She Hardly Fits Model of a Pool Shark

She reminded herself to call the nuns.

Here she was, eating strawberries in the commissary of Pat Sajak’s talk show in Television City, about to go on with Mel Torme and Harry Anderson of “Night Court” and such. Sajak’s people set up a pool table on stage, so that she and the host could crack a few racks on national TV, and so that she could show the form that had turned her into a world champion.

Maybe the sisters back at the all-girl Mount St. Mary’s academy in Watchung, N.J., who only a few years back had been her teachers, weren’t aware of it. Maybe they weren’t even aware that her recent surgery had been successful, that the lymph nodes beneath her right arm, her cue-stroking arm, had been benign and been removed.

“I’d better call them,” Loree Jon Jones said.

Some of the others in the CBS canteen might have mistaken her for a singer or model or actress. Anything but a pool shark. The man who represents her, David Kastle of Nashville, likes to say that it isn’t every day you find somebody who “plays like Minnesota Fats and looks like Grace Kelly.”

Furthermore, she does sing. Had voice training, sings at weddings, feels she could sing professionally. And, she does model. The famed Ford modeling agency is currently negotiating with her; there’s a full-page glamour photo of her in the August edition of Esquire. And, she does act. Or, at least, she and Kastle are confident that she can, and they are exploring possible ventures while in L.A.

“I learned at an early age not to limit your possibilities,” she said.

When Loree Jon Ogonowski was 7, she and a certain Cue Ball Kelly played an exhibition before a ballroom full of 1,000 people in Chicago, demonstrating some of the trick shots that Cue Ball had taught her. She used a regulation-sized cue, which was taller than she was.

When Loree Jon--always that; never just Loree--was 15, she wowed a crowd at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, becoming the youngest world champion ever, earning a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records in the process.

Now she is 23, a five-time champion, world pocket billiards champion, 1988 women’s player of the year, veteran of tournaments and exhibitions and television shoot-outs, wife of pool pro Sammy Jones, and still the little girl whose dad opened a 10-table emporium in Greenbrook, N.J., and eventually called the place Loree Jon’s Billiards.

The sisters never discouraged her from playing pool. On the contrary, they often freed her schedule so she could have time for it. They knew Loree Jon’s father ran a respectable business, that her mother had won amateur titles, that her older sister Nancy was a champion. The nuns did not have a River City attitude toward pocket billiards. They saw it not as corruptive, but as the healthy, wholesome pastime it had become.

“Every day when I was in grammar school, I had an hour for lunch, and I lived a half-block from the school, and I used to hurry home as fast as I can. My mom would have my sandwich already made, and I’d eat that, and then I’d play her in a 25-point straight-pool match,” Jones said. “We did that forever.”

She wasn’t some punk in a black leather jacket with a cigarette dangling from her lips and a tattoo of Woody Woodpecker smoking a cigar on her arm. She was just a kid, going home to practice, learning to excel, the same way Janet Evans went straight from school to a swimming pool, or Debi Thomas to an ice rink.

“Anyway, people don’t ‘hang out in pool halls’ anymore,” Jones said. “I hate that image.”

What also makes her cringe is any time somebody associates pool with gambling. These people are preoccupied with the Fast Eddie Felson mystique, that pool is strictly for hustlers, that you count up your money at the end of the game and the person with the biggest pile is the winner. This betting aspect spoiled much of the “Color of Money” movie for her.

“The only thing the movie did was bring more people into the billiard rooms around the country,” she said. “They act like gambling does not go on in any other sport in the whole world but billiards. I wish that a movie would show some other things about our sport, just once.”

OK, here’s the story line: Paul Newman forgets all about Tom Cruise and takes a top woman player under his wing. Teaches her all he knows. Then, she teaches him a thing or two.

“I do believe, with all my heart, and my husband and the other men believe the same thing, that the women are the ones who are going to bring the sport out, make it more and more popular,” Jones said. “The men are great. You need men in every sport, obviously. But, the women are the ones who are changing the image of the sport.

“More women are coming into the billiard rooms. They aren’t afraid. A whole new group of girls are coming in. Most of the pool rooms you’ll find today are usually clean, beautiful places. I mean, yuppies go there now.

“And, there’s more women in the audience at the tournaments now. Different people are coming to watch us play--women, important people, movie stars, corporate types, possible sponsors, people who could help us financially. It’s not just the Joe Schmoes off the street. You see a better class of people.

“Pool is a game for the ‘90s. Even the Olympics are getting interested. I think a lot of young girls in this country are going to start telling their moms and dads that they want to grow up to become pool players. Times are definitely changing.”