Trying To Be Clutch
One night at about 6:00 a.m. in the morning, I had a great run on the pool table. Our group of a dozen men had been playing at the pool hall ever since our restaurant shift. I'd beaten everyone, even the best other player, who was my brother Dylan.
Dylan had a funny look in his eye as I sunk the winning bank shot on the 8 ball. In the distance, we heard other pool balls clack and crack on other tables. On mine, we listened to the soft bump of of the black ball on the back of its pocket. Then it began to roll along the sorting track underneath. It rattled into the low, black return box and lay quiet.
"Looks like your night," he said.
"I'm getting better at using the rail," I offered cautiously.
"How'd you like to play for money?"
Now, Dylan had been playing pool maybe three times a week for a couple years. He was better than I was. But I'd been playing with the waiters and bartenders for at least two months. I thought I'd caught up to him.
"Sure. Five bucks?"
"Twenty."
He gave me that knowing look as we shook hands and I understood that he was depending on my lack of self-confidence. Again and again in pressure situations - darts, pool, and basketball, especially - I'd miss clutch shots. He was counting on that. In fact, he was putting on the pressure. Little did he know, I'd been training myself out of those bad habits. I'd proven myself in basketball, at least a little, and now I was starting to do it in pool, too. I was going to surprise him.
He volunteered to break, sank two balls on that shot, sank another solid, and then another. He put away four of his balls before I even got my turn. As it happened, my first shot was a hard one. The best angle was on the 15 to the middle pocket. In previous games that night, I would have sunk it. This time, I missed.
My brother laughed and leaped to his turn. He sunk one ball, then another, then another. Finally, he had only the 8 ball left. He didn't like his position on that so he deliberately missed.
My next shot was an angle at a corner, not very hard and I made it. Then I started thinking: I've got to make a run. I've got to sink everything. That's when I folded under the pressure, I guess. I wasn't thinking about my second shot because it was easy. Instead, I was concentrating on leaving myself a good third shot.
So I missed.
After the game, I knew I had to break that pattern. My brother had taught himself to be great under pressure. He'd risen to the occasion. And I hadn't.
But how do you train yourself to be a clutch shooter? Is it possible? I thought it was. I'd trained myself not to be afraid of heights so I felt sure I could make this kind of self-training succeed. If I could jump out of an airplane (which I'd done the summer before) after being afraid to stand on the low dive at the pool, I could learn to like pressure situations. I thought I'd already come a long way. I could sink basketball shots under a little pressure.
I desperately wanted to be someone everyone could depend on, someone who everyone looked to in an emergency. In fact, that was already my strength - for most emergencies. Now it was time to add to the newly-formed strength.
First, I spent time thinking about crisis situations. I rehearsed how I should respond. I remembered how I'd responded in past crises (car accidents, serious fights, confrontations with girlfriends, clutch shots in sports, and so on) and I tried to figure out what I could have done better. I went over the situations again and again, envisioning improved outcomes.
Then I returned to college. Reading Daoist and Zen Buddhist texts, discussing Stoicism, going through envisioning meditations and sitting or walking for clear-mind meditations helped. Most of all, though, life itself gave me assistance. When you look for crises, you find them available. They are there mostly because you’re not turning away from them. (They may find you even when you’re trying to avoid them, of course.) I wanted improve my responses. At how many car accidents did I stop to help, now that I had a car at my college? Too many to count, maybe. How many fights did I break up as a bartender? Only a few because I learned to see them coming. We had an earthquake while I was in college. We had medical emergencies on my hall.
When no one wanted to talk to the problem roommate, I volunteered.
When someone slipped on the pool deck, I rushed forward to carry them.
When I came across another auto accident, I gave first aid, talked to the victims, and made the phone call for an ambulance. I developed a routine for car accidents.
I started betting against myself mentally and, eventually, I was betting against other people on ping-pong, on pool, and even on basketball. I'd always been horrible at basketball but I spent a college semester getting good. I managed to beat a much better team of players with my clutch shooting.
For two years, I put pressure on myself to perform. Eventually, I found the right response inside me. I'd learned that, under pressure, my body would go calm. My shots could get more focused, more determined, more sure.
