Chalk One Up for Government Statisticians

Friends, we got trouble . . . trouble right here in Ventura County . . . trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for:

Puh-leeze!

What else is there to say of the dire news about pool?

There have been no major announcements, but the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission--an agency of your federal government--has quietly estimated that the harmless passion of Minnesota Fats sent 5,930 people to U.S. emergency rooms in 1996. That is up 50% from the previous year.

Pool!

By contrast, hunting led to 930 injuries and 87 deaths, according to a trade group. No one died at pool.

(Sign of a wasted youth: I’m terrible at pool but fabulous at statistics about the risk of playing it. What’s wrong with me, Doc?)

Tom Carver couldn’t believe it either.

Carver owns a poolroom in Newbury Park called the Bent Cue. In his five years of racking ‘em up, he has seen only one injury: A repair man re-felting a table took two stitches when a pair of pliers slipped and bonked his head.

“We’ve never had a fight here,” he said. “In five years, I’ve only had to escort three people out. I’ve never even heard of anyone being hurt.”

At Black Tie Billiards in Camarillo, the regulars were equally puzzled.

“What are they gonna do?” asked a burly player named Don as he unzipped his leather cue case. “Put out a surgeon general’s warning?’

Like most newish pool rooms, the Black Tie is aggressively nonthreatening. Couples come in for a game and a bottled water (beer is also available) before the movies. Plush stools line a bar topped with dark green marble. Owner Clarence Bales, a dapper man with a silver mustache, wears a tuxedo shirt-front and dispenses tall cafe mochas for $3.

“Injuries?” he asked, disbelieving. “To think a gentleman’s sport would be--” He paused, groping for a term to frame the slander. “It’s a game of finesse,” he said. “You just don’t see injuries.”

Racking up another round of nine-ball, Don agreed.

“Back in the ‘60s, I was at a place in Port Hueneme and some gal drove right through the poolroom window, right up to the tables,” he said. “But no one was hurt.”

From a poster on the wall, “Machine Gun Lou” Butera watched as Don sank the cue ball three times. Butera, a hall-of-famer who once ran 150 balls in 21 minutes, was the grand old man of Ventura County billiards before he sold his Simi Valley poolroom a few years ago.

From his new room in Las Vegas, he, too, wondered.

“Why not say that people swallow pingpong balls or something? I had a sister put a screw up her nose once. What are we supposed to do--go after the hardware industry?”

In fact, a 3-year-old girl was among those put in harm’s way by pool, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. She was rushed to an emergency room after shoving a miniature cue ball up her left nostril.

The commission looks over logs of sports injuries from emergency rooms across the country. It numbers the walking wounded: Teenagers whacked over the head with cues; a college student whose tooth is chipped by a backfiring cue ball; children breaking bones in leaps from the basement pool table; grown men felled by splinters in their shooting thumbs and chalk dust in their eyes.

The producers of “ER” could pluck many a subplot from the true stories found by government researchers:

* A 59-year-old woman is “accidentally struck on the hand with a pool stick by a vendor at pumpkin festival.”

* A 43-year-old man “was playing pool and felt extremely weak,” apparently from a brain malfunction called toxic encephalopathy.

* A 23-year-old man “hit corner of pool table at bar with fist,” breaking his finger.

* A 67-year-old woman “experiencing pelvic pain at the bar had a couple shots of whiskey, got up from bar stool and fell to floor after grabbing pool table.”

Of course, danger is where you find it. If the whiskey-swilling woman had grabbed a bishop instead of a pool table, the government would have a chess injury on its hands.

Life is risk. One wrong move and you will swallow that toothpick. As for pool, there is only one encouraging note: According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it’s 9,000% safer than softball.