I play pool for one reason. Competition. The thing I’m competing against is my brain, nothing else. Success at pool is all mental. And the amount that you can convince your brain who is boss and that it needs to follow your wishes is, well, key.

Right now for me it’s a little like WWI trench warfare or the damn Charge of the Light Brigade. My brain is killing me. Some days I jump out of the trench and head into No Man’s Land and I’m immediately shot in the face with a cannon ball. Other days I get about 20 yards before being hacked into little pieces. Sometimes my brain even lets me think I’m winning just before it strafes me into oblivion with uranium-enriched, 50 caliber bullets.

That’s OK. That’s what I signed up for and I soldier on.

Unfortunately pool comes wrapped in a coating of crap. I don’t like pool hall culture. Woofing. Sharking. Stealing. Intimidation. People who feel they’re entitled to your respect because they happened to spend their lives buried in a pool hall. Where people think how smart you are has some relationship to how well you run a rack of 9-ball. It’s twilight zone-like, really.

That’s OK too. I can choose to participate or not.

But I mention all this because it can be so much fun when you run into something inspiring or truly good in this unexpected place.

That’s how I felt when I first met Nell Drake. And really there has been a lot of nice finds like Nell since restarting this pool journey. But she stands out. I met her during a stream of a 1-pocket tournament. In the chat room. There aren’t many female fans of 1-pocket. Well there aren’t that many fans of 1 pocket, period. But there’s Nell talking 1-pocket. She had just taken up the game at the young age of 71. I remember when she sent me an email after she made her first 3-rail bank.

Nell lived on a lake in Alabama and had to drive quite a ways to play pool. She had started playing pool in her sixties and now played in tournaments when she got the chance. But driving wasn’t  much of a problem for her as she was still water skiing at her advanced age. We had talked about doing a video of her playing 1-pocket because I assured her she had to be the best female, 72-year-old, 1-pocket player in the world. But we never got there because of health issues. Like most special people she never whined about any woes she was having. She just talked about what she could do.

Nell’s friend Amy notified me this morning that she had passed. The PoolStudents website is all about one thing: The best things about pool. For me Nell was one of the best things about pool that I’ve found. She was inspiring. Rest In Peace.