Pool Hall Proxemics

There are some very specific proxemic rules at Sacco's, and at every other pool hall I've ever been a part of. The first has to do with the physical requirements of pool playing as a sport: the position of the body while shooting, the ability to walk unimpeded around the table. There's always a potential for conflict while two players are at adjacent tables, so one rule is that if someone is visibly further along in the shot process, s/he goes first. So if I'm considering my options but the guy at the next table is clearly lining up his chosen shot, I stay at a minimum about three feet away until he's finished with both the shot and its immediate aftermath. In terms of sheer function, I could of course be within about six inches and not impede his stroke, but it would clearly be impinging on his play space.

Edward Hall and other proxemics researchers say that most of us have a personal space area that's somewhat egg-shaped; fairly close behind and to the sides, but more extensive out ahead. That's both larger and more exaggerated for pool players: a little bigger behind us, quite a bit bigger at the sides, and very extended to the front. It's definitely considered unsportsmanlike to stand behind the line of someone's shot or to about 30 degrees of either side of that line. So the non-shooter is also in constant motion to avoid that kind of visual interference as the shooter moves around the table. If you get "caught" — that is, if your opponent goes down to shoot while you happen to be facing him — you stand dead still and look anywhere other than at the shooter.

The idea of territoriality and privacy is somewhat hard to visualize but again is perfectly understood by all of the regulars. Your attention should only be on the table itself, on the person or people also involved in the game you're in, on the television in the upper back corner, or on any spectators who happen to be attending to your game. It is impolite and immodest to look at an adjacent game or table to which you have no direct interest or close friendship relations. So if I'm playing on Table 1 and another match in my own league is on Table 2, or if Steve or Carlos are playing on Table 2, I can look at that; but if Table 2 is occupied by someone I don't know well, I can only make occasional eye contact with the players and not take any close interest in their game. This is true even for the tables furthest away from you; you don't get to look at the people at the other end of the room for more than brief fractions of a second at a time. If you're of opposite gender, you'll get labeled as a perv; if you're of the same gender, you'll be silently asking for physical conflict.

(We don't often consider the privacy implications of distant sight in public places, but you can easily make someone uncomfortable by locking your eyes onto them at a distance of 50 feet in a crowded room. If we take Altman's idea seriously that privacy is about control of information, then someone staring at us is clearly gathering information for a reason we don't know, and that's a very uncomforable consideration.)

Spectating is also a very specific social action. Players who are better than the norm expect to be watched, and usually don't mind as long as you understand the rest of those rules I've laid out above. And don't talk while someone's shooting. But it's not at all polite to be a "spectator" of crappy players. Again, I think that the presumption there is "I'm no good so clearly he can't be interested in my game, therefore he's interested in me and I don't know why."

A final bit of proxemic advice: if there are balls on a table and no players around, don't move the balls. It may be that they're playing a long-term and continuous game like straight pool or one-pocket, and have agreed on taking a break for biological functions of more or less dubious health implications. When Frank and I play straight pool, one of the things we always wonder is whether the cue ball and the open ball will be where we left them when we come back from a break. This is a matter of crucial importance in straight pool; once 14 balls are gone, you rack those 14, leaving the cue ball and the last remaining object ball in their last positions, and attempt to make the one non-racked ball in a way that sends the cue ball into the rack and opens up further shots. So if there are pool balls on a table, that's a territorial marker as sure as planters on a porch; leave 'em alone.

Pool Hall with Feeling

My emotional experience of playing pool at Sacco's starts long before I leave the house. I was sitting around this morning (Saturday), working on grading and responses for my Environmental Psychology class, and I noticed that it was about 10:45. Sacco's opens on Saturdays at 10:30. Gee, I could be there already... I'll do a couple more of these... gee, it's almost 11:30... maybe I can leave the rest of these until after I get home...

I have a real anticipation about this. Interestingly, it's not because playing pool is "fun." But I'll talk more about that later.

