lowest ball on the table first, though it doesn’t matter which ball goes in one of the pockets. The player that sinks the nine ball wins. It’s that simple. If a player sinks the nine ball on the break—the billiard equivalent of a hole-in-one—she wins the game. Or she can do what expert players usually do, systematically knock in balls one-through-nine one at a time and win the game, often in a single turn. The game was not tough for Fisher to pick up. The rules and the layout were different, but the stroke and the shots—and the talent and skill required for both—were the same. She settled in Charlotte, “pretty much because it was the first place I saw,” she said, and joined the tour full time in 1996. The WPBA had been a competitive place before Fisher arrived, spawning several champions like Robin Dodson, Villarreal (the Texas Tornado), and Ewa 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Mataya (the Striking Viking). The women shared championships, and the voting was always tight for the Player of the Year award. Fisher quickly dispensed with all of that, greedily winning everything in sight. Declaring that her goal was to win in the first six months, she won an event in her first two weeks. After about a year, she said, she got “comfortable.” Fisher’s comfort was the bane of the rest of the league, especially those who were actually accustomed to winning. She won the last five events of the year in 1996. In 1997 she won six of nine events. In 1998 she won the ESPN Ultimate 9-ball Championship and with it $65,000, the largest purse in cue sports history. She was the WPBA’s player of the year each year from 1996 to 2000. The tour’s members and followers started to call her the Tiger Woods of pool. She won a fair amount of resentment, too. The other players, with their high heels and long, curly hair, snickered at Fisher with her boyish haircut and black vest, the uniform of the snooker player. In 2001, Fisher finally got what Tiger Woods lacks, a genuine rival. Karen Corr, the world’s No. 1 player, is from Ballmoney, Northern Ireland. Like Fisher, she was a snooker champion first, and had won world championships in the years since Fisher had left. Corr’s jet-black hair stands in perfect contrast to Fisher’s light blond hair. She is soft-spoken painfully shy—her eyes stay firmly fixed on the ground most of the time. She wears thick glasses and looks like a suburban librarian. 12 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Unlike Fisher, who lights up the cocktail lounge at night after playing, Corr spends her nights playing pool. I saw her hitting balls in the tournament’s backstage area the first afternoon, long before her first match. Late that evening, hours after her match was over, she was still hitting balls. Fisher enjoys the non-billiard world far more than Corr, and has to find a reason to play. She would just as soon work in her garden. At first it looked as though Corr would simply supplant Fisher, rather than compete with her. In 2001 she won all six WPBA tour events, and took over the No. 1 world ranking. Fisher was lulled by a previous lack of competition, and was distracted and distraught by her father’s death. Corr’s dominance gave her a reason to focus again and something to work toward. She had won three of the first five events in 2002. Corr won just one. If Fisher’s dominance was the WPBA’s “Tiger Woods” period, it is now in its “Williams sisters” period. Like women’s tennis, where the sport is dominated by just two players, Fisher and Corr are virtually the only players you see on television. “At first I thought it was a good thing, two players with a fierce rivalry going at each other,” said McWorter. “Now I think it’s getting a bit tedious.” Fisher and Corr’s dominance demonstrates the place where the women’s game falls short of the men’s—depth. While individual players like the dynamic pair can compete at any level, the talent level drops off considerably after them. Among the men, the No. 1 player in the world and the No. 20 player are not far from one another. Ming Na, on the other hand, can only dream of beating Fisher or Corr. 13 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Corr was the first of the top players to have a match as I sat to watch the first round Thursday in the Miccosukee Dome. She was playing Sarah Rousey, who is 19 but looks about 12. Rousey was the youngest player on tour before Ouschan showed up. Corr does not have Fisher’s vicious smile but shares her ruthlessness at the table. On the very first shot of her very first match in the Miami tournament, Corr sank the nine on the break and went up 1-0 at that second. She hardly even smiled. That was indicative of the way she treated the competition at the tournament. Corr won nine games in a row and sent Rousey, whose billiard talents are considerable but looks as though she should be playing clarinet in a junior high band, back to Chicago. Rousey told me that she planned to go to England to learn snooker, thinking that it held some secret to competing at nine ball. Corr and Fisher are attractive in their way, especially when they are dressed up for competition and circling the table, but not in a way that suits modem television and its desire for the Koumikovas of the sporting world. Jeanette Lee is the closest thing they’ve got to that. Lee, “The Black Widow,” has had much to do with the following the sport has earned on ESPN. With Fisher and Corr’s dominance, however, Lee doesn’t make it to the televised matches very much. In her one appearance on ESPN in the past year, she played Corr and got to the table twice in the course of seven games. Fans had to be happy watching her sit in the background and shrug her shoulders. 