The cue stick eases forward, its leather tip coming within a wisp of the cue ball before backing away, then forward and back again. Then it explodes forward. The cue ball rockets into the racked balls-thwack!-the sound echoing across the empty pool hall. The balls skitter across the green felt.
The tall, thin woman holding the cue stick, Ewa Mataya, looks over the break, pleased.
The game is 9 ball. Players must sink the balls in numerical order, 1 through 9.
Mataya, leaning over the table, says she`ll take the 1 ball to the far left corner pocket. The cue ball will slide off to the right, so she can pick up the 2 ball over on the far right corner pocket. When she hits that, she needs the ball to back up for the length of the table-a draw shot-in order to drop the 3 in the near right pocket. After sinking the 4, the cue ball will again back up, but just a bit, as she works the 5 ball in the middle of the table.
The 6 here. The 7 back there. The 8 in tight. And the 9 across the table to close.
Got it? She smiles. A couple of guys watching nod, smiling, skeptical.
And she runs the table, nailing every shot, the cue ball doing just what she called, until the 9 ball drops into the back left pocket.
”Game,” she says softly.
She is 28. She pronounces her name ”AY-vah.” She`s a Swedish native who came to New York to play in a pool tournament at 17. She went to a Yankees game, met a cool guy, moved in with him five days later and never went home. She has since been a model, a Playboy bunny and a housewife.
She`s now divorced, a mom and the defending champion of the Women`s Professional Billiards Association. She faces the rest of the pack at the U.S. Open Straight Pool Championships Aug. 19 to 23 in New York.
She`s practicing today on Table 12 at Pockets, a pool hall that`s her favorite.
Like athletes and artists, she has a certain grace when she loses herself in performance. She moves lightly, smoothly about the table, her eyes never looking up. It`s as if the world has fallen away, and all she sees are problems of geometry and physics unfolding before her.
The left foot is forward, the right pulled back, both flat on the floor. She plays quickly, her eyes sighting down the cue stick to the cue ball, to the target ball. Just before she moves the cue stick forward, her eyes shift from the cue ball to the target ball.
”When you throw a football, you don`t watch your hand pull it back behind your head and go forward,” she explains. ”You look at what you want to hit.”
Pockets is dark and cool, as befits a serious pool room. The clack of balls, soft words, a laugh. No windows. No jukebox. Lamps hang low over the tables.
Mataya is the only woman among the 20 or so guys in the hall. She`s familiar and funny with them. As she munches cheese sticks and sips coffee up front, several men stop and say hello. Some ask her to sign a copy of her picture on the cover of a trade magazine. Later, taking a break between games, she sits between a couple of men, watching a game.
It makes for an appropriate image. This is a domain that is-traditionally, anyway-as exclusively male as hair salons traditionally were female. As chronicled in ”The Hustler” starring Paul Newman and in novelist William Kennedy`s ”Billy Phelan`s Greatest Game,” the game has been one of slightly seedy reputation, a romantic game of unpolished men who wager almost as hard as they drink.
Mataya is making a career of shattering that pop mythology. She`s doing so in much the same way as Chris Evert helped make women`s tennis an internationally recognized sport-by playing up her looks and grace instead of hiding them.
She and her compatriots on the women`s tour are succeeding wildly. Her combination of talent, timing and looks has made her by far the world`s most visible pool player, male or female.
”Right now, nobody even comes close to Ewa`s popularity,” says John Lewis, director of programs for the Billiard Congress of America, or BCA, the sport`s governing body.
After 11 years of hard work, Mataya makes about $100,000 a year, nearly 70 percent of it in endorsement contracts. She`s on the road at least 150 days a year, smiling at demonstrations, signing autographs, chatting with talk-show hosts, always plugging the sport. She takes her daughter, Nikki, with her whenever she can. When she`s at home, the two spend ”as much time as possible” together.
Time is usually short.
She`s just sold the rights to her life story to Warner Bros. In the last year, she has been on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, profiled in Sports Illustrated, chatted up by David Letterman, on the cover of several trade magazines and a guest on any number of talk shows and cable broadcasts. She`ll be on NBC`s new Sunday morning ”Today” program Aug. 23 and has a marketing company in Washington exploring other options.
