Bare Eye
What Superman failed to study and master
By Recah Trinidad
Inquirer
First Posted 07:57:00 11/14/2007
MANILA, Philippines -- Until the rat crept in to gnaw at his nerves and wreck his composure, youthful star Roberto Gomez was doing it like the true Superman of world pool.
But the moment disaster struck during the crown match for the 2007 World Pool Championship, stunned television analysts could only wince and ask if it was the same wonder worker they had before them.
Gomez, 29, sank from brilliant to bizarre.
The result, of course, was ignominious as Gomez, gleefully taking the whole nation on a voyage toward a world crown, nose-dived, crashed and fell in fragments.
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Actually, with his smooth, almost flawless game en route to the final, it had appeared that his championship rival from England, Daryl Peach, would need a piece of kryptonite to upset the favored Filipino crown-seeker.
You see, before the title showdown, sportsman Perry Mariano quietly bared the strict, enviable regimen he laid for Gomez for this year’s pool championship.
Gomez’s chief handler said that, for months on end en route to the World Pool challenge here, his youthful bet would play at least a total of 70 racks a day, seven days a week.
And the daily workout would only be complete after Gomez had taken a full bunch of assorted tests: 50 each of the long shot, jump shot, against-the-rail shot, and the thin-cut shot or the pina.
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Gomez had to qualify through the backdoor.
There were other secret rituals Gomez had to perform before he was finally let loose in a qualifying tournament at the Star Paper pool parlor of RP billiards patron cum laude Sebastian Chua.
Gomez, in short, was perfectly fit for the mission.
From Day 1, Mariano was quietly confident his unheralded charge would go far, maybe all the way to the crown.
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Well, it’s too late now but Gomez has realized that there are other intangibles, not unlike ghosts and phantoms, that can totally wreck the most solid of championship plans.
In local pool parlance, they call this crippling menace the kaba or nerbiyos, jitters in short.
Like a rat creeping into a player’s shoes all the way to his chest, the seat of composure, it builds up into a pressure gigantic enough to cause inner crisis and unsettle even the greatest of pool heroes.
No need to ask who introduced this baffling bug into the game of pool, maybe the biggest rat of them.
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The truth, as the legendary Efren “Bata” Reyes will attest, is that the soundless pool rat, “daga” in local pool parlance, can wreck even the sharpest pool sharks in the world.
“Mahirap kapag inabot (It’s hopeless once you get nervous),” Reyes confided recently after another round of Torres 10 brandy, his new favorite, during a guest stint in Mandaluyong City.
The bigger problem, added Bata Reyes, is that they still have to invent the surefire antidote to this poisonous feeling that never fails to ruin a pool player’s composure.
Ok, they were saying Gomez should do much better next time, now that he had already encountered the dirty pool rat that killed his golden bid at the Araneta Coliseum on Sunday.
Sorry, but that’s as shallow as a bogus assurance can be.
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The experts were right. There’s no fool-proof formula to quell the chilling jitters that could strike at the least likely moments in a big pool tournament.
The next best thing his handler can do is let loose Superboy Gomez in man-sized tourneys out there in the American circuit.
It would’ve indeed helped immeasurably if Gomez had, say, not been denied a visa in his first try to break into the rich US pool market last year.
Meanwhile, Gomez should take pains and live with the unexpected, unscheduled on-game baffler and try not to rattle in his boots during big games.
A timely tip: he should retreat, chalk back, take his time and recompose his nerves, before taking his next shot once the rat starts gnawing.
Funny, but Gomez was seen charging, taking his shots in defiant haste, thereby freezing and banging blind against the demon in his chest during last Sunday’s championship.
Bata Reyes has more secret tips.
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