At college, I did well enough. But I couldn’t afford to stay on campus full time. I had to take semesters off to work in bars. I’d crank through full-time shifts for months to save up money. Then I’d head back to school when I was rich enough. So it was in Maryland, at another pool hall, when I found myself in a pressure situation more tense than the one before.
At this hall, the crowd was tougher, louder, and more drunk. You couldn’t rent a table. You had to pay for drinks, two dollars per beer, a beer every half hour to hold your spot. The pale ale was as bland as anyone makes it, which suited me. I liked whiskey. They didn’t serve any. And I liked some of the mixed drinks I made at work, which were fancy and therefore sissy. At the hall, I drank what I could of the light beer and spotted the other waiters and bartenders some of my cups.
Every time I touched my beer, it felt sticky. Everything did. The smell of the beer, though, was a relief from the background stench of cigarettes. The number of smokers was never high on any given night. It didn’t seem to matter to the deep, pervading odor of the place. When there wasn’t an eye-watering burn beside me, I felt the air blurred with the lingerings of after-smoke. It gave every late night or early morning a soft, enjoyable glow. The chairs, benches, and wood panels on the walls gave off the stale reek of a thousand tobacco addicts puffing, dropping ash, flicking half-used butts at one another, laughing, or maybe cursing, but always blowing fumes and always reaching for another cigar or cigarette, for a decade or more.
On this particular night, I was having a good run; I'd won most of my matches for about two hours. Then a new crowd of folks came in. There weren't enough pool tables anymore. They demanded the right to play for my table. That was the way it worked at this pool hall.
In fact, all of my friends lost their tables in about 15 minutes. The players at the hall were good. But I won for my team. My partner kept missing, although he managed two, easy shots. I sank everything else in a series of runs and then finished off with a long, straight shot at the 8 into a corner pocket.
The team that had lost sulked off. Of course, they were immediately replaced by the next team. That was the drawback of this playground-pool hall. An interesting thing happened, though, just then. A tall, thin black man who'd been watching me whispered to the team coming up. He wore gold chains and a fat, gold ring. After an urgent exchange of words, he talked his way onto the team. He got one of the other guys to go take a seat by promising him money. That was important, I thought - he managed to do it with a promise, not with any actual money. Everyone gave him the sort of semi-bored looks you give to a familiar hustler. He was obviously a known man. Also, he was way too obviously on the make.
In pool, a hustler is someone who acts like they're no good in order to encourage other players to bet against them. Then, when the bets are high enough, the hustler actually tries to win - and if he's good, he does. I knew right away that he wanted to catch me while I was hot so that he could sucker me into a bet.
My partner kept wringing and wiping his hands. Our other friends, who had gravitated to watch us while they waited for chances to play in, stood up around their table. They hadn’t seen many black men hanging around the hall. The ones who did usually looked tough, not slick. Those men had been more like construction workers, and they came with their white-trash pals who looked a lot like us. When I saw how nervous my friends were about the newcomer, I realized this was clutch time. I got calm.
First, we played as a team. The black guy was pretty good but he couldn't beat us. For one thing, my partner actually sank a couple, one on a side-rail touch shot. For another, I decided to keep on playing well. I took my shots and made them exactly like I'd been making them all night or - just maybe - a little better. I wanted to verify that I hadn't been emotionally suckered into changing my game for this guy, who was smiling, fidgeting, stopping play suddenly, switching his shot, making noise during my shot, and just generally doing anything that occurred to him to throw me off my game.
That was his plan, really. He was going to find out what bothered me and then do more of it. In various little ways, he wanted to psych me out and pressure me into making mistakes.
After the team game, he said, "Feeling tired?"
"Not really," I said. But my partner, who actually did seem exhausted by the constant competition for the table, said he'd like to stop.
"Want to play for money?" the hustler asked with a sly smile. He hardly noticed the other players. His eyes were, as usual, on me. "I mean, just you and me."
"How much?" I asked.
"Twenty dollars?" That was his opening offer. I knew damn well that he wanted to go higher.
"Let's see it."
"What?"
"Let's see your money."
