Staring down a date with the Duchess of Doom, I was both clueless and cueless.
All around me, men and women of serious mien roamed the Riviera lobby with slender, quiver-like devices slung over their shoulders, ready for their rendezvous at a 3 1/2-foot-by-7-foot, felt-top table. But they did not have to duel with the Duchess, or to do it empty-handed.
My kingdom for a cue stick!
As it turned out, it cost me only $45, on sale from a dealer in an exhibits area off the lobby. I would wield my new weapon once, to break a diamond-shaped cluster of nine hard, shiny balls. Allison Fisher, a.k.a. the Duchess of Doom, put them—and me—away, one by one, pocket by pocket.
Familiar to anyone who follows Women's Professional Billiards Association matches on ESPN2, Fisher earned her sinister sobriquet by winning more than 40 professional titles and more money than anyone on the women's tour. She was at the Riviera this week as spokesperson for the American Poolplayers Association, whose 2005 Team Championships continue through Saturday.
One of her duties, along with signing autographs, is to play 9-Ball challenge matches like the one I started Friday. In an hour, she dispatched a succession of men who broke and watched. Two got lucky, one by pocketing the 9-Ball on the break, the other by knocking in the 9 with the cue ball after it hit the 1. (The object is to make the 9, but you have to shoot at the lowest-numbered ball first.)
Fisher, who is 37 and slender with short blonde hair, is one of the new faces of a game that is centuries-old—it is believed to have started as indoor croquet—but which for decades has been associated with pudgy old men playing in disreputable dives. The same was true of poker until its recent cable-show renaissance. So I wanted to know if the game I started playing in my parents' basement could be the next poker.
"Yeah, absolutely," Fisher told me between autographs Sunday. "There's a few more TV shows coming out about pool, and yeah, there's no reason why not." In addition to WPBA matches on ESPN2, pool has spawned BallBreakers on Game Show Network. "There's over 40 million Americans playing the game," Fisher continued. "There's no reason why not. It's just ... getting the corporate sponsorship and getting the right eyes watching it."
For the 250,000 members of the APA, pool already is poker and more, and the Riviera is what Binion's Horseshoe used to be for the card game.
The APA stages its singles championships at the Riviera in April, and its team championships draw more than 10,000 cue aficionados from all over North America.
The tournament turns the Riviera's convention center into the world's largest neighborhood bar. Hundreds of Bally Cougar coin-operated tables, each lit by a suspended lamp, recede in regular ranks through the vast spaces of two banquet rooms. Pop music blares through the smoky air, counterpointed by the concussive crack of cueballs dispersing their racked cousins. Amber Bock is one of the APA's sponsors, its logo on every overhead lamp, and mobile bars dispense it, and harder drinks, in both halls.
"They're doing the same thing they're used to doing on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in their local leagues ... which is going out and having a few beers and playing pool," says APA spokesman Jason Bowman, who hastens to add, "I don't think a lot of them drink real heavily because I don't know how beneficial that is ..."
It might be the Vegas-vacation version of Thursday night at Mickey's, but for most in the 1,015 teams playing in three tournament formats, it is the climax of a year's Thursday nights, and they take it as seriously as would Tiger, Phil or Vijay on Sunday afternoon.
"It's real big," said Craig Webster, making a first visit to the tournament with a team from Montgomery, Alabama. "We all went back and took our vacations, brought our families, and saved our money. And we also came up here to win this thing, not just play in it ... You've got to have that attitude."
Bob Graeser knows that attitude.
"I had a team that played in this tournament two years ago and they actually made it to the final round, and they told me they had been dreaming about playing in a tournament like this for 20 years," said Graeser, who has been the local APA franchise-holder for half that time. Graeser coordinates the competition for about 100 teams, whose five-to-eight members pay the APA a $20 annual fee and $7 weekly to play.
The APA is one of several amateur leagues around the country, and Graeser's local franchise is one of several affiliated with them. The APA boasts a handicap rating system that helps level competition, with a team-total handicap limit. "Usually the higher-skilled players are the ones that start to form a team," said Graeser, "and they're out hunting for the weaker players, and so the weaker players are in more demand than the higher-skilled players."
That's my kind of game— picked last no longer.
The championships comprise a women's 8-Ball tournament and coed 9-Ball and 8-Ball tournaments, all modified single-elimination format, meaning each team gets a chance to play at least twice. One of the two large halls also hosts a range of "Mini-Mania" tournaments for which players merely need to sign up.
Avid as the APA members are, they're no index of the game's potential popularity. Saturday I headed for Mandalay Bay, where the newly formed International Pool Tour pitted two legendary players, Mike Sigel and Loree Jon Jones, in the first "World 8-Ball Championship," an event clearly designed to raise pool's profile. About 500 people watched Sigel dispatch Jones in two sets, 9-2, 9-2, in an arena rimmed with television cameras.
Never having watched two high-caliber players in action, I found the competition gripping, with Jones the underdog favorite. In pure Vegas fashion, Sigel got a $150,000 tray of legal tender, while Jones settled for a large imitation check for $75,000. While they posed with their spoils, I flagged down actor Paul Sorvino and asked if pool was the next poker.
"Well, it should be," he said. "Poker is a mental game, but so is pool ... It seems to me that pool is a combination of a game and a sport. It's a magnificent hybrid.
"Especially now with what Kevin is doing, raising the stakes. So much prize money, it's got to ... I'm not going to watch somebody run down the block for 50 bucks, but if they're going to run down the block for a hundred-thousand, I'm going to come out and watch that."
"Kevin" is self-styled "media mogul" Kevin Trudeau, known to insomniacs for infomercials touting nontraditional health treatments. Depending upon your take, he is either an antigovernment hero whose best-selling book, Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About, rips drug companies and federal regulators, or a snake-oil salesman. Last year he settled a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission for $2 million. The settlement bans him from making infomercials "that advertise any type of product, service, or program to the public, except for truthful infomercials for informational publications," according to an FTC news release. Also, he served time in the early 1990s for credit-card fraud, which Reuters says he "dismissed as nothing more than a youthful indiscretion."
So the IPT's success, and pool's popularity, might ride on Trudeau's reputation. The IPT website (internationalpooltour.com) promises the Sigel-Jones match will be televised in September, but does not say by whom.
Back at the Riviera, where $750,000 was on the line in a variety of tournaments, teams with names such as Rack 'N' Run and Chalk is Cheap were duking it out under less-glamorous circumstances. Superfreaks from Michigan was hoping to do well in the team shirt contest as well as the Ladies 8-Ball tournament. Clad in colorful tie-dyed T-Shirts, they told me Friday they'd organized their team —named for the song on their tavern jukebox—with an eye to winning here.
When I ran into them again on Sunday, they'd just been eliminated by Pink Ladies from Louisiana. But Fifth Place was good for $1,000 and not a little pride. "We're pleased," said Michelle Bollaert. "It came down to the last match, sudden death." The team gathered in a circle for a celebratory toast, with calls of "Way to play, guys!" and "Cheers!" As it turned out, they would do even better in their tournament's shirt contest, taking third place.
Pool already was popular enough for these weeknight warriors, and Graeser said it could start to match poker's appeal. "Pool has come out of the dark, dank pool rooms, smoky pool rooms that people used to whisper about," he said. "Almost everybody plays some pool along the way."
You can follow the APA championships at
http://www.poolplayers.com. If you want to start a team, contact Bob Graeser at 256-4061.