Posts Tagged ‘pool’
“There’s always a shot; you just have to find it.”*…
Finesse at it’s finest…
[image at top: source]
* billiards adage
###
As we take our cues, we might send accomplished birthday greetings to Mildred Ella “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias; she was born on this date in 1911. An athlete who excelled in golf, basketball, baseball and track and field, she won two gold medals (in track and field) at the 1932 Summer Olympics, before turning to professional golf and winning 10 LPGA major championships. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest athletes of all time.
Famed as an athlete, she had many other talents: she was a seamstress (who won the South Texas State Fair in Beaumont in 1931) and an musician (a singer and a harmonica player who recorded several songs on the Mercury Records label; her biggest seller was “I Felt a Little Teardrop”).
And she was a competitive pocket billiards player.
The spirit of bi-partisanship…
There’s a chance that some readers have encountered this video, now in pretty heavy rotation. But as our representatives in Washington succumb to centrifugal force, it’s heartening to be reminded that– in Oregon anyway– a spirit of creative cooperation survives. (Indeed, had the Legislative Study Group, the authors of the film, employed Auto-tuning, one might even had said “harmony”…)
As for once we’re not sorry to have been Rickrolled, we might recall that it was on this date in 1956 that Willie Mosconi sank 150 straight balls in the course of winning one of his record 15 pocket billiards (straight pool) World Championships. For Mosconi, whose first professional match was at age 6, the feat was nothing too special; two years earlier he ran 526 consecutive balls without a miss during a straight pool exhibition in Springfield, Ohio (35 witnesses signed an affidavit attesting to the accomplishment). Many speculate that this record will never be bested.
Mosconi preparing Paul Newman for his role in The Hustler (source)
You must be logged in to post a comment.