A history of the Leisure World Pool Club, part 1

by Dave Silva

LW contributor

I have been in Leisure World for 25 years and one of the first clubs I joined was the men’s pool club. The official title of the club was The Men’s Pool and Billiard Club of Clubhouses 2 and 3. I thought that sounded a bit long and unwieldy. The part about Clubhouses 2 and 3 was specifically designed to exclude players in Clubhouse 1, who stubbornly refused to join the men’s club.

When I first joined the club, there was a doubles tournament that involved the Women’s Q Club. I remember that I won that tournament, but don’t recall who my partner was. The men’s president, Dominic Zappia, asked me if I wanted to be on the pool club board. I thought great, I will get to help schedule pool events. No! Back then the purpose of the pool club, aside from the once-a-year tournament with the women’s club, was to put on large dinners with entertainment. So I was expected to sell tickets instead of planning tournaments. When I would suggest pool activities, members of the board would look at me strangely. The Women’s Q Club, in their little room at Clubhouse 1 with only two tables, had tournaments and activities all the time.

Eventually we started losing money on the dinners, and I became president sort of by default. I decided to invite the women’s club to participate in monthly doubles tournaments playing eight-ball. The entry fee was $2, and we divided the players into two groups, according to ability. We had A players and B players. We didn’t schedule players ahead for tournaments back then. Whoever showed up played.

I believed we should have had more variety in our pool playing than just eight-ball. I liked nine-ball but thought it too difficult for many of our players to run that many balls. I invented the game we call 369, where the three counts as one point, the six two points, and the nine three points. We now have several 369 tournaments each year.

For a few years we had yearly tournaments with Laguna Woods. The women and men had separate tournaments, but after a few years we discontinued the competition because they had a pool room with six tables and we only had four tables. It just took too long for them to play the match here. The only match that we won against the Laguna Woods men was the very last one.

I kept trying to get others to be the president of the pool club. Lee Rickerson was president for two years and Mike Mooney did a good job as president, but then the job came back to me again. Little did I know there would be big changes in store for the LW Pool Club.