14 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Frank Gomez, a fan from Jacksonville who loved to talk about the WPBA, drove to Miami specifically to watch Lee. Or, as he delicately put it, “to watch the Black Widow bend over the table.” Lee often inspires this response. She is the only player from the WPBA who is famous outside of Billiard circles. When I told friends about this project, they almost without exception said, “oh yeah, the Black Widow and all of that.” ESPN.com took a poll last year to determine the world’s sexiest male and female athletes. Lee came in third among the women, after Koumikova and the sprinter Marion Jones. Lee is a 32-year-old Chinese-American from New York City. She now lives in Indianapolis and is married to a professional pool player named George Breedlove. (Virtually every married professional player has a husband in the billiards business.) She is tall and thin with straight, long, black hair. She wears only black. No one can recall whether the style or the nickname came first. The look is more biker’s girlfriend than height-of-fashion. Everything is tight, leathery and shimmery, and her shoulders are usually bare. And she can play. In this sense she is no Koumikova—the marginally talented tennis star who ends up on countless magazine covers because of her curves—not completely anyway. While Lee would not have garnered much attention were she overweight and cross-eyed, she has won several tournaments and was the No. 1 player in the world before the Brits showed up. 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Players and observers of the WPBA often call her the greatest self-promoter in the game. It is most certainly true. She has an agent and has countless products, from tables to cues, named after her. At first I thought I heard a note of scorn in this “self-promoter” language. But in prodding other players to elaborate, I sensed more admiration than jealousy. These women are all primarily in the business of self-promotion, partly because every modem athlete is a salesman of his image, partly because of the nature of pool. It has always been more of a sideshow than a sport, with trick shot exhibitions getting as much attention as actual matches. Minnesota Fats, the most famous player of all time, was by no means the best, even in his own era. He simply knew how to sell himself. He had gone by the name New York Fats, but when the Paul Newman film The Hustler came out in the early 60s he changed his name to “Minnesota” and convinced everyone the Jackie Gleason character was based on himself, a myth that persists after his death. Lee is very much in the Minnesota Fats tradition. Late on Thursday night, I watched Lee play for the first time. Virtually everything that has been written about the WPBA has dwelt almost exclusively on Lee, so I was determined not to pay her any special attention. That proved awfully tough, as her presence was downright magnetic. I expected to find that television had been kind to her, that she wasn’t as impressive up close. But she was actually more striking. Having none of the stoicism 16 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that mark most players’ styles, Lee engaged the crowd, carrying on conversations with friends and fans in the bleachers. Tonight she was playing Ikumi Ushiroda, a young teenager from Japan who didn’t speak a word of English, and she was getting trounced. The early rounds of tournaments are supposed to be a mere formality for players like Lee. But in losing she was all the more entertaining. She shrieked with mock horror when the teen would make improbable shots, and she was making a lot of them tonight. She pretended to bash Ikumi over the head with her pool cue. When Ikumi was about to make the match-deciding shot, a straight shot of the nine into the side pocket, Lee threw a towel on to the table, conceding the match, and opened her arms to the young upstart. It was a moment of endearing humility, but it kept the spotlight squarely on herself. Self-promoting indeed. Lee is mostly an aberration. The players that dominate the current game now follow Corr of Fisher’s model. Gerda Hofstatter or Helena Thomfeldt, the third and fourth ranked players in the world, are even more short-haired and masculine, not unlike the stereotype