Winning Isn’t Always Winning
Another student of the Chico Billiards Academy, Meredith Graham, who is President of The Chico Women's League, has some words to share.
It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game. We’ve all surely heard this at one time or another. I always took it to mean: Don’t obsess over the outcome of a game; as long as you play your best, you’ll leave knowing at least you tried. Recently I’ve taken it to mean something else altogether.
A couple of weeks ago, while playing in a coed 8-ball league, I was matched up against someone who is widely accepted to be better than I am. That doesn’t intimidate me—in fact, I play my best games against my toughest competitors.
On this particular night, my opponent wasn’t at the top of his game. He missed a couple of shots, giving me more than one chance to beat him. The last chance he gave me, we each had four balls left on the table. I ran all four of mine, leaving myself a difficult—but makeable—8-ball slice into the side pocket. I missed. Now, my opponent should have been able to run the rest of the table—he had no problem balls and I even left him with perfect shape one at least one of them. But he shot and missed—by a full 6 inches—giving me yet another chance. This shot was quite a bit more difficult, but I came close, rattling it in the corner pocket. Again, my opponent missed his shot, by a mile, and at that point I sunk the 8.
I went to shake my opponent’s hand and I said, “I feel like you gave me that game.” There was no reason for him to have missed those easy shots. He said, simply, “I did.” I took exception to this—I don’t want to win because someone took pity on me. I was angry, because while I’d played my best game, I had missed that 8-ball shot—I’d lost the game. I told this to a friend of mine and she said, “He was probably upset that he wasn’t playing his best game and you were on top of yours. He probably felt you deserved to win because you’d outplayed him.”
I thought about that reasoning for a minute, and it reminded me of the saying about how you play the game. Perhaps my friend was right; perhaps he gave me the win because he thought I’d played a better game. That doesn’t excuse his behavior. No one wants to be given a pity win. But it certainly gave me a better perspective on winning and losing. Sometimes you might not sink that 8-ball, but you’ve still outplayed your opponent. And they know that just as well as you do.