EPISODE IV – A NEW HOPE
£85 Million!!! Eighty-five! Is anyone seriously worth that amount of money? After all its just a sport for goodness sake. Sure you can make most of it back in merchandising, personal appearances, shirts, scarves and TV deals. And of course your attendances are going to go up as you pack in the crowds every single week. So the talk of the town this summer, and the question on every sports fans lips was – who would take on the mantle of hosting Rackspack now that Racks had gone under!
The whole thing had come as a bit of a shock after Vinny had sent a text two weeks ago to say that the liquidators were in and Racks had gone under. Not only had I already paid the summer league entry fee, printed the t-shirts and commissioned the commemorative mugs, but we had shareholders and season ticket-holders to keep happy!
The off season had seen us busy in the transfer market trying to secure not one but two teams for the venue. We had been inundated with literally one request to join our team since our most recent failure to take the Summer league trophy. After losing in the worst semi final I have ever played in the inevitable casualties followed as Coach Shiel was given the bullet. Now lacking not only the captaincy but also a nickname, John was pulled back into the playing ranks and new Coach Kevin ‘Slugger’ Southam stepped up to take on the awesome responsibility. The king is dead – long live the king!
Reeling from the body blow of Racks going under, Vinny’s text now meant that we were without a venue and unable to field the two sides we wanted. Not only that, but we were stuck with a team name that now has no relevance to our venue. The statement of “Racks gone into liquidation – closed down for good” was one of those ‘you remember where you were when you heard’ days…
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It took me back actually to a Saturday night in Northern Ireland. I was over there visiting family back in 1990 and some of us had spent the small hours in a club in this out of the way place called Cookstown. In a drunken stupor, my older cousin had pulled some atrocious looking woman and then disappeared with her around 10pm. At 3am he arrived back to meet us and catch the coach home, but wouldn’t admit just how bad looking this woman was. All of us on the coach were ripping into him while he sat in silence taking the abuse and trying not to react. After 30 minutes of relentless abuse he stood up at the back of the coach, and in front of 40 people (most of which we didn’t know) he said:
“ LOOK, I didn’t realise how bad she was ‘til we got under a street lamp. She had a set of teeth like a witchdoctors necklace and her growler needed more work than Terry Waites allotment! ALRIGHT! “
Vinny’s text had the same effect – stunning and something I wasn’t going to forget.
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All of which brings us back to this seasons pool. Rackspack needed to regroup, so JY and ex-coach Shiel did a pub crawl/reccy to find a new venue, and after venturing up and down Maidenhead High Street finally settled on The Bear. Our top brass negotiated long and hard with landlady Jane, and she eventually agreed to the world-record fee of £85 million that would bring the handsomest most talented people ever to pick up a cue to her venue. She got the bargain of the summer , and all we had to do now was settle on the side.
Coach Southam rallied the troops and after an extensive and exhaustive selection process settled on:
Coach “Slugger” Southam
Keith “The Wonder” Walls
Neil “Magic 105.4” Cameron
Brad “The bear at The Bear” Robinson
John “JY” Young
John “needs a new nickname” Shiel
Lee “Grinder” Greenwood
Craig “If he turns up at all I will owe you a fiver” Wilson
Ben “I’ll put him in a double with Craigy” Kiely
We had dotted the ‘t’s, crossed the ‘i’s, and all that remained was a name for our now legendary assault of the league title
Summer League 2009 – This Time it’s Personal
Match Report: WHITE WALTHAM SOCIAL CLUB 2 – 10 RACKS PACK
Like pulling on a old pair of slippers we slipped effortlessly into the usual routine and traditions. The first one, of course, being that we barely made six players on the night and the second one was getting lost on the way to our first match.
I went straight from work as it was only 4 miles away. Leaving bright and early at 7.10pm I got there dark and late at 7.55pm! Thank god Terry rang me while I was driving and was able to tell me where the place was. JY, Coach Southam, John and Bradley Bear were already there, and it was left to Neil to make the six. After a frantic phone call to find out where he was we knew that he had less idea of how to get there than we did. Fortunately JY spotted his car in the distance going the wrong way, so we rang Neil and told him to do a swift bat-turn and head back. Twenty minutes later Neil was still nowhere to be seen, and it dawned on us that perhaps it wasn’t Neil’s car that JY had seen after all. So of course we had to ring him again and tell him he was probably going in the right direction in the first place and could he get a move on. At 8pm he had managed to find a local cricket club, and eventually at 8.20 we managed to guide him back to WWSC.
