As Female Leagues Grow, the Game Loses Its Sleazy-Bar Image

Delores (Dee) Wright, 42-year-old mother of two, carefully chalked her cue and checked the table for her next shot.

The other players in the room, all women, watched as the 21-year veteran banked the 10 ball into a corner pocket. Then, with the precision of a pro, she cut the eight ball into another corner.

The spectators--mothers, grandmothers, bartenders and former waitresses--have experienced the game’s migration from dingy, smoke-filled pool halls to brightly lit family billiard parlors, neighborhood bars and trendy nightclubs, and with it, women’s entry into the game.

Booze and Cues League

Wright and the rest of the Glo-Room team on this night were in Anaheim facing the team from Lucky John’s IV. They are among 14 teams in the Thursday night Booze and Cues League. Hundreds of women in Orange County compete in leagues organized more than 15 years ago as a way to generate more business for neighborhood bars.

Betty Williams, 48, the Glo-Room’s captain and a grandmother of six, was a waitress in a bar in 1970 when she learned to play from the men, she said.

“They were enthusiastic that we were getting into it. They were our biggest cheerleaders. Ten to 12 men used to follow (the team) to the visiting bars to watch us play,” she said.

35 Bars Sponsor Teams

Later that year, Williams began a league with four bars participating. Today, several teams meet five times a week. A total of 35 bars sponsor teams, some bars four to five teams each.

“It started at the Cypress Inn. From there, everybody heard about it,” she said. “It spread by word of mouth. I would call a bar and ask if there were any players who would be interested in playing. Pretty soon, other bars got interested.”

Wright, a bartender at the Distillery Lounge, said that although women now are thoroughly ensconced in what traditionally was considered a man’s pastime, they weren’t always welcome.

In 1964, while working as a waitress at a bar in Washington state, Wright used to watch the men play until she finally decided to challenge one of them to a game, she said.

“They couldn’t believe it, no woman had ever tried to do that before. One guy said, ‘No women are allowed to play.’ I said, ‘Where’s the sign that says I can’t.’ Finally, the owner said it was OK since I worked there. Well, I beat the guy, and he walked out. That was the last I saw of him,” she said with a laugh.

Another time she beat three men in a row, she recalled. “They didn’t like it. Men hate women beating them. Even today, they don’t like it.”

But Wright said she enjoys her revenge. “I’d rather play against men because they don’t take me seriously and it makes me mad. I’d rather play a man to show him I can beat him and that women are not that far back in the woods.”

Wright has won All-Stars (the final showdown between the top players in Orange County) twice, in 1982 and 1983.

Grandmother Shows No Mercy

Audrey Dupuis, 64 and a Lucky John’s IV member, is the oldest woman player in the leagues. The grandmother of four has been in the leagues 12 years and was 43 when she took up the game at the urging of friends. Now she shows no mercy.

“I once played a young fellow for fun and I’d just about run the whole table but I scratched on the eight ball. He looked at me and said, ‘You would do that, wouldn’t you,’ ” she said. He won, but with all his balls on the table; the victory was hollow.

Dupuis admits she’s no match against her 70-year-old husband, who plays three nights a week. And she said she sees a future pool shark in her 7-year-old grandson.

“He has a real good eye. Someone like that can almost see where the ball is going to go. He just gets up on a chair and really concentrates.”

The Glo-Room team, which has ranked first six times since 1972, is a close-knit bunch, they say. For example, Williams said, “I had decided to stay out for a while. Well, the whole team stayed out rather than play for someone else. That’s how close we are. We’ve been through marriages, divorces, children, grandchildren and birthdays.”

From their years around pool tables, they’ve also acquired anecdotes. They remember a player on an opposing team 10 years ago who insisted on playing her game with her pet python wrapped around her arm, said 51-year-old Maggie West, a grandmother of three.

“It was a baby python but she had (it) wrapped around her arm. The next time we were scheduled to play, we had just about made up our minds that if she was going to have that snake we were leaving,” West said. The Glo-Room members complained and the league made a new rule: no pets allowed.

One night, Williams, at the time president of the Neighborhood Bar Assn., which oversees the schedules and handles the finances for the leagues, was called in to check out a report of two nude female league members.

“The owner of a bar where a tournament was going on had promised them free drinks if they took off their clothes. This was during the time when streaking was popular. I went in and they had their clothes off. We talked to the players and told the owner never to do that again.”