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%ry..'R7Yqj*&GpRC7~ / FEBRUARY 23, 1992 CILILIN L THERE IS A COMMON FEMALE FANTA- sy - a corollary to the male dream of sitting at the piano at a party and mesmeriz- ing all the women with a dazzling rendition of "Rhapsody in Blue." The woman's version takes place in a poolroom, one of those dark, smoky establishments rarely depicted in Martini & Rossi ads. The heroine, dressed for dancing, is taken there by her date. Preening, he racks the balls and shows her how to hold a cue. With a condescending smile, he hands it to her and says, "Now you try." Tugging at the hem to keep her skirt from riding up, she bends hesitantly over the table. "Like this?" she asks. She fires and sinks one ball, then another, and another. Other players, fierce, bearded, big-bellied men, gather around and guffaw. Her date's expression shifts from astonishment to rage, but she keeps her head bent over the green felt. When she fires a table- length shot that rockets the nine ball into the corner pocket, she permits herself a small, private smile. Pool, and only the fastidious call it pocket billiards, is still viewed as the ultimate man's game, a sport not of kings but of rogues, characters and con men, a martial mix of skill, bluff and nerve that is so absorbing it makes princes of street-smart paupers and leads kings to bet and lose their ransoms. Women have no place in this raffish, shadowy nether world. Its code is rarely shared with outsiders, but tantalizing glimpses of it are found in such films as "The Hustler," and even in its pallid sequel, "The Color of Money." Women have only one role here, that of the awed and silent onlooker. Or so they used to say. Actually, there is women's pool. There are women who play for fun, and then there are the professionals, the ones who play for money. There are women who roam the country making their living shooting pool, women who can run a dozen racks in a row and never miss a shot, women who can "hook" (place) the cue ball so skillfully that opponents have no hope of ever regaining control of the table. The women have their own tournaments, customs, taboos and rules of conduct. AT THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP OF THE Women's Professional Billiard Association (W.P.B.A.), a tournament held last December in a working-class neighborhood of Milwaukee, the pool hall was called Romine's, and the back room was a dimly lighted preserve like all the others, the kind of place where cigarette smoke curls up into sepulchral clouds above Alessandra Stanley is a reporter for The Times. Pool champion Ewa lliataya and her fellow female players on the tour yearn to reform their sport and its shady, bacl¢-rooae image. But can a game that begot Fast Eddie and 1Kinnesota Fats survive without its raffish charmsY Alessandra Stanley The characteristic Mataya concentration, right, at a tournament last year in Chesapeake, Va. Jacky Moeller, above, monitoring male conduct for the Professional Billiard Tour Association in Reno. 28 AsOVEv DARRYLESTRINE/ONYXFORTHENEW YORKTIMEf. RIOHTiMURAD3HASHA.

the pool table, beer is drunk straight from the bottle and the only sound is of balls cracking against each other and sinking into a pocket with a deep, swallowing sound like the stomach rum- ble of a giant. A few things hinted that the pool here is not the kind Paul Newman played against Jackie Glea- son at Ames, the late lamented pool hall of legend on West 44th Street in Manhattan. Nine-ball (rather than straight pool) was one. Perfume was another. Then there was also the pious, head-bent, eyes-closed invocation given at a players' dinner the night before by Robin Bell, a born-again Christian who is ranked No. 3 in the country. In between matches at Romine's, the No. 2-ranked player, Loree Jon Jones, propped herself against an unused pool table and tenderly breast-fed her 3-month-old baby. And when the woman who is often called the best female pool player in the world, Ewa Mataya, won the Milwaukee event, the first time she had ever won the prestigious national championship, she shook hands with her opponent, then clasped her in a teary hug. The gap keeps narrowing, but most days the best male players stilll play better than the best women. Yet in professional pool, the greatest difference between men and women right now is not one of skill but of sensibility. C,all it Virainia us Minnesota Fats: this battle of the sexes separates en - who want to bring femininity and feminism to the pool halls and give their underfinanced and unnoticed sport a whole- some image - from the men - who would love to see more money and prestige in the game, but whose idea of wholesome is filtered Camel ciga- rettes, drinking Scotch with a mixer and refrain- ing from betting on matches only when their sponsors are in the room. The pool industry claims that more than 38 million Americans play the game, nearly twice the number of tennis players or golfers, and 12.7 r million of them are women. Yet only 20 of these women travel on the pro tour full time,-and their stumele for acceptance in one of America's las_t bastions of rimitive man recalls the