Finally, I pick up my cue case and ball case and walk out to the car. I take the same northward route up Bow Street to Dexter to Broadway to PowderHouse Square for all kinds of trips -- to the grocery store, to the gym, to leave town for Western Mass... but it feels different when I go this way to play pool. It's almost gravitational, like I'm being pulled down the road.

Lots of traffic toward the end of the trip today — there's some kind of marching band festival today in Davis Square. My normal street down to parking is closed off. I keep driving southward until I come to a street that takes me over to Mass Ave, then loop back and miraculously find a parking space immediately outside the door of Sacco's.

In martial arts (at least in Tae Kwon Do, the one I used to do), there's a sequence of starting a session that's intended to help you leave the world behind. The dressing room is at the back, so you come in, bow toward the Korean flag, and walk around the mats to the changing area. You change out of your street clothes and into your gi, walk back out to the mats, and bow again to the Korean flag and to the master. In its own way, Sacco's has for me that same sequence that allows me to externalize everything else and just be present. Cleaning out pockets and putting everything on the side table... screwing the cue together and taking out chalk... putting balls on the table, cleaning lint off the cloth... filling the water bottle... and I'm ready. It's a four- or five-minute ritual that helps me close off the world.

It's Saturday, so nothing but practice. I have nothing specific I need to work on today except the ability to sharpen my focus. I'm seeing the pocket-to-ball line exquisitely well today, and when I go down to shoot, I'm watching the cue ball hit my contact point very well. It's kind of like meditation, where you're supposed to do nothing but focus on your breathing. Try that for ten breaths, and you'll almost always find that your mind has wandered after three or four. Pool is like that. Focus on nothing but the contact point. When I don't think about my stroke, my stroke is better. I'm able to stop the cue ball almost effortlessly, or draw it backward several feet, or have it die softly against the side rail. All by setting what I want to do in my mind before I go down, and then seeing nothing but the contact point on the object ball. I'm regularly making shots I struggled with even a month ago — back cuts, banks, dead rails, long safeties — just because I'm seeing more attentively.

A psychologist, Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, has written extensively about an experience he calls "flow," in which you lose track of time, in which your normal sensory perception is distorted (like seeing the line on the table), in which you no longer think but simply do. Flow isn't fun, it isn't hard, it isn't challenging... it just is. When you try to make flow happen, you keep it from happening. It is an emotional experience, in its own way, but it's not pleasure.

A hundred years ago this year, some Japanese scientists challenged the notion that we only have four tastes (based on specific chemistry of taste buds on different parts of the tongue) — sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. They showed that there was a fifth one, which they called umami, or "richness;" the kind of savory intensity we associate with Portabello mushrooms, for instance, or beef stock, or a strong Cheddar cheese. Flow is kind of like the umami of the emotional range; hard to describe in everyday terms, but wholly distinctive and unmistakable.

Playing pool is one of the very few things I ever do in which I think of nothing else while I'm doing it. I'm not worried about work, I'm not thinking about my partner or our cats, I'm not thinking about money or credit card payments. It's all umami...

100 on my mind...

I usually go to Sacco's three times a week, and each one is a different mental event. On Saturday afternoons, I go to practice for three or four hours -- the place is usually pretty dead, no one around but Roger at the desk. On Sundays, I play in my weekly league. But the third event is the one that's probably the most purely enjoyable: my weekly appointment with Frank to play straight pool. Frank is a retired petroleum engineer who now works at his second career as a crime analyst for the Somerville Police Department, and works for fun a couple nights a week at Sacco's from 6-10.

I usually arrive a little before six, and try to park on the street because the meters quit running at 6:00 instead of the 8:00 of the public parking lot across the street. I can tell if Frank is already there or not by looking for his black Cadillac STS. I park, put a quarter or two into the meter, and then pull my cue case, set of balls, and water bottle out of the back seat and walk inside.

