Stamina

It's been an interesting postseason for those of us at Sophie's. A couple Tuesday nights ago, three of us from the team were hanging out at at the bar enjoying a quiet, off-season night of pool. Around 7 o'clock, the bar's phone rang. Howard, the bartender, handed the phone to Freddy, saying it was something related to the pool team. It was the captain of the team from Why Not bar at 40th and 9th, asking us where we were. Turns out, our team had gotten the wild card but for whatever reason our captain had not gotten the word. Very quickly we ruled out taking a cab to Why Not to play. That wouldn't have been fair to the rest of the team. I made a bunch of phone calls and long story short we were able to reschedule the match so that we wouldn't have to post a forfeit (thanks to all involved in that, you know who you are). The rematch was this past Tuesday at Why Not and we lost to them 0-3. But it wasn't like it was a total shutout for us. Our first two players, both 4s, got to the hill in their matches, against a 5 and a 6. Then it was me, a 5, vs a 6. And it was a grinder, going over 40 innings and nearly two hours. It started out close, tied at two games a piece, then I just ran out of steam and allowed him to take the last three games in a row. Looking back, there were a handful of moments where I wish I had just taken a few more seconds on my shots. I had an easy runout in one game, but as I was preparing to go for it the palm of my bridge hand, which was sort of cupped around my opponent's 9 ball, barely, imperceptible to everyone but me, touched it. It didn't even really move the ball. But I admit here and now to the world that I should have called myself out on it. My opponent probably would have said "Go ahead, don't worry about it." Instead, I allowed it to distract me and I hastily shot and blew an opportunity to get to the hill. As they say, hindsight. I'm going to try to take a few days off from pool. Just wanted to post something about the end of the summer session (my 101st entry to this blog, as it turns out). Above is a mix of new and old team members from Sophie's. Left to right: Cary Conover, Josh Vietze, Adam Friedstein, Joseph Williams (aka Slima), Chris Cino, Grace Mangum and Wilfredo Correa.