cam i fe ale tennis p ayers wa - one a e. Tennis was never a dis~ble_ s) ort. - ~' T HE 60 OR MORE MEN who are full-time profes- sionals play at least 15 ma- jor national and interna- tional tournaments a year and as many smaller re- gional events, all offering Above: Jeanette Lee, a 20-year-old from Bayside, Queens, at the national championship of the Women's Professional Billiard Association in Milwaukee last December. __ purses of as much as Right: Loree Jon $40,000. But the women can count on just eight or Jones, the No. 2 nine tournaments a year at best. ESPN, which female player, with last year devoted 133 hours to bowling, telecast her baby at the only 32 hours of professional pool - just 9 of them Milwaukee featuring the women. tournament. Like the civic-minded ladies in Westerns who are forever scolding the sheriff to close down the Top right: "Men are saloon, female pool players have their hearts set more strong- on cleaning up Dodge City. The men, to put it minded," says Mike delicately, do not brook interference from the LeBron, a brooding opposite sex. player also known as "Look, the men have all had tough lives," says Spanisb Mike. an exasperated Allen Hopkins, a former world champion and president of the Men's Profession- Far rigbt: Ewa al Billiards Association. "Women want in, but we Mataya's ex- know what has got to be done with the game." husband, Jim, who Hopkins is impatient with the women's notions prefers to be called of propriety. "The women think we can't control Pretty Boy Floyd, is ourselves, they think we have a bad image." He considered pool's pauses, and adds scornfully, "The girls are doing bad boy. all that 'lah-di-dah stuff, so nice and neat and polite. They still have to be able to play." Why women are not yet good enough to compete N O ~ w 0) co _N co .A is 30 FHOTOGRAFHSaYDARRYLESTRINE/OHYXFORTHEHEWYORKTIMES .

against men in a sport that requires less muscle than hand-eye coordination and mental acuity is a mystery that does not appear to befuddle the male players. "Men are more strong-minded," explains Mike LeBron, a dark and brooding player who is known as Spanish Mike and wears a ring consisting of a green onyx pool table encrusted with tiny diamond billiard balls. The women cite lack of money, encouragement and experience - cultural barriers that echo Virgina Woolfs famous essay on why there are not more successful female writers. For women players, It comes down to a Pool Room of One's Own; if the legendary Willie Mosconi had had an equally talented sister, there is little chance she would have survived the oppression of that era. Even today, female pool players, including those who grew up in their fathers' poolrooms, point to disadvantages they've suffered. Ewa Ma- taya, who took two years off from the tour to stay home with her baby, says: "The top men have been playing for 20 or 30 years straight. The women have babies or full-time jobs. Very few have had uninterrupted careers." --v r- Mataya. 27. is now the W P B.A.'s ton ranked ULII3M lo a pomL svste mua U One~1____i-n nrofescinnal tennis. She is also the L sport's most promising spokeswoman, and has been anointed by Brunswick Billiards, the country's biggest and best known table manufacturer and her official sponsor, as the player most likely to im- prove the game's image, raise its profile and, who knows, someday make it almost as respectable - and financially rewarding - as bowling. Unlike male players - who go by such evocative names as Buddy (The Rifleman) Hall, Lou (Ma- chine Gun) Butera or Mike (Captain Hook) Sigel - Mataya is known simply as Ewa (pronounced AY- vah). "They sound like gangsters or big-time pro wrestlers," she says of the men, wrinkling her nose. "It's such a guy thing - it's really not feminine," she says, adding, "Besides, Chris Evert never real- ly had a nickname. She was just Chrissie." THE WOMAN WHO IS REGARDED AS THE greatest female player of all time was Jean Balukas, a five-time W.P.B.A. champion who abruptly quit playing in 1987 in protest over being fined $200 for poor sportsman- ship - she had thrown a tan- trum during a televised match against Robin Bell. Balukas now quietly runs her family's poolroom in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, but in the 80's she was the only woman to enter men's tournaments, and occasionally beat some of the best. She was a trailblazer, a child prodigy a loner whn rr-_ beileda¢ainst dress codes for Wqman - h pqpl efl ~ivalPn~ Qf Rillio Taan Kino Li}ic Chric Evert Ewa Ma- taya is a top player whose greatest contribution has been ,to the image of the game. She says she never gambles or hus- tles, but admits that on occa- sion, when prodded by a girl- friend, she has gone into a neighborhood pool hall and taught obnoxious, braggart men a lesson over the table. She calls it "taking some egos." At the pre-tournament din- ner, which took place in a low- ceilinged, airless banquet room of the Hospitality Inn motel in Milwaukee, Mataya was a lesson in good manners, chic in a short, well-cut black cocktail suit and emerald silk blouse as she serenely worked the room like British royalty, chatting with the other play- ers, cooing over Loree Jon Jones's new baby and listening attentively to the views of ex- ecutives from Brunswick. "Isn't she just gorgeous," whispered John Lewis, an offi- ciai of the Billiard Congress of America, the sport's oldest trade association. The B.C.A. is trying to advance the cause of female pool players and - even more quixotically - to make pool an Olympic sport. "Women do add class, don't they?" Lewis adds. Mataya, who emigrated from Sweden at the age of 17, is, in fact, (Continued on page 34) L / \ THE {VEW YORK TIMLf MAGAZIHL / FLiRUARY 23, 1992 3'

