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CREATING ANOTHER THRILLA

The inside story of how pool officials have tried to save the 2007 World Pool Championship from the plague of soft breaks, just in time for Sunday's finale.

By Ted Lerner

(Brought to you in association with Hilton Professional cues.

Visit www.hiltonprofessionalcues.com for more information.)

At just about 10:30pm this past Friday, Johan Ruijsink, the Dutch national pool coach and coach of the European Mosconi Cup team, was walking up and down the concourse of the Araneta Coliseum looking for Roberto Gomez.

It was about an hour before the start of Gomez' round of 16 match against Ruijsink’s player Niels Feijen, which was to take place on the main TV table.

Why, you may ask, would the coach of Feijen want to speak with Gomez? Well, Ruijsinnk had a plan.  He was sick of the soft break, which everyone, especially Gomez, was using with major success on table one. He felt it was making the game way too predictable, repetitive and terminally boring.

"This kind of pool is no good," Ruijsink said. "It's not good for the game. If this was the way the game was played when I first discovered pool, I would have never taken up the sport. I would have played chess instead. It’s boring."

But, of course, Ruijsink had other, more immediate motives than acting as a savior to the sport of 9-ball. He, like millions of others, saw Gomez employ the powder puff break to perfection the previous two nights on the same TV table, first blowing out fellow Dutchman Alex Lely 10-1, then destroying Taiwan' s Chao Fong Pang 10-2. And so he wanted to track down Gomez and offer him a deal.

"We want him to break hard," Ruijsink said. "We both agree to break the balls hard. Enough of this soft break. Yes, he can run 11 racks. But so can Niels. Niels is a tactician and he can do the same thing. I don't think he wants that as well. So to avoid this we want to make a deal with him."

Ruijsink hurried off to look for Gomez. Although I knew Gomez would never accept such a proposition, from a fan's perspective, it sounded like a decent idea. I, like nearly everyone else who loves 9-ball, am completely sick of the soft break. The players, even the ones using the soft break to their advantage, hate the soft break.

I haven't yet found a person out there who thinks it's good for the game. Everyone, from officials administering the sport, to the players who compete, to the fans who watch and buy the tickets, all realize the soft break is ruining the game. We all want to see the spectacle of the rack smashed to pieces. We all want to see different layouts and varied plays on each rack.