European female Olympian. The WPBA recently hired a PR firm—Nashville’s Trifecta Entertainment, which handles NFL players and professional wrestlers. Trifecta’s president, Dixie Carter (not the actress), is a beaming, heavily made-up Southern woman with a strong accent, she is clearly trying to play up the sexuality of the WPBA’s players, knowing it may be their strongest selling point. It occurred to me as I talked to Carter 17 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and others how little feminism there was in the WPBA. While the organization exudes all sorts of feminine power, almost everyone refers to the players as “girls.” It may be difficult for Carter to play Pygmalion with many of the players, as an afternoon photo session in a suite at the Miccosukkee demonstrated. The women were primped and primed by hair and make-up people and put in front of a photographer who had them lean over chairs and make faces in the fashion shoot. This came naturally to a few of the players, but most of them seemed terribly uncomfortable, didn’t take directions especially well, and didn’t care for the lights shining on them. “I just want to play pool,” their faces seemed to say. Unfortunately for Carter and the image-makers, most of the younger players are in this latter group. No one involved with the WPBA wants to talk about it directly, but there is clearly some lesbianism in their ranks. Some of the top players, I was told, have been in long-term relationships with one another, quietly and privately. It is a dilemma most women’s sports deal with. They have tried so hard to quash the butch stereotype through the years that the actual lesbians are forced to stay in the closet and downplay their private lives for the supposed good of the game. Fisher and Corr moved easily through the Miami tournament field, dominating lesser names on Friday, and struggling somewhat with some of the more established players on Saturday. Monica Webb, a young player from Atlanta, Ga., with a hip, scruffy haircut gave Fisher a tough match in the semifinals but eventually lost 7-5. 18 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WPBA tournaments allow one loss, but neither Fisher nor Corr lost a match. They found themselves, yet again, in the finals against each other. The television crew had arrived for Sunday’s finals. The Miccosukkee dome had looked like a makeshift pool hall before, but now looked as though an actual sporting event was taking place, with just one table in the middle of the room, an official to rack the balls and watch over the games, and cameras and lights pointed at the center of the room. Mitchell Laurance, former star of HBO’s news parody Not Necessarily the News and a familiar B-movie actor, is the lead commentator for all of ESPN’s pool broadcasts. (This is common practice at ESPN; the network’s lead commentator for its poker telecasts is Gabe “Mr. Kotter” Kaplan.) Laurance has earned his job. Few know more about the WPBA or the game of pool. He is married to a player, Ewa Mataya, who will take over as WPBA president this year. They will function as a sort of first family of billiards. Laurance brought Jasmin Ouschan on for some extra commentary, but her English is rough. Athlete’s cliches seem to be all she has learned so far—she clearly listened during Wednesday night’s media training, delivering such gems as “I did my best and hopefully next time I’ll come out and win.” The style of play changes at this late stage, becoming faster and more tense. Televised matches, the semifinals and finals of each tournament, have a 30-second shot clock, to avoid the tedium of a player standing endlessly over a shot. A player 19 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. must be over the table within that span or she loses her turn. Webb, playing for the first time on television, made that mistake against Fisher and lost a game for it. But Fisher has played more televised matches than any player, male or female, in pool history. She doesn’t mind the spotlight. Like any champion athlete she appears to crave it, not out of showmanship but out of the heightened sense of competition it brings. Fisher’s entourage sits in the front row. The crowd has swelled into the hundreds today, though it is smaller than it looks on television. Corr has an entourage of one, Julie Kelly, (nickname: Motor Molly, world ranking: 9), a fellow Irish snooker player who came to the United States shortly after Corr and lives with her in Pennsylvania now. Motor Molly anxiously watches Corr play, rubbing her palms together constantly. Corr did the same during Kelly’s matches. The only time Corr stopped hitting balls was to watch Kelly. As the match begins, Fisher and Corr lean over the table to lag. The lag functions as a sort of coin flip determine who breaks first. The players each hit a ball, simultaneously, to the far end of the table and back, attempting to stop the ball as close as possible to the rail in front of them. It is among the more telegenic