POOL (Continued from page 31) in fact, as improbably lovely as a heroine of a romance novel. Five feet nine and one-half inches tall, slender, with wide green eyes, high cheekbones, a flawless taw- ny complexion and a deli- cious Gene Tierney overbite, Mataya speaks English flu- ently, but with a slight Scan- dinavian undertone, so that even her poolroom slang ("I dogged it") makes her sound like Ingrid Bergman defying the Nazis in "Casablanca." When she travels, carrying her custom-made Richard Black cue in a gray leather case, passengers mistake her for a flutist. Once, on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, she ran into musicians from the Oslo Philharmonic, who immediately accosted her, fascinated to find out what kind of instrument she was carrying. Mataya is not the least bit attracted to the louche ro- mance of the game. "That movie did a lot of damage," she says of "The Hustler," the 1961 film that first intro- duced pool to millions of Americans and inspired an international revival of the game. "A hustler is not a pool player; he is just a hus- tler," she insists passionate- ly. "The real hustlers are on the golf course. That's where the money is." More than anvthing taya says she would like to see a majo~~raHon adopt p001 the waV somP riva- rette and cosmet,_cs nies have st~nsored woman's tennis or skating. "Everv- body has used pool as a one- night stand, but nobody wants to get married n i" ch cavc forlornl a raid that the image isn' clean enough yet" ~ N THE PRACTICE area of Romine's, Ma- taya, wearing char- coal-gray trousers, a black blouse and pol- ished moccasins, was a pillar of sartorially correct intensity as she readied herself for the na- tional championship. Her form is classic and flawless, with one eccentricity. When breaking, she splays her bridge hand open, resting the cue on her thumb instead of crooking it under her in- dex finger. When she shoots, she folds her long, slim frame at a sharp angle over the table, as neat and pre- cise as a halogen desk lamp. Concentration, Mataya con- tends, is everything: "You go into a kind of coma. You don't see anybody else. You just see a green haze." Around her, other players practiced shots, all of them neatly turned out in tailored trousers and well-pressed blouses, the requisite cos- tume of the tour's midrange "Class B" dress code "Class C" is more casual; 'Class A," reserved for the top events, is formal). Ex- cept, that is, for Jeanette Lee, who was in decidedly Class A attire - exotic flow- ing black crepe palazzo pants, matching tight tunic zipped open to reveal a see- through black netted blouse and black satin bustier - all of which made her look like a Bond girl, a bad Bond girl. Lee, a pretty 20-year-old Korean-American from Bayside, Queens, was mak- ing her first appearance at a W.P.B.A. national tourna- ment. Sponsored by her lo- cal pool hall, the Howard Beach Billiard Club, she was eager to display wayward sophistication - "I once made $900 in 20 minutes," she boasted, "but I quit hus- tling because it hurts your self-esteem" - an image slightly undermined by her cocktail of choice, a sweet and frosty chocolate and Kahltia concoction called a mudslide. Lee's vampish appear- ance drew attention from a handful of male spectators and scorn from more experi- enced female players. "The reporter from the Milwau- kee paper asked me what her outfit was made of," said JoAnn Mason, 24, a perky, fresh-faced player from Monticello, N.Y., who is ranked No. 4. "1 told him wool-crepe, but it was really rayon-acetate." Mason's charity did not extend to the pool table, where she trounced the new- comer with brisk, no-non- sense dispatch in one of the A painting by the artist Rene Prinet, c. 1900, entitled "La Partie de Billiard" ("The Billiard Game"), is an early example of a woman's ability to execute a trick shot. opening matches. Nearby, Robin Bell also ran the table in game after game with steely efficiency, though she managed to do so looking like what she is - a subur- ban P.T.A. mother of three. But Bell came up the hard way. As a rebellious teen- ager in Bellflower, Calif., she started hanging out in seedy pool halls, became a heroin addict and hustled pool to support her habit. "Pool saved me from be- coming a hooker," she says. At the age of 20, she became born-again, quit drugs and stopped playing pool for five years - until one day, she reveals brightly, "God said, 'You have this talent, go use it for Me this time."' During her first game of nine ball, against a Milwau- kee homegirl, Linda Ste- panski, Mataya curled her legs under a