The first thing I do is to listen for the sounds that will tell me whether the place is busy or not. If I hear bowling, then I know there'll be a lot of folks around; if not, then I can either hear a pool ball or the TV behind the desk, and I'll know there's hardly anyone in yet. The hallway is covered with decades of news clippings and old bowling photos, but I hardly see those at all any more; I walk right by. When I first started going there, they were one of the elements that drew me in -- the whole place is a kind of candlepins museum, and the foyer is an introduction to that history. But now I just go past them all.

I come around the corner and see Dave working behind the desk, usually with his laptop open. I put my cue case down on the side table next to the microwave, carry the ball case to Table 1, and scatter balls across the cloth. Opening the cue case, I pull out the butt of my playing cue and the older of the two shafts that fit it (since we're playing straight pool, there aren't any opening break shots, so I leave my break cue in the case, unlike Saturday and Sunday). I take the joint protectors off the two halves of the cue, screw the butt and shaft together, and lay it on the table. I put the protectors into the small pocket of the case, pull out the three cubes of chalk, and put those on the rail. Once I pick up my cue, Dave turns on the table lights -- the meter only runs when the lights are on, so Dave's saving me a dime or so by waiting until I'm ready to start playing.

I look over the pattern of balls on the table, looking for shots where I can stop the cue ball dead and have a shot at a subsequent ball. At the beginning of a rack, I'm usually trying to see four or five balls ahead, so I'm thinking eleven side - four corner - six corner, with a couple of inches of draw - ten opposite end - fifteen side. Okay, so 11-4-6-10-15. Once I get through the six ball, I'm now looking a ball or two past the 15 that I'd already identified as the end of my opening sequence. "That's blocked... that's blocked... looks like the 9 is next, so how can I get there? Probably a drag shot, about a foot of run..."

Don't worry that you don't know what I'm talking about here. I'm just narrating what's in my head...

Stop. Stop. Draw. Stop. Drag. Stop left. Miss.

When I miss, one of three things has almost always happened. The first is that I've shot harder than I wanted to, and the pocket has rejected the ball. The second is that I've had a shot that had to run almost parallel to the rail, and I have a hard time seeing those -- I often over-cut those so that the ball rolls exactly parallel to the rail, which isn't what I want. But the third reason for missing is what pool players call "going blind:" I've stopped looking at my contact point on the target ball and I'm thinking ahead to what I want to do next. You really have to focus on strategy when you're standing, and then leave that all aside and think about nothing but that one shot when you're down.

A word about aim. When I'm playing well, what I'm seeing is an imaginary line that runs from the center of the pocket through the center of the ball I'm aiming at. To make the shot, I have to put the cue ball at the tangent point where that imaginary line would emerge from my side of the ball. I really do see a kind of faint line, about an eighth of an inch wide and almost the same color as the cloth but a little lighter. There's no line there, of course, but when I'm playing well, I see it almost as though someone had drawn it on the cloth.

One of the new league players, a local music teacher, arrives to practice. One of the unspoken rules of pool halls is that if the place has enough open tables, you never take one that's adjacent to one in use. The three tables that are in the best condition are 1, 2 and 7, so this player takes 7, which is diagonal to mine.

Frank comes in a couple of minutes before six, and we toss the coin to open the match. I win the toss and make Frank break (breaking is a huge disadvantage in straight pool). He leaves a ball open. I make it, and play a safety. Frank and I trade safeties for four or five shots, and he makes a loose ball. Then he thinks he sees a combination in the rack, a "dead shot" that can't go anywhere but into the pocket. I'm not so sure, but he feels brave and takes a go at it. Turns out I was right, and now that the balls are opened up around the table, I run out the last twelve to take a 13-1 lead.

We play for a couple of hours before Frank decides it's time for a smoke break. We put the cues down on the table, Dave turns off the table light, and we grab a couple of chairs and sit on the front step. That's when we catch up with what we've each been doing for the past week -- the presentation he does once a month for the Mayor, the classes I'm teaching, his son's band playing at the Middle East. Just friends staying friends.

