Jeanette lee
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New story about Loree Jon
BILLIARDS; A Top Player Survives That Sinking Feeling
One of the most successful professional pool players in the world carefully lined up a shot. Loree Jon Jones placed her cue in the bridge of her left hand, her thumb raised intriguingly.
The 29-year-old champ's light-brown hair fell across her face and her blue-green eyes narrowed as she eased into striking position.
Even now, barefoot, wearing a short print dress and playing a casual game of 9-ball on the green-felt table in the basement of the home she shares here with her husband, Sammy, and their children, Jonathan, 3, and Jessica, 4 months, Jones scrunched low behind the cue ball, like a lioness about to spring on an unsuspecting prey.
"My eyebrows go down, my lower lip kind of curls and I get this glare in my eyes," was how Jones described herself when about to strike the cue ball. "It's bulletproof concentration," George Fels, the columnist for Billiards Digest, had once perceived it.
At this point of the gam
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LOREE JON OGONOWSKI HAS BEEN A POOL SHARK EVER SINCE AGE FOUR
Loree Jon Ogonowski scans a pool table, its 15 numbered balls scattered about, and visualizes a boldly colored constellation. Then, stroking the cue ball, she picks them off one by one as easily as tracing a connect-the-dots drawing. As she lines up each shot, the 5' 7½" Ogonowski bends from the waist like a gymnast until the tip of her chin rests lightly on her cue stick. Her long lines and centered focus suggest a sleek cannon lowering its sights on little tugboats.
Ogonowski, 19, is grooving her stroke and command of the cue ball at Loree Jon Billiards, a pool hall named after her by her father. It is on Route 22 in Green Brook, N.J. Loree Jon was a prodigy at age four, when she first lifted a cue stick over her head with one hand and speared balls into the pockets of the family table. At seven she gave her first exhibition, but two years later retired from the sport to ride bikes and go to slumber parties. By 11 she had grown tired of little-girl games and became a professional pool player after placing eighth in
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She Hardly Fits Model of a Pool Shark
She reminded herself to call the nuns.
Here she was, eating strawberries in the commissary of Pat Sajak’s talk show in Television City, about to go on with Mel Torme and Harry Anderson of “Night Court” and such. Sajak’s people set up a pool table on stage, so that she and the host could crack a few racks on national TV, and so that she could show the form that had turned her into a world champion.
Maybe the sisters back at the all-girl Mount St. Mary’s academy in Watchung, N.J., who only a few years back had been her teachers, weren’t aware of it. Maybe they weren’t even aware that her recent surgery had been successful, that the lymph nodes beneath her right arm, her cue-stroking arm, had been benign and been removed.
“I’d better call them,” Loree Jon Jones said.
Some of the others in the CBS canteen might have mistaken her for a singer or model or actress. Anything but a pool shark. The man who represents her, David Kastle of Nashville, likes to say that it isn’t every day you find somebody who “plays like Minnesota Fats and looks like
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