A daily blog that was too good to ignore
Kindly reprinted here with permission
Courtesy of Ste Williams
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Saturday 26 June 2010
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A Game of Life, Death and All That's Inbetween
Pool… Now that’s always been a massive part of my life.
I’ve loved it and hated it with equal passion over the years… and hate is a very strong word. Loathed it in fact.
However, the fascinating thing that I love about pool is that it draws so many parallels with life. When you’re at the table, YOU are in charge. Kristen Castaldo, a player from Chicago suggested I blog some thoughts I had on these…
The break shot brings the whole darn game to life. Depending on the conditions, a hard break or a cut break opens the rack and good cue ball control sets you up to with a roadmap through “life”. Your next shot ? It's up to you to play aggressive and dominate – or play the percentage, study the lay of the land and be cool, calm, clear-headed, calculating and cruel.
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The table and the balls on their own aren’t going to do anything. They won’t move. Leave them alone and they will stay exactly where they are. But when you play the cue ball it's you who played that shot and you who is responsible for what happens after. Too much English on it and miss your object ball or position – it's your fault – not the tables fault, not the cue ball's fault, not the dirty rails, not flakes of chalk on the ball… your fault. You could have looked at the table to see if the line is clean, you could have paid attention before to how the rails are playing and compensated for it, you could have looked to see if the cloth was ripped on the line you were playing or rolling into – all of this before you played the shot.
Sometimes, just a touch too much power, side, top or not enough power can have a dramatic influence on what happens to the shot and what we had expected to happen. Just the slightest miscalculation and the landscape changes.
In pool, we are blessed with being in the enviable position of being capable of effecting aspects of our reality and of truly being in charge of our own destiny / outcome. The same situation that most of us crave to be in in our everyday lives.
But back to the scenario – say you did check the table and the shot before you played it but bad luck still happened. You’re snookered or out of position after the shot… well, hey, sh!t happens dude ! Just deal with the situation you end up in.
We have all seen players explode when sh!t happens. Those that blame this or that (generally) are refusing to accept that the outcome of what they have done was pretty much down to their own actions. Just look at what they say if you get a little luck, and fluke a shot – they will always say, ”You were lucky” and by the same token – they refuse to believe that they have made a mistake, an error and that they are responsible for it. As someone close to me would say “They are measuring with two different length sticks!”. It’s always somebody elses' fault – never theirs. Now try and tell me that that attitude of theirs only stays on the table and is not something that they carry around with them in day-to-day life huh ?
Sure, blame yourself; but not the other guy, or the music being too loud, someone moving in your eye-line, or the table. It’s like hitting traffic on your way to work in the morning, or burst pipes in the house, a broken washing machine flooding the kitchen. The world won’t end; but it's how you deal with sh!t things that effect the outcome of your situation. Deal with it badly – and your world might just end. That’s not to say that other random circumstances won’t come into play after you try and act on the first situation – but we are straying into the realms of mapping life into mathematical equations (but that is for people in life that are far more intelligent than me !).
The point I’m making is that, how we respond to adversity effects (in part) the outcome of what ever situation we are in.
Think about this…
All good pool coaches will teach you a pre-shot routine, this will involve (but not limited to) – sighting the line of the shot, stance, posture, breathing, head placement, cueing and execution. Any good life coach will teach you that identifying goals and problems is key in order to resolving them and working out a plan of action (sighting), our physical presence, spacial awareness and correct resting posture places the body in a more confident mode in which to perform (stance, posture, breathing and head placement). Keep focused on your chosen course of action and follow through with conviction and commitment (cueing and execution).
The two situations are inextricably linked. It's not a coincidence.
Consider the table and the layout of the rack after the break as your life. If you take this shot, this is what will happen, if you take that one then you will end up there and have to try and get back round for the right angle to break up that cluster over there…That’s what a majority of successful people do – they take a step back (often outside of them selves and look at situations objectively); see issues – either problems in life or issues with themselves, draw up a plan address those points and remove the issues and then move forward with confidence. That’s what good pool players do. They see problems and think a few moves ahead.
Looking at a pool table is like standing over your life with the ability to see things from a more enlightened perspective than the one we see on ground level through our own eyes. See what we have to do and where we need to position ourselves to run the rack out and reach our goals.
If we were to take this a step further psychologically; certain definite alignments could be drawn between pool players’ on-table performances and their off-table lives. Whether it's the megalomaniac in us all I don’t know, but to have any interest in this game demands that you have to have a healthy batch of “control freak” in your DNA.
I won’t go as far as to say that pool teaches you how to address lifes’ problems; but, how we hold and conduct ourselves in life off-table can lend a vast amount to how we can play pool with greater success and greater authority at the table.
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