After his White Owl burns down, we head back inside and rejoin the game where we'd left off. I'm leading 57-47 in a game to 100. (If either of us were any good, two hours would be more than enough time to get to 100. But that presumes that one or the other of us would regularly pull out a run of 30 or 40... I think Frank's high run is eleven, and mine is 14. I have a video of a tournament in which the German player Rolf Souquet comes to the table down 39-30, and stays at the table for a little less than an hour and wins 150-39.)

The second half of the game is where things usually are determined; if I'm playing poorly, we'll stay close, but if I'm pretty loose, I'll open up a lead. And so too for tonight, in which my ten-ball lead ends up as a 29-point win. Frank and I shake hands, I unscrew my cue, and reverse the sequence of storage that I started with three hours earlier. Once everything's packed away, I usually go into the bathroom and wash my hands; the heel of my bridge hand is grimy from all the chalk dust imbedded into the cloth of the table, and my cue hand (which I also chalk with) has a heavy layer of green chalk dust between my fingers.

Out to the car (it's dark now), put things away, and drive home. If I had to describe to you my route to get from Sacco's to my apartment a mile and a half away, you'd never find it. I do it with no conscious thought except for watching the traffic.

Sacco's and the Body

The poolroom at Sacco's is about 40' across and 30' deep, and has room for eight tournament-sized tables. They're in two rows of four, each row lined up side by side with 4' of distance between tables. (I haven't been able to upload photos from my cell phone, so I'll be as descriptive as I can. But you can get a little bit of a sense of things from the link to their website.)

The most obvious embodiment of the space has to do with the pool tables themselves. Their outside dimensions are 9' x 5', and the height to the top of the rail is 31.5" (the regulation playing surface is exactly 30" above the floor). I'm 5'5" or so, and my waist is at 35" high. That means that when I bend over the table, my waist is just barely above the rail. There are good and bad things about this. The good thing is that when I'm down over a shot, my chin is right down on the cue and my eyes are only 4" above the table height, allowing me to sight down the cue like a rifle. Good for accuracy. But the bad part is that, fully stretched out over the table, I can only reach out with my bridge (left) hand about 4', so I can't reach shots that taller players can easily get to (that's why they make the mechanical bridge, to extend your reach).

A second thing about the height of the table is that when standing, my eyes are almost exactly 5' above the ground. So when I stand at full height to survey overall position and decide on my route around the table, I don't have as "true" a look at it as someone who's 6' tall and looking more directly downward (if you watch pool on TV, you'll see a camera pointed straight down at the table from the ceiling — that gives you the truest sense of the geometry of the overall layout). So I make up for that by walking around the table more, imagining where each ball has to stop in order to leave me the shot I want for the next ball. Taller players walk around less, because they can see paths more easily from their higher vantage point. There's a very real way in which pool is a more experiential or phenomenological game for me than for most people, because I have to walk behind every shot path before I shoot, and I'm looking at the balls and table much more at eye level.

The third thing about the table height is that it almost completely precludes players shorter than about 5' from ever playing well. When I bend over and hold the butt of the cue in my back (right) hand, I've got my elbow at a height that allows my forearm to hang down perfectly perpendicular with the floor. Your elbow is the pivot point for moving the cue back and forth; you don't want your upper arm to move at all, but just to let your forearm act as a pendulum. Because of my height, my back hand is about 2" higher than the rail, just perfect for keeping the cue level. But any shorter, and I'd have to put some kind of hitch in my stroke to accommodate the fact that my "correct position" would have the back of the cue lower than the front.

The final thing about the table height (and Holly Whyte would have predicted this) is that a 31.5" rail height is perfect for sitting on, and also convenient for resting your bottle of Mountain Dew on. Which are both the last things you want someone doing. So Mike and Frank and the other guys who work there are always alert to crowds of young people putting drinks on the table or sitting on the adjacent tables to watch a game.

