IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER in this age of Instacart, plush couches, and screen addiction, that Americans used to spend a lot of their time just… hanging out. One of the places they loved hanging out was at pool halls.
In Santa Fe, there’s a thriving culture of pool, with organized leagues and non-profit halls. Far beyond the lone bar table, hundreds of folks gather every week from every neighborhood, culture, and economic background to shoot balls and shoot the breeze. Most of them know Garrett Williams.
Certified instructor, advisor to film and television, and all-around pillar of pool in the community, Garrett is on a mission to get everyone out to play. Including you.
You are a certified pool teacher. What does that mean?
I’m a certified billiard instructor with the Professional Billiards Instructor Association of America. What it means is that I am a person who can answer your questions. When you want to know why things aren’t working out on a pool table, I can make the mysteries of playing pool clear. I can give you concrete reasonable steps that can make you improve, and make you improve quickly. The downside to that is that most of what I tell you is not going to be exciting or flashy. It’s going to be the things that you must do on every shot, the basic mechanics of making your form function on a pool table.
Are there any other certified billiard instructors in Santa Fe?
There are not.
You are currently teaching an 84-year-old woman how to play.
She’d never played pool before. She played with a friend and enjoyed it and wanted to understand more about it. We’ve been working together for a few months now, and her game is improving steadily. She was an athlete in her past – she played tennis at a fairly serious level. I can see that from her work ethic with pool. She shows up, practices on her own. She’s interested in getting better. It’s really nice, her priorities are a little different from your average student. She doesn’t want to compete.
People who do want to compete, that’s fine too. I do a lot of stuff with that, but a lot of times the people who want to compete, there’s a lot of time spent dealing with the trauma of having lost, dealing with the fear of competition. With somebody who just wants to hit a ball, it’s nice because they don’t have any of that.
That sounds very wholesome, and yet pool has a gritty reputation.
Yeah. It has a reputation for a criminal element that’s fairly undeserved. There’s very little gambling that goes on in pool, way less than golf or tennis or football or every other sport.
It’s not full of hustlers?
Pool is 400-years-old. It arose with Louis the 14th wanting to play croquet. Because pool is so old, gambling has in the past been a regular part of society, and that impression rode along with pool.
In America there’s probably four million people playing pool regularly every week and almost none of them are going to be gambling. A big-time pool money match might be $50,000, which is nothing in gambling circles – it’s low rent. But because of movies like The Hustler and The Color of Money, it has this reputation for being dangerous and revolving around gambling, when really pool is about adults spending time together and being creative.
Movies need plot devices to carry the story forward. If you look at something like The Music Man, the con-man creates this boogeyman of pool in order to sell the town on his own vision. A bad guy hangs out in a pool hall. If you want to have a super bad guy, he’s not going to be hanging out in Starbucks.
The culture that we live in now is an observation culture. We watch things. We watch sports, we watch TV, very few people do things. Pool is a throwback to a time when people used to participate in stuff.
In Santa Fe, we have a nice community of people who have known each other for many years and there’s varying levels of commitment to it, obviously, but everybody who’s involved in the community really loves it and loves playing each other. Because we’ve known each other for so long, there’s a lot of trust. It’s not dangerous at all. It’s very different from what the movies show.
You’ve worked as a pool consultant on television and in film.
Yeah, I’ve been asked to instruct and shoot shots on a few shows. In some cases, I’ve taught actors to play. In other cases I’ve shot shots for them to use on screen, to pretend like the actors were playing.
I have shot shots where they have the lighting over my head and I’m shooting from my knees with a stick over my shoulder and I try to come up with an interesting shot that they can use later in the show. I don’t know if they’ve ever used them because I’ve never watched any of the shows; I don’t really watch much TV. I pretty much only watch things that are pool related. If it’s not a pool match or a pool instructional video, it’s very unlikely that I’m going to watch it.
You don’t watch the scenes that you’ve been in?
I have never watched any of the scenes that I’ve been in. It’s always an interesting situation because television, when you’re watching a TV show, the people have to appear to be immersed in that world. But really it’s only a minute-and-a half on a show that’s going to be seasons long. They need to look convincing playing pool for that minute-and-a-half. Typically, when you arrive, it’s usually
a table that’s probably not level, if it’s a table at all. Sometimes it might be just a pool table frame with plywood and whatever cloth they had stretched over it with no rails attached. You just have to do the best you can with what they provide you and hope that what they shoot is convincing.
It’s important to me that pool is presented on the screen. I think that the more that people see pool the better, the more more likely it is some kid is going to be like me and be interested in it. Want to play and find a new home.
I like that idea of finding a new home, but it’s intimidating that first time to walk into a room full of people who are much better than you are.
That’s a hard thing because the way people perceive pool is also tied up in fear of failure. When people walk into a pool hall, if they don’t know how to play and no one’s ever taught them, they often don’t give themselves the slack of saying I’ve never done this before, and I’m going to try it out and have fun.’
They immediately start feeling bad about themselves for failing to be able to do it just naturally, even though it’s a very difficult thing to do. That stress that they feel when they walk into a pool hall feels threatening, so they have this idea of pool as this threatening environment from the minute they start playing.
How do you fix that?
I think leagues help. If you don’t have any skills, you can still play in a league. It’s a highly handicapped system, the idea being that in every league across the country, beginners have a chance to win. The better you are, the more points and more games you must play. But, being attached to outcomes is one of the main things that tends to give pool players trouble.
A lot of the pool you see in media are ridiculous trick shots, crazy combos, jump balls. You hardly ever see that at the professional level.
What I tell people is, if your game is exciting, you’re probably playing it wrong. Pool played properly is careful, it’s deliberate. It’s people shooting balls straight into pockets and getting just a little bit of angle on the next ball. The angle that they get is going to give them an easy way to hit that ball in and get a new angle in the next ball.
What I like to tell students is that pool is flower arranging. It’s not baseball. It’s not about speed and strength. In fact, if you are a strong and fast person, it’s possible you’re going to need to learn an entirely new set of skills because speed and strength aren’t really that useful. It’s a game for people who like to think about puzzles, because every rack is a puzzle to be solved. You’re playing connect the dots in reverse because you need to have a plan that gets you through all the balls and leaves you easy on the last ball.
It’s more like chess…
I’d say pool is significantly more difficult than chess because while chess is a feat of memory, with pool, you not only have to remember the situations and the ways that you solved them in the past, but you’re never going encounter the same shot twice. People say that on a chess board, there are more possible positions than molecules in the universe. On a pool table, we’ve removed all the squares, so all the pieces can be in all the spots.
What’s the best places for the public to play pool in Santa Fe?
I like the Alley a lot. Joey at the Alley spends a lot of money on nice cloth. He keeps his tables clean and the equipment in good shape. It’s the best pool place to play at Santa Fe.
I’m very fond of the VFW. The person who takes care of the tables does a great job. People also really like the Eagles. The Eagles is a classic place in Santa Fe. They do smoke in there though, and I’m not a big fan of smoking.
Anything else folks should know about playing pool in this town?
The pool community is friendly. If you see people in town with their own cues playing at a table, 99% of them are wonderful people that you’d like to know. Go ask ‘em questions.
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Photo Tony Floyd
