The life of a female pool shark
Billiards has long been considered a man’s game, said writer Megan Greenwell. But that hasn’t stopped a tightknit tribe of elite female players, who suffer through long hours and bad pay for love of the sport.
R ENÉE MATA IS a 4-foot-11 ball of irrepressible good vibes. She never stops grinning, and stops talking only slightly more often. So when she takes a break from shooting pool one Saturday morning in midJanuary to tell me, still smiling, that she’s “in a funk,” I honestly can’t tell if she’s joking.
Thirty-year-old Mata (Ren, to her friends) is one of 30 women at Billiard Palacade, a dark pool hall in Balboa Park, one of the last ungentrified neighborhoods in San Francisco, and there’s nowhere she’d rather be. But the funk is very real: She didn’t get much sleep last night because she didn’t get home from work—pouring beers and cooking hot dogs at another pool hall—until 2:30 a.m. Now it’s time to compete at the penultimate stop in what may be the most competitive regional women’s pool tour in the country.
“These girls are all my friends, but they’re also crazy good pool players,” Mata tells me, fresh off a streak of eight consecutive hugs with her competitors. “So if I’m not on top of my game because I didn’t get enough sleep or didn’t eat right or didn’t have a good practice session last night, I’m going to have a rough day.”
The event is the eighth stop on the West Coast Women’s Tour, a series with monthly events across Northern California. The tour focuses on nine-ball billiards, in which players must use the cue ball to strike the lowestnumbered of the balls on the table. Top performers will qualify for the annual American Poolplayers Association Championships in Las Vegas in August, and several of the regulars travel widely for bigger competitions.
But the California tour is not just for elite players—the women at Billiard Palacade range in age from their teens to their 70s, and the spread of skill levels is at least as wide. A handicap system encourages women of all abilities to participate: The pro player who co-founded the event in 2007 has to win eight games to win a match, while newbies must win just five. Mata falls somewhere in the middle. For the past five years, her life has revolved around pool. She quit her job managing a Bay Area Target store when she convinced the owner of her favorite pool hall to hire her, so she practices nearly every day at work. She plays in a team league as well as on the women’s tour. When she was a kid, her dad loved watching pool on TV, and she dreamed of playing professionally, too. But the only pool halls near their home were inappropriate for little girls—so she didn’t start playing regularly until she was 23, when her brother’s girlfriend asked her to join her team. She wasn’t very good, she admits, but her drive to improve was insatiable. Two days earlier, Mata told me that she thinks of this particular tournament as more of a fun time than a competition—“This is my girls’ weekend, with no boyfriends or men at all”—but make no mistake: She is here for a prize. When the draw is announced and players move to their assigned tables, even the bubbliest player in the room goes mum, the smile suddenly gone from her face. She racks the balls into the diamond shape that begins a game of nine-ball. As the tournament begins, six 20-something men who have just walked in look crestfallen: The women are using all 15 tables, so there’s no room for them to play. W OMEN HAVE BEEN playing billiards since the sport’s earliest days, when it was a hobby for European royals in the 15th century. Mary, Queen of Scots, complained about being deprived of the game while imprisoned, and her body was covered with the cloth from her billiards table after her execution in 1587. But until the 1970s, there were few women’s tournaments, and decorum prevented most female players from spending time in pool halls with men. In 1934, a Pennsylvania woman named Ruth McGinnis was named “Queen Billiard Player of the World” by the World Billiards Association after winning a series of games against both men and women in Chicago—but she retired more than 10 years before the creation of the first national tournament for women in 1967. Eight years after that, two players seeking to give women more opportunities to compete—without being intimidated by more experienced male players—created the Women’s Professional Billiard Alliance (now the Women’s Professional Billiard Association), the first governing body for women’s events. In 1981, two professional male players developed the first governing body for amateur pool tournaments, the American Poolplayers Association. Looking to encourage more-casual players to compete, the pair developed a handicap system that would give rookies a chance at beating more-established players in coed recreational tournaments. Before the 1990s, competitive events for female pool players were rare in the U.S. (though more common in Asia and Europe, where pool is a more mainstream sport). Female players who are now in their 30s and 40s say they were routinely discouraged from playing as children, whether by men who refused to take them seriously or by protective parents who refused to let their young daughters hang out in smokefilled pool halls frequented by older men. Eleanor Callado—who co-founded the West Coast Women’s Tour with her twin sister, Emilyn, in the early 2000s and is now an internationally ranked pro on the WPBA