The background story

My love for the game of billiards started young. I grew up on an angus farm in western Oregon, and when I was in the eighth grade, my dad got a free 1906 Brunswick seven-foot pool table from a local men's fraternity. All we had to do was get that one-piece slate pool table out of their second story building and it was all ours for free. Boy, was that a job. We ended up putting it in our shop, and my brother and I would play that game for hours and hours every day.

When I went to college in the mid 90’s, I was surprised by how much better I was playing than my friends. I felt like a superstar player and although I could only run a few balls at a time no one I ever played could run a rack, so I just thought that was something professionals did. I’d play at local bars and do pretty well against everyone I played.

Later, I got married, moved to Boise, Idaho and purchased my own pool table, a 9-foot Brunswick, and I joined an APA eight ball pool league. I was rated somewhere between a 5 and a 6 out of possible 7 ranking, which cemented my feeling that I was clearly not bad at all when playing. In 2007, I had to sell my pool table to make room for a nursery for my newborn son, and as a new father I stopped playing pretty much all together. In fact, I only played once or twice a year at the bars with friends over the next decade. I still played better than all of my friends, so I felt great about my game.

In October of 2017, after fifteen years of marriage my wife said she wanted a divorce. I was heartbroken. It was a hard time, but I held strong. A year later, in October of 2018, the divorce was final, and my dad came to live with me for a few months to help me get back on top of things. During this time my dad, my son, and I went out to a restaurant and we taught my son how to play pool. It brought back wonderful memories of my childhood and my son absolutely loved the game. It was a wonderful passion that I remembered all too well from my youth. It was that moment that I knew I had to buy another pool table. So, in the early summer of 2019, and after a thirteen-year break, I bought another pool table and got back again into the game that I loved.

I played a weekly bar tournament at a local bar called “the pocket”. I won two matches against tough opponents and then totally got stomped on my third match. The player was better than I had ever played before. What I didn’t expect, was with how much passion I came back into the game to improve myself. I thought I had slipped in my game, and I needed to get better. (Later I would learn that I was never that good) There was a challenge that I had never felt before, and I felt even more excited about this game.

By early August, the pool bug hit me hard; however, it seemed that no matter what I did, everything was just out of reach. I signed up for lessons from a local billiard shop, but those couldn’t be scheduled to start until late September. I joined two pool leagues (APA nine ball and APA eight ball), but I couldn’t play that current session. I wouldn't be able to play for weeks.

I practiced on my table for hours on end. I watched pro tourneys on YouTube, read pool books, and I sat and watched my new league teams play for several weeks to play out the rest of their current season. I was waiting on the sidelines with bated breath for September. I just wanted to play with them. I wanted to play so bad, but it felt like there were obstacles everywhere. No one I knew was passionate about the game like me, and I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to practice. I didn’t even know if there was a pool community in Boise, Idaho. (Honestly, I'm still not sure about it.)

On the days I had custody of my son, we mocked up several games, and pretended to be different players on a league. We would play out entire league matches and we found out that he really had a passion for scorekeeping. I ended up taking him to an APA scorekeeping clinic so he could learn more about it. He was thrilled. I think it was more than the game itself; he was really enjoying all of the one on one time we were having together. We had really found something that we enjoyed doing together.

I just couldn’t wait until I could actually play the game. I started reading Dr. Dave’s illustrated book on billiards and watched a bunch of pro games on you tube. I joined an online forum called azbilliards and made a single post on there asking what people thought about multi-day intensive trainings.

A random guy on the Internet responded to my message in a private chat. He said that he was thinking about starting a pool dojo of sorts and asked if I was willing to be his guinea pig and testing subject for his material for three days, he’d be happy to train me. He suggested three full days of intense billiard training. I would move into in his basement in Minnesota for three days and eat, sleep, and live pool for an intensive one-on-one instructor training. He wanted to help bring my game from an amateur level to a semi-pro level. I'm not normally someone that jumps into things like this, actually normally I'm pretty boring, but they best things happened to me in my life when I just let things happen. What happened next supercharged my journey and this journal. It turns out this random guy was one of the top players out there (Fargo rate 744 – Top USA rated #35), Demetrius Jelatis.