Okay, so that's the anthropometrics. Let's talk a minute about the other senses in the room. The room has no overall lighting, but rather has a fluorescent luminaire suspended about 8' above each table, a pair of fluorescent tubes running side by side down the length of the table. So the room as a whole is pretty dark, especially when I'm practicing and nobody else is in there. This helps focus my concentration on the table itself, an island of illumination in a larger pool of gloom. But one long wall of the room (parallel to the street outdoors) is an expanse of translucent glass block from about 6' to 10' high for its full length. During daylight hours, this can create some problems with glare while you're trying to shoot in that direction. At night, of course, (the natural domain of the pool player), it's just as dark as the rest of the wall.

The sound of the room is remarkably varied over the course of the day. When I'm practicing by myself, the only sound is the click of ball against ball and the clunk of a ball going into a pocket. It's almost monastic in its purity. But then some crowd of young people will come in, and the jukebox will go on. Table One, the tournament table right next to the counter where I most often play, is also right in the line of fire for the jukebox, so it's very often the case that I'm getting 90 dB in the side of the head while I'm trying to figure out the cue ball's path around the table. And typically, the music isn't very good, either... lots of AC/DC, for instance, which I think of as the children's training wheels of metal. If we're going to have metal, why not some Opeth or Tool? Geez...

If you're playing against someone else, there's a particular pool-player's etiquette that also contributes to the sonic environment. Most often, when someone else makes a good shot, you acknowledge that not by saying "nice shot," or by applauding, but rather by thumping the butt of your cue down on the floor a couple of times. Bump-bump-bump. So FYI, if you ever hear that sound in a pool hall, you know two things. One is that someone just made a particularly nice play, and the other is that they know a lot more about pool than you do and you'd probably learn some new things if you played against them.

When there's a lot of bowlers, there's a constant crashing of pins coming from the other room. If it's a bowling league, the pins are about all you hear. But if it's a party night of kids from Tufts (often enough) or an afternoon birthday party of six-year-olds, then the bowling noise is accompanied by squealing. No matter what, though, if you need to take a cell phone call, you'd better walk outdoors for a minute.

The tactile environment is mostly focused on play — the cue shaft sliding across your hand, the pressing of your bridge hand down into the roughness of the woolen cloth, the scratching of chalk across the tip. The floor is carpeted, indoor-outdoor carpet that probably hasn't been changed out since the Nixon Administration but which at least keeps the noise down a little bit. The walls are a kind of deeply ridged wood paneling, painted a dark leather-red — the vertical indentations make a great guide for leaning your cues up against so they don't fall down while you're outside on the phone.

And one of the things I notice most about Sacco's is the thermal environment. These are not people afraid of spending money on space conditioning. When you walk in from the snow in February, you'll hit an immediate 75-degree wall of defrost. And in the summer, when it's 93 degrees and sticky outside, the huge 1950s air conditioner -- about eight feet tall and five feet wide and looking like a gargantuan old refrigerator, covered with band stickers -- is blowing a torrent of dry 55-degree air across Table One like a great, blessed river of coolth.

The physical experience of Sacco's is one of my favorite things about it. It feels secret, somehow, a place that isn't known fully to very many people. When I first moved to Boston, I looked up pool halls in the phone book, and checked them out before I decided on a neighborhood to live in. Once I walked into Sacco's, I knew more or less where I needed to live.

Greetings from Sacco's Bowl Haven

The place I'll be exploring is Sacco's Bowl Haven, a candlepins alley in Somerville MA. Specifically, I'll be looking at the pool room that's divided away from the bowling area. I spend about a dozen hours a week there, practicing aspects of my pool game and playing in a Sunday league and also a weekly appointment with a friend to play a specific pool game no longer in fashion.

As with a deck of cards, there are almost an infinite number of games that can be played with numbered balls on a table with six pockets. But out of that array, most everyone plays one of two games: eight-ball (which is the format of our Sunday league) or nine-ball (which is what you'll see most often on ESPN). But the tournament game that was the king of all up until the 1970s is called straight pool, or more formally, 14.1 Continuous. That's the game my friend and I play every Tuesday night.



More on the embodiment of Sacco's tomorrow...

Welcome to the Exploration of Small Places

This is the home location for a group of people engaged in repeated explorations of a small place -- a park, a corner of a room, a sidewalk lifeworld.