The match got under way, and Coach Southam’s first big decision was who would lead us off on the path to eventual glory. The answer was “Wonder” Walls and he justified the decision with an 8 ball dish – it was the start of dreams. For the rest of the team, who had to be talked through it in excruciating detail, the stuff of nightmares. 1-0 to The Pack, and Dish of the Day already in the bag for the Wonder.
John was up next against Wayne Parr, and in a typical John Shiel frame no-one could figure out quite what he was doing or what shot he was going to play next. One minute he was in the frame, then he was out of it, then back in, then out, in, out, in, out. At one point he did actually shake it all about, and at that stage it struck us. A new star was born in John “hokey-cokey” Shiel. Luckily for John, at the conclusion of the frame he was in rather than out, and he duly stroked the black into the pocket and we took a 2-0 lead.
With things going swimmingly we carried on another Rackspack tradition of trying to chuck it all away. Brad’s mind was clearly and understandably on other things, and a slightly out-of-sorts Bear lost to Mick Rapley who hit a couple of cracking pots to pull one back for WWSC. The cocktail of Strongbow, Stella and a half-dozen Menthol cigarettes since four o’clock that afternoon was also having an effect on Brads game. Mind you, he did tell us how Dean Wisher was the best one frame pool player he had ever seen and then slipped in the “when I beat Dean Wisher on the Region 7 tour 7-1 he said to me… “ blah blah blah. Thus proving that ‘the most hated man in pool’ had lost none of his swagger during the summer hiatus. At least he was man enough to admit that John Terry had gone off the boil and would be better off going to Man City!
What was needed now was a real captains performance. Gritty resolve and a steady nerve were just two of the characteristics missing from Coach Southam’s game as Mark Trillow levelled it up at 2-2.
JY has spent hours on the practise table in recent weeks trying to work his game up from piss poor to slightly below average. It paid off as he put in an excellent finish against ‘Happy’ Gilmore which meant we took the lead again (3-2). ‘Magic’ followed JY, sporting for the first time a newly tipped cue courtesy of Robert Uzzell. After one shot where “it felt spongy”, he then cleared with the next visit and put us 4-2 up at the half.
One thing we wont miss from Racks is the sandwiches. But it’s good to know that despite it’s demise, the spirit of Racks lives on in outside catering as something strikingly similar to Racks fare appeared at half time, jazzed up by some sliced peppers.
Perhaps this Racks spirit fired us up, as the second half was a blitzkrieg as we stepped up a gear and “brought the thunder”!
JY doubled up against an unfortunate Rapley who could have taken a notable couple of scalps in JY and Brad but for a missed pot (5-2). The Wonder got past ‘Happy’ Gilmore who played two really good frames on the night but for no reward and “Hokey Cokey” put it all in once again and after shaking it all about notched up his double (7-2).
It was then left to the only losers from the first set to see if one of them was going to record the dreaded ‘double bagel’ in the opening match of the season. Coach Southam was never in danger with a polished performance and The Bear did what he does best – looking like he was in trouble he slammed a yellow the length of the table down a rail, and dropped in the black despite the white being wedged under the cushion.
Magic Cameron and his SpongeBob tip whittled through the final frame of the night and we had taken 8 in a row from 2-2 to get a 10-2 victory against a pretty useful side.
Pointless Flair Shot of the Week went to ‘hokey-cokey’ Shiel who slammed a double in with absolutely no effort at position on any other ball. Whacking it in and casually standing back trying to look like you know what you are doing is what this shot is all about.
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*newsflash*
Keep your mouse fingers flexed and your browsers pointed at rackspack.blogspot.com for earth-shattering news of what will surely be the most talked about event of this summers league - The rackpack.blogspot.com showboat special!
An announcement and more details follow...
*newsflash*
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