Heeze Ball Monologue

“If you ever do, take the cigarette out of your mouth while you shoot. These guys that come in here think that it looks cool to have a cigarette hanging out of their mouth while they bend over the table. That’s bullshit. You ain’t here to look cool. You’re here to beat your opponent and when you get ready to pull the trigger on a winning shot and that blue smoke hits you in the eye and stings like hell and you miss the shot, you can blame it on the cigarette hanging out of your mouth.”
Sam had the ten ball about a foot above the pocket on the long rail. He was taking very careful aim when Jimmy stopped him. “You know the secret to this shot?”
“No. What is it.?”
“Whenever you have a ball frozen on the rail like that you can make it an
“Bottom right.” Jimmy instructed. Sam just looked at him. “Oh, yeah, we haven’t talked about English yet, have we? I don’t know why they call it English. I guess some English fella invented it. But what it means is that you put spin on the cue ball to make it change directions. Here, I’ll demonstrate.” Jimmy showed Sam where the tip of the cue stick was going to hit the cue ball creating a counterclockwise spin. He made the ten in the corner and the cue ball came right back at him, took two rails and ended up straight in on the thirteen ball. Sam was anxious to try it himself.
“You know why they call the British, Limmies?” Sam shook his head and Jimmy went off on a tirade that had something to do with sailors with scurvy and eating Limes. Sam would learn in the years to come that Jimmy was prone to run off at the mouth like that for no apparent reason.
Sam absorbed everything Jimmy said. Then he would practice each shot over and over until he was good at it. As he watched Jimmy shoot, he got to the place where he could predict the order in which Jimmy would shoot each ball in succession. He was learning to plan his shots three or four balls in