”Ewa is a breakthrough player for her sport,” says Tom George, vice president of Advantage International, the sports marketing company, which represents 150 athletes including David Robinson, Steffi Graf, Moses Malone and Bonnie Blair. ”She`s a smart, successful, attractive, active young mother. If we can overcome the image of `The Hustler`-the idea that pool is a game played by schleppy, unscrupulous people-her appeal is almost unlimited.” Likewise, women`s professional pool is jumping ahead. For the first time, the Women`s Professional Billiards Association has established a schedule of a dozen tournaments next year, each with $25,000 in prizes. In the past, they`ve had no more than a haphazard schedule of four or five tournaments. No small part of the success, says Vicki Paski, Mataya`s buddy and head of WPBA, is Mataya.
”It`s not only that she`s No. 1, it`s that she`s gone to all the talk shows, the interviews, answered all the same questions, been polite and outgoing and friendly,” Paski says.
The BCA is also learning how to deal with its first female star.
Only two women-Dorothy Wise of Washington state and New York`s Jean Balukas-are among the 29 players in pool`s Hall of Fame. Although Balukas is certainly the best women`s player ever-she won seven U.S. Open tournaments in a row in the late 1970s and dominated the sport in the early and mid-`80s-she never got half the fame as Mataya.
”Part of it`s the upscale movement that pool has seen since `The Color of Money`-timing. Part of it`s Ewa`s good looks and graces. Part of it is that the women have really gotten organized in the past few years,” says the BCA`s Lewis. ”She`s very dedicated, and she`s in the right place at the right time.”
Jim Bakula, vice president of Brunswick Billiards, hired Mataya years ago to promote the company. ”There`s no active player, male or female, half as well known as Ewa,” Bakula says. ”I don`t think her career has peaked. She`s got whatever star quality it takes to make it big.”
Privately, some male players say they are tiring of the Mataya media blitz.
Only some of that has to do with Mataya. Tension between male and female players has existed for years, primarily because they rarely agree on how to promote the sport.
”Plus, you just have to say that a lot of the men are chauvinistic,”
says Lewis. ”There is some resentment and jealousy among the men about Ewa`s popularity. Some of it`s valid-I don`t think Ewa could play with the top 10 male players-but it`s mostly just silly. If Ewa wasn`t there, the press wouldn`t be there at all.”
The Professional Billiard Tour Association and the Men`s Professional Billiard Association did not return calls for this story.
At the center of all this is a pleasantly surprised woman who came to America 11 years ago, not speaking the language, knowing almost no one.
”Pool has really been a marriage for me,” she says, with only a trace of her Swedish accent. ”It`s been everything for a long time.”
Ewa Mataya has been the WPBA champ since 1991. Under a point system much like that of professional tennis, she currently has 1,215 points. Her nearest competitor, California`s Robin Bell, is No. 2 with 1,015. JoAnn Mason Parker of New York is No. 3 at 1,000.
That is a comfortable margin, but it`s not a landslide. Next year, with 12 tournaments on the schedule, Mataya could be overtaken.
The pressure is nothing new to Mataya; she says it makes her play better. ”It`s when I`m goofing around that I have a hard time playing well,”
she says. ”Once a tournament is on, once I`m into that mode, it`s easy to focus.”
She`s played pool since she was a girl in Oppala, Sweden. She followed her older brothers to the local pool hall because she wanted to see what guys did in there. By 1981, she was the Swedish national women`s champ. She went to New York for an international tournament.
There she met Jim Mataya, a professional on the tour, who was 14 years her senior. They married five days later, and she moved to his hometown in Michigan.
She was soon bored, so she tried modeling in New York. She didn`t like it and moved back. She then went to work as a waitress in Lansing`s Playboy Club for a few months. But then the couple had a child, Nikki, and she stayed home with her daughter.
There weren`t many women`s tournaments then, so she went to tournaments with Jim and watched. When Nikki went to school, she was able to practice in their basement for hours at a time. By 1990, she`d won five of nine tournaments.
Ewa and Jim Mataya were divorced last year, a split Mataya politely declines to discuss.
She says her priorities now boil down to ”Nikki, pool and airplanes.”
However: ”You can`t play pool forever,” she says. ”In Sweden, you`re very cared for. The government takes care of you. But in America, that`s not true. So I`ve got a pension started, a savings for Nikki`s college fund, life insurance. Those things are what I`m scared of.”
She thinks the more publicity the sport gets, the better. More publicity means more sponsors and more money. And if there`s more money, she`ll be able to take care of herself and Nikki.
It`s suggests an easy explanation of why Ewa Mataya plays pool so intensely.
She doesn`t really have a choice.
