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.