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.