Top Players Pool Their Talents at Tournament

Twenty-one sharply dressed men with serious eyes and slim black leather cases have converged here at an unassuming strip-mall pool hall.

The very best in the nation, some among the world’s finest, did not come to play pool.

Their game is three-cushion billiards.

This arcane American offspring of an 18th-century French game is played with three balls on a pocket-less table of electrically heated Italian slate that is lined with costly Belgian wool-blended silk.

And this week saw the U.S. Billiards Assn.’s five-day 1996 national championship open in Simi Valley because few other halls boast the custom-built tournament-quality tables the game demands.

Three-cushion billiards, its finest players say, is dying in America.

While pampered billiards pros in Europe lounge amid catered food and full-time TV coverage, the game lives on in dusty U.S. pool halls in relative obscurity because it is so hard to master, said player Mike Lombardo Sr.

“Pool is like checkers,” confided the round, ruddy owner of Oasis Billiards Club, the venue for the championship. “This is like three-level chess.”

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While European experts share their billiards skills with other players, Americans clasp them close to the vest. The only way to gain any skill is play, play, play--and hope that an old-timer will take you under his wing.

“That’s why I believe the sport is dying out in this country,” Lombardo said, “because so many of the great players died and took those secrets to their graves.”

Secrets locked up in three, 62-millimeter balls and a deceptively simple set of rules.

Four-time U.S. champ Frank Torres of Las Vegas demonstrates how the game is played: Each player gets a cue ball--one gets yellow, one white. Use the cue stick to fire your cue ball across the table. It must hit the other cue ball, a third (red) ball, and at least three cushions in the course of the shot.

A successful shot, called a billiard, earns you a point and the right to shoot again. Fail and you yield the table to your opponent. First player to reach 35 points wins.

“One, two, three,” said Torres, stroking a simple shot during warmups. “Billiards.”

But mastering three-cushion billiards, they say, is akin to earning an advanced degree in mathematics and physics. The gear is finicky, almost scientific.

Tournament play includes a table “mechanic” like In Soo Park, who vacuumed dust from the table’s green baize this week, polished speed-robbing chalk off the balls and heated the four expensive hardwood tables to eliminate moisture that might slow players’ shots.

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Unlike the average barroom pool table with pockets, a good billiards table has sharp bumpers, flatter slate and smoother, cleaner felt. Cue sticks are lighter, more balanced. Balls roll fast and farther--up to 40 feet on one shot--and rebound more precisely.

Experts must learn near-infinite combinations of shots, or “systems,” and myriad subtle methods of cue stick manipulation known as “the stroke.”

The game is coming back slowly to Robert Spicknall, a Seattle metals manufacturer who picked it up again two years ago after a 1985 divorce distracted him from a professional run of several years.

At 12, Spicknall used to lose all his paper route money gambling at pool tables.

“I’d go to the bowling alley and lose my money to the big kids [playing pool] and then I’d have to tell my dad I got ripped off,” said Spicknall, now 42.

He saw his first billiards table a few years later. At first glance, he recalled, “I thought it was pretty abstract. I didn’t understand it.”

But a trip to the 1978 world tournament in Las Vegas hooked him.

He traveled around South America, shooting billiards where the game gets more respect, where good players are not so few nor far between. A friend’s daughter escorted him to private Peruvian billiard clubs, “The kind of places where the waiter was walking around with a towel on his arm--pretty posh,” recalled Spicknall.

Along with systems and the stroke, Spicknall learned the psych--or how to avoid it. Lower-class players might pretend to drop cue sticks or move around suddenly to distract him--unlike the gentlemanly pros playing in Simi Valley this week, he said.

Ignore the sharks, Spicknall learned, just play your game. “My challenge is to take control of the table and the balls and have them do my bidding,” he said.

When practice ended Wednesday morning and official play began, concentration cloaked the pool hall in a damp blanket of near-silence.

Sang Lee, 42, reigning six-time U.S. champ, fixed the table in a cobra’s stare and his cue stick in a surgeon’s grip. He slid its tip through paper-smooth fingers and gave his yellow cue ball a surgically precise poke.

That dull click signaled the start of a long, grim, quiet battle that will end Sunday with one victor.

Players shot in near silence punctuated only by the clack of balls, the rasp of chalk on cue stick tips and the occasional round of “applause,” when players signaled muted appreciation of a tricky shot by lightly snapping their fingers.

Lee and opponent George Andraos played neck and neck for the first 15 turns, or “innings.” Then Lee got a run of 10 consecutive billiards, shooting “like a machine,” as one spectator whispered.

Just after Andraos missed a particularly tough shot, Lee leaned over the table, pursed his lips, and fired off his final, perfect billiard. Now players clapped openly, a few murmuring, “Wow!”

Andraos wrung Lee’s hand, later admitting that facing the reigning U.S. champ and 1994 world champion psyched him out.

“It gets you off your game,” he said half-admiringly. “You become a spectator almost.”

Khalil Diab--boasting a PhD in entomology from Rutgers University and several billiards championships from his native Egypt--sympathized.

“The first day is tough, changing from normal games to tournament games,” said Diab, 59, an intense man of steel spectacles and balding dome who oversees all the public health clinic laboratories for Contra Costa County in Northern California.

“You stiffen up a little bit,” he said. “You try to eliminate mistakes and you wind up making more mistakes. It takes time to get your stroke back.”

With more than 40 years on the billiards tables, Diab can afford to be philosophical. He has tuned himself to a Zen-like mind set that makes him one of the best in the game.

“You have to just concentrate on what you’re doing,” he said. “If you blink, you miss.”