moments in a pool match, it being the only time both players stand at the table together. It gives off the feeling of a gauntlet being thrown down. Fisher’s blond head and Corr’s black head lean over the table simultaneously. Fisher’s sneering smile is appearing already. She is more aware of the crowd and more aware of herself than Corr, whose focus is such that her eyes don’t leave the 20 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. table. Corr wins the lag. The finals is a race to seven rather than nine games—another concession to television—so the advantage in breaking first is huge. A woman can be halfway to victory before her opponent gets to the table. This is exactly what Corr does. She runs off three games immediately, with the same measured style and quiet focus that she has shown hitting balls backstage. She forces a smile at the end of each game to acknowledge the applause, then returns to her business. Corr lets Fisher get to the table in the fourth game, but leaves no shot on the six. Corr is a genius at playing safeties. Fisher has nothing to do, has to be satisfied with not scratching. Corr wins another game to go up 4-0. Fisher, sitting quietly, is beginning to enter another politely annoyed phase. It's feeling like 2001 again. The pair spars for a few games, playing safeties and giving the table back to each other. Fisher squeezes out two games, but Corr wins two more. Fisher, facing elimination halfway through the ninth game, pulls off an amazing shot on the eight ball after being stuck—snookered as these women would have said in their previous life—behind the nine. The shot, which runs the length of the table and off a rail, goes in and everyone explodes into applause, but Fisher knows better. The cue ball has yet to stop. It keeps rolling back to the pocket where she’s standing for a scratch. Corr cleans up easily. Match over. Corr forces a more sincere smile as she holds up the trophy. She leaves with Kelly, resisting any remaining temptation to go hit balls. 21 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fisher was not exactly despondent afterwards, chatting with her entourage and signing another set of billiard balls. When spring came, Fisher came back to win the first tournament of 2003, in Mississippi in mid-March. Corr finished a shocking ninth, and Fisher regained her No. 1 world ranking. She is not, as yet, ready to retire to the garden. On returning home to Los Angeles, I visited Hollywood Billiards, a modem, cavernous pool hall across the street from my apartment. Hollywood Billiards is known as more of a serious players’ club than the velvety nightclubs like”Q’s” that dot the city. Like every other place on the block, Hollywood Billiards has a wall of fame. But instead of Brad and Julia, they have pictures of Fisher, Corr and Lee. All are signed and displayed prominently. Male stars had been forced into the wall of fame’s ghetto, in its far reaches near the restroom. The gender of the crowd was evenly divided on this Sunday night. If anything there was a surplus of women. They were mostly Asian, with low slung jeans and sweatsuit tops. Parts of the room had a meatmarket feeling, with anxious men leaning over to “help” the young ladies with their strokes. But most of the women focused on their games, ignoring the men unless they were playing against them. None were content to just sit and watch. 22 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bibliography Cook, Lynn. “Games: Bank Shot.” Forbes. 9 July 2001: 168. Corr, Karen. Personal interview. 5 Dec. 2002. Dominguez, Robert. “She Breaks Just Like a Woman.” New York Daily News 6 Aug. 1997: 29. Fancher, Bob. Pleasures of Small Motions: Mastering the Mental Game of Pocket Billiards. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002. Fisher, Allison. Personal interview. 5,6 Dec. 2002. Gershenson, Adam Scott and Jeanette Lee. The Black Widow’s Guide to Killer Pool: Become the Player to Beat New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000. Laurance, Ewa Mataya, and Thomas C. Shaw. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Pool and Billiards. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Laurance, Ewa Mataya. Personal interview. 5 Dec. 2002. Mancini, Nicole. Personal interview. 5 Dec. 2002. McWorter, Jan. Personal interview. 16 Jan. 2003. Na, Ming. Personal interview. 4 Dec. 2002. Paglia, Angelina. Personal interview. 4, 5 Dec. 2002. Ross, Tom. Personal interview. 5,6 Dec. 2002. Shamos, Michael Ian. The Complete Book of Billiards. New York: Gramercy Books, 2000. Villarreal, Vivian. Personal interview. 4, 5 Dec. 2002. Women’s Professional Billiard Association. 1996-2003. <http://www.wpba.com/>. 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
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Dalton, Andrew James
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Black widows, Irish invaders and the Duchess of Doom: The women of professional pool
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