When he opened his wallet, it turned out he only had eleven dollars on him. So we played for ten. That told me a lot of things. First, he was shocked that I'd asked to see his money - or he acted shocked. Second, he really was broke. He had to win the first game in order to raise the stakes for the second game. Third, as respected as he was in this little bar, he wasn't any great hustler.
I already knew showmanship was part of his game. The fact that he needed to apply social pressure meant that he wasn't outright as good as everyone thought he was. I had no doubt he'd won a lot of games in this place just based on his personality. He did seem to have the ability to make other players make mistakes.
He let me break. That was part of the way he exuded confidence. However, I was feeling deeply sure of myself. He might beat me, I thought, but he'd have to be good and lucky because I wasn't going to beat myself.
I should mention that my friends didn't want me to play. They whispered to me that they wanted to go home. They pulled out cigarettes to calm themselves. Each one of them looked nervous. They knew I was being hustled. Everyone at all the tables around us knew.
I sunk a ball on the break. I sunk an easy lie in the corner. Then I missed a hard shot. This was his chance.
The cue shook in his hands. I could see it despite his bluff show of confidence. His shot wasn't hard. In fact, he was already talking about the shot after, already planning ahead. And he missed. His 15 ball rattled in the corner and popped out.
I sank a couple more. On each shot, he said something. He tried to bet on a particular shot to make me more nervous. He had no choice but to keep raising the stakes. That was his game; that was what he did.
He sank a shot, finally. I could sense some of the tension go out of his arms. He sank a second shot but, this time, it was luck. Finally, laughing but visibly sweating, he missed.
I sank a couple. He missed. I sank my last ball and then the 8 ball. It was over. At the end, he tried acting extra-confident in my abilities. He started planning the next game, laughing, watching, hoping I would miss.
When we were done, I owed about eight dollars for the drinks to the table. We hadn’t paid the waitress in a couple hours. In fact, she had lined up my mostly-untouched cups. Three of them sat in a row, off to one side. I’d barely touched the first one.
I told my opponent how much and asked, "Pay for the tab and call it even?"
He leaped at the chance. The owner, who was working behind the register, seemed okay with it, so it became the bar’s problem, although I knew a guy like this would try to get away with a promise rather than money.
I tipped the waitress, a brunette woman with unnaturally red highlights. She was a solid figure with a grim almost-smile, an inch taller than me. She was older by eight years or so, we guessed. We were all waiters and bartenders in our group, so we tipped the beer girls in cash. For her part, our waitress recognized us and tried to hold back her her cynical comments, at least during the few seconds we were handing over our money.
On my way out, my friends started congratulating me. One of them bumped me shoulder to shoulder. He had to lean close and bend at the knees to do it. A couple more put out their hands for low fives.
Once we were out the door, the celebrations stopped. My friends didn't think me winning in that situation was such a big deal. They’d seen me with drunks at the bar. They’d seen me corral the manager, also raging drunk at the bar. They had expectations of me. And that was good.
Our personal milestones don’t mean anything to most other people, I guess. My restaurant co-workers thought of me as reliable. They didn’t think me beating a pool hustler, especially a kind of terrible one, was a sign of my transformation. It was what I already was, to most of them.
#
Each clutch situation is different. In most of them, things happen so fast you don’t get to decide who you are. Instead, each urgent event reveals who you are. It lays bare the reflexes you’ve acquired.
Are you really, deeply, the person you think you have become? A crisis will reveal how true your instincts are to your concept of yourself.
As I look back on this thread in my life, I see how I applied the same process many times in attempts to grow and change. And I see the unfortunate limits of the process. Training yourself to be good in a crisis doesn’t make you a championship-level pool player, obviously. It only gets you so far.
The best you can do, maybe, is to ensure you don’t defeat yourself. Your top limit is whatever it is. Not everyone has perfect hand-eye coordination. Not everyone can dunk a basketball. Not everyone’s core musculature has the same strength. Not everyone can take the same punch. (It helps to take a lot of childhood punches, I think.) When I beat a hustler who wasn’t very good, it demonstrated something but, ultimately, not very much.
I had gotten to a point where I didn’t have to fall apart and beat myself. If I had faced a better pool player – my brother really was very good at one point – my progress would not have shown up so well. Someone who could run the table would have left me no chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment