On the starting blocks

Photo: "Pool Game" by Serge Bertasius Photography from www.freedigitalphotos.net
 

Thirty-five years is a long time.  Too long for keeping up with skills learnt in my mid-teens.  Still, I loved the sport and in the depths of the stress of family life and work, home and finance and all that modern, rat-race stuff, I needed to get back to something I loved doing.

At the age of 14 or 15, a friend of mine invited me up to the local snooker hall where I lived in Medway.  It was the snooker hall upstairs from Burtons on Gillingham High Street - not the most salubrious place in town - but the place where I was introduced to a sport I was to grow to love.  For a fairly quiet lad, it was a bit of a venture out to me, but I quickly warmed to the place and found that snooker came easily.  That's not a boast, being good at snooker was very tough, but I got the hang of the game pretty quickly, and pretty quickly I was beating my mates.  I had the ability to control the cue and control what happened to the balls on the table without having to make too much effort.  The trick was mainly in keeping a cool head and thinking through each shot, each strategy.  I fell in love with the game within a few short sessions, and the snooker clubs in the Medway Towns quickly became my regular haunts.

Photo: "Ball and Snooker Player" by Toa55 from www.freedigitalphotos.net

To get free time on the tables - because as a school kid I had little money to spend - the snooker club owner allowed the lads who showed a bit of skill to help out by brushing and maintaining the tables.  Then the older players would spend time with us mentoring.  If it was not quite coaching in the professional sense, they helped us enormously by providing us with all sorts of advice and tips, and most importantly of all, hours and hours of practise.

Fast forward to the present day, and my sport of choice is pool.  I kind of fell into this in a similar way:  a work colleague challenged me to a game.  I had played occasionally - many pubs have pool tables and I have a vague recollection of being invited to play in a team having spent a drunken New Year's Eve out with family, going to "pot a few balls" and spending the night on the table.  The formal return was not unlike this:  I rolled out of the office door on a Friday night in the depths of winter 2014 and dragged myself, half unwilling to the Cyber Cafe at Ocean Heights, put a £1 coin on the table to play "winner stays on" ..... and stayed on all night.  Once again, I was hooked, and this time, much more seriously.

Photo:  "Pool" by James Barker from www.freedigitalphotos.com

Now I play in the Gibraltar League for the NAAFI bar, usually on a Thursday evening during the season, and I play the rankings, to try to qualify for international competitions.  The League is a pleasant way to enjoy the competitive game, practise and improve.  Playing competitively on a regular basis is essential to keep your game sharp.  The competition in the rankings is more serious.  You are competing against top local players and we all want to represent Gibraltar at international level.  It's a matter of pride.

My focus at the moment is to carve out the time I need to practise, to draw back out of myself those skills I learnt in my youth as a snooker player, adapt these to pool, and come back from the Nations Cup having aquitted myself well for my country.  I'm on my way!

Gibraltar Pool Association