It got to the point where I stopped socializing. Every time I ate a long dinner or decided to watch a movie or relented to my friends and went to hang out, I felt I was letting people gain on me and it was a complete waste of time. I felt like the more I was playing when everyone else wasn’t, the stronger and the better I would get. I wanted to be playing when they took bathroom breaks. I wanted to be playing when they were having long dinners. I cared about being the person who was playing when everyone else was going to the movies. I kept doing it to the point where people would have to carry me back to my apartment because I did not care about the health of my body. I was constantly in pain, but I was so in love with the game that I didn’t care. JL: At the beginning, it absolutely was all about putting the time and the hours in. Within three years I turned pro, and a year-and-a-half after that, I was number one in the world. My back had so many problems I had to strengthen my core just to survive and be able to continue playing. Everything I did from that point on had to do with pool. In contrast, pool was the most exciting thing I could have fallen in love with by far. Before pool, I think there was so much dead time and such a lack of inspiration or motivation to do anything. I was just like, wait, I’m playing this game so I’m going to go eat what I want to eat and I’m going to do it on my time the way I want because I have to get back to pool. When I started playing pool, I stopped caring what other people thought. Jeanette Lee: Falling in love with pool really started the beginning of me learning who I am. InsideHook: Looking back on your career, how were you able to accomplish so much so fast? Then, as ESPN2’s transition to talking heads pushed non-mainstream sports even further down the channel list, she faded away. Despite her pain and being a relative newcomer to her sport, Lee was a star in the ’90s and early 2000s and even had her own SportsCenter commercial. Stalking the table with confidence and swagger, Lee never gave a hint that she suffered from scoliosis as a child and that her spinal condition still pained her, despite having had surgery to correct it. Nicknamed “The Black Widow” by an acquaintance from the Manhattan pool hall where she started shooting as a rebellious teenager in 1989, Jeanette Lee was one of the WPBA’s top players by the early ’90s and was named the association’s Sportsperson of the Year in 1998, three years before she won a gold medal for the United States at the ’01 World Games.īorn in Brooklyn to Korean immigrants, Lee stood out for her look as much as her play and was instantly recognizable dressed in form-fitting black clothing with her signature two-fingered glove on her bridge hand. Smith shouting into the ether, a young ESPN2 was home to Women’s Professional Billiard Association matches that introduced America to the tour’s most intriguing player, “The Black Widow.” Before it was the destination cable viewers flipped to find Around the Horn, Pardon the Interruption and a variety of other shows featuring Stephen A.
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