By Failing to Heed a Cue, the Newcomer Was Marked for Life

He got hustled, and his ego will never get over it.

Looking for a beer and some relaxation after a particularly white-knuckle day at the office, he strolled into a Northridge pool hall, hoping for a respite with a friendly game of billiards before facing the drudgery of his untidy apartment.

In retrospect, that was:

Strike one.

The Billiard Connection, as it turned out, served only nonalcoholic beer and a rainbow of sodas and Snapple drinks. And the friendly game of billiards was about to become less than relaxing, despite the sign that said “No Gambling” in bright red letters four inches tall.

“Are you looking for a game?” asked a hip-looking youngster decked out in a baseball cap worn backward, street-tough-wanna-be style.

Slumped shoulders, his eyes rounded and wide, he seemed young and harmless.

Mostly harmless. A kid in his late teens.

“Sure,” the newcomer said, laying his black-linen pool cue on the lime-green table. “Eight-ball?”

“How about nine-ball,” came the reply.

“I hate nine-ball,” the newcomer said. “Too much luck involved.”

The challenger reluctantly agreed to a game of good old-fashioned eight-ball. He had an innocent-sounding question:

“What do you want to play for?”

At first the novice hesitated. Sure, in the last year or so he’d been playing a couple times a week and, yeah, a year ago he went so far as to invest in his own pool cue. But he doesn’t play well enough to deserve that 20-ounce Huebler cue.

And pocket billiards to him had always been a game played on a table with faded felt and warped bumpers in the dinginess of his fraternity’s basement room at Pomona College in Claremont.

He had never played for money.

Sensing the hesitation, the would-be opponent softened his challenge. “We’ll just play for time,” he said, meaning the loser pays for the table.

No problem, the newcomer thought.

They played best of seven, and the kid won four games to three. “I’ve played better games,” the newcomer thought.

But then again, so had his opponent.

“You want to play for five bucks?” the kid asked, laying down a gauntlet with his plain house cue. “Just to make it more interesting.”

The newcomer quickly sized up his opponent, a greasy-haired, mischievous-looking kid in knee-length shorts and high-top basketball shoes that made him appear shorter than he really was.

That was when ego kicked in. “I could beat this kid,” he thought.

Strike two.

He lost badly, 4-1. In the process, he learned his opponent’s name was Howard, and he is a Pierce College student who can be found most days at this pool hall with his buddies, trying to impress their girls or playing nine-ball--always for money.

The newcomer was irritated. He was mad. He was suckered.

So he played Howard again. Double or nothing.

(Maybe you can see what comes next? Yup. That’s right.)

Strike three. Yer out.

His wallet lighter, the newcomer went to the restroom and looked in the mirror for a flashing neon sign on his forehead reading: “chump.” Surely there must be one.

It wasn’t the money, which, in all, was about $20. It was the sense of having been taken, like going to a drive-through fast-food restaurant and getting home only to find that they forgot your onion rings.

But, of course, he only had himself and, as a female friend put it later, “that male ego of yours” to blame. The way his opponent carried himself and the surroundings set off all sorts of warning bells and whistles in the newcomer’s head, which he stubbornly ignored. He wanted to show himself what a hotshot he was.

Looking around, there were a lot of hotshots in that billiard room.

Rich is the house pro and, by consensus, the best of the lot. His job is to play pool and organize weekly tournaments.

But he doesn’t like the “House Pro” T-shirt he has to wear, complaining “it cuts down on the action I get. People get intimidated.”

Some of the other regulars, about half of them students from Pierce, Cal State Northridge or nearby high schools, he said, are “pretty good. They can be challenging.”

Around the room on a weekday night, regulars go up against each other, like rams butting heads for leadership of the pack. The ones that are real good don’t even finish their games. When all that is left on the table is the nine-ball, most of the time they wrap it up, as if the last shot was a gimme.

A lot of those “gimme” shots looked pretty tough to the newcomer, though.

Now, practicing by himself, he looked down at his cue with disdain, wishing its gleaming shaft wasn’t so straight, its weight so perfectly balanced; wishing he was more deserving of the cue.

He looked for chalk for his cue, and, finding none nearby, he went over to another table, against which another player was leaning.

“What do you want to play for?” the player asked.

“No,” he said. “I just wanted some chalk.”