Excerpt

THREADING THE NEEDLE

Have you ever tried to thread a needle? When you tried for the first time, did you notice that you could hold the thread steady until you approached the eye of the needle, and when it was almost there your hand shook and the thread missed the eye?

Attempting to pour liquid into the mouth of a very small-necked bottle may often result in the same kind of shaky muscle behavior. You can hold your hand perfectly steady, until you try to accomplish your purpose; then for some strange reason, you quiver and shake and spill the liquid.

In medical circles this is called purpose tremor. It occurs in normal people when they try too hard, or are too careful not to make an error in accomplishing some purpose.

In playing pool, these purpose tremors may lead to a missed ball. It may occur in a pool player if he is being excessively careful or too anxious not to miss a shot. Excessive carefulness and anxiety both have to do with too much concern for possible failure, or doing the wrong thing, and making too much of a conscious effort to do right.

You can avoid dogging it by training yourself to stop trying too hard or being overly careful at the moment you deliver your stroke. You must learn to trust your stroke.

Do your best to position your body into the stance with your center of vision and cue stick on the stroking line, and have keen focus on the contact point before you begin your stroke. Now, with your body perfectly still, your eyes focused on the contact point and not a thought in your mind, freely swing your arm forward in a pendulum motion.

When you are first learning your stance, it will require much work just to get aligned properly for each shot, and may feel awkward. Yet the more you practice good form, the more natural it will become, and getting into your stance will also be like threading a needle.

You develop a trust that your body is lining up to what you are looking at, and with trust comes confidence. The trick is to keep your body still as you relaxingly and confidently throw the cue with your shooting arm.

So many times a dogged shot is accompanied by a sudden jarring of the body at the time of the forward stroke or a stroke that obviously deviates from its usual relaxed and straight path. Again, this often comes from being overly careful and anxious.

It may help to remind yourself to trust your stroke or Im just going to move my arm before you get down on a shot. Also, taking deep belly breaths to ease possible tension in your torso and to get more oxygen to your brain can be helpful.

Try hitting some long straight-ins and angled shots with your body perfectly still and your eyes glued to the contact point. Then move only your arm with no concern for the outcome, just detached observation to the feeling and results of the shot.

If you have a habit of moving your body on your stroke, you may not even notice it when you do move. Even if you have someone to alert you when you do move, try to develop that body awareness so you will know without someone telling you.

Even though you will be looking at the contact point on the object ball, you must focus on keeping still as you deliver your stroke with perfect trust.

Do not try to stroke straight, do not try to make the ball. Just swing your arm forward and keep your body still and see what happens. You may discover incredible powers to make difficult shots look easy, even in pressure situations.

BRIDGE LANGUAGE

In pool, your bridge hand will determine how well you can communicate to the cue ball where it needs to go. Developing your stroke is also important, but now we will focus on the bridge hand, that device which guides the stroke and helps keep it on line.

Some people simply have more dexterity than others and quickly learn to form sound and solid open and closed hand bridges. For others, making a sound bridge comes in varying degrees of difficulty and the time spent in developing the bridge hand is especially well worth it.

All of our hands are unique, and if you do not have the bendy double-jointed fingers of many of the pros, just try to maximize the potential that your fingers give you. If you simply cannot make a good closed hand bridge no matter how hard you try, you can still be effective with a good open hand bridge.

Think of someone fluent in sign language. They easily change from one distinct symbol to the next as they communicate. When they transform from one symbol to the next, do they fidget with their fingers for a while as they form the next symbol? Not if they are fluent.

That is the idea with pool. It is ideal to be able to smoothly and easily lock your bridge hand into the chosen form for the present shot. Many top players will even form their bridge in the air and finalize it by squishing it onto the table, thus locking it in place right away.