barstool, sip- ping ice water and abstract- ly smoking a Marlboro while her challenger played the ta- ble. After winning, Mataya left the room hurriedly, say- ing with a superstitious gri- mace: "At least the first match jitters are over - I hate the first game of a tour- nament." Mataya serenely went on to win match after match until she choked on one cru- cial shot in the semifinals against Belinda Bearden, a sharpshooter from Austin, Tex. The score was tied 10- 10, but in the 21st game Ma- taya forged ahead, having cleared the table of every- thing except the eight ball and nine ball. Instead of fir- ing the eight ball in, howev- er, she slow-rolled it. The ball rattled in the corner pocket and stayed up. As the spectators murmured a col- lective "oooooh," Mataya, who rarely displays emotion while playing, tapped her- self sharply on the side of the head with her cue. Waltz- ing up to the table, Bearden turned to two friends in the spectators' bleachers and crowed, "Isn't this fun?" and easily sank the two remain- ing balls to win the match. Mataya shook the victor's hand, then retreated to the practice area ta prepare her revenge. She was inter- rupted by a young man who, burnished by the self-confi- dence that comes with youth, good looks and beer, asked her out on a date. Mataya demurred with a smile, saying, "Oh, I'm too shy for you guys," a polite variation on "No" that to young, brash men sounds like "What time?" When he replied, more insistently, "So, will ya?," she replied, her smile turning wintry as she returned to the table, "Thank you, I can't." In her rematch against Bearden that night, Mataya played fast and flawlessly, winning 13-3. "Losing was good for me," she said after- ward. "I was angry at my- self. When I am sad, I can't play well; but when I am angry, I take it out on the table." In the heat of a match, pool players are acutely sen- sitive to distractions; the cough of a spectator, the rus- tling of an opponent or the ill-timed jangle of a bracelet can throw a player out of stroke and turn the match. Away from the tables, pool players are just as hyper- sensitive about the image of their game. No reference to pool on the local news or location shot in a "Rockford Files" rerun is too fleeting to escape their obsessive scru- tiny. (How many people, be- sides pool players, view the 50's musical "The Music Man" as a hysterical screed against pool?) During the group dinner, Cathy Petrowski, a petite blue-eyed blond player from Coppell, Tex., who reveres the daytime soap opera queen Susan Lucci, happily reported that an "All My Children" cast party was re- cently held at the Amster- dam Billiard Club in Man- hattan. This, she said, was proof that the soap opera stars were "at the cutting edge" of good taste. But her china-doll face grew stormy as she re- counted the injustices heaped on the game. "In Dallas, they wanted to bust people dealing drugs, so the police leased a pool parlor and set up a sting opera- tion," she said, adding an- grily, "Why did they pick a pool hall?" Next to her, Loree Jon Jones's husband, Sammy, the owner of two poolrooms in New Jersey, threw down his fork in out- rage. "We could sue them for that!" he said. "I wish you had called me." Petrowski, slightly molli• fied, continued: "We are nice people. They pick on pool like it's the only sport that 'has hoodlums. Unfortunate- ly, there are a lot of lowlifes in this sport, but there are in other sports, too. You just can't see them." At that moment, Jim Ba- kula, a vice president of 34 PHOTOCRAPHIC REPRODUCTION FROM THE 3lLLlARD ARCHI V E

Btunssacickhe main_ %IBLn- sor of the tournament, rose to giye n insni Q al nED i~ talk. He predicted that the women would one day look back on these lean, hard years with nostalgia. "This may be a cliche," he inton solemnly. "But you've come V a long ways [sic], baby." EWA MATAYA EARNED a relatively paltry $4,000 for winning the national championship in Milwau- kee, the oldest and most prominent event on the women's tour. In general, the female players take home far less than the men, but both sexes constantly lament how little money there is to be made - legiti- mately - in pool. The wom- en stay in motels, doubling up to save money, driving all night to save on air fare and washing out underwear late at night in the sink. Though ranked No. 1, Ma- taya earns between $80,000 and $90,000 a year - that includes prize money, her Brunswick salary and in- come from exhibitions and trade shows. The top male players make perhaps $100,000. Even.professional bowlers make more money. And the pool revival that flourished in the wake of the 1986 movie "The Color of Money" - a burst of new, upscale pool halls, an in- crease in table and cue sales, an epidemic of news articles about yuppie pool - has leveled off. That promis- ing boom, moreover, failed to translate into network coverage or additional cor- porate sponsorship. Lately, players have taken to de- scribing their sport in the downcast tones of ship- wrecked sailors who have elatedly waved at an ap- proaching rescue plane only to watch it turn and vanish into the horizon. It was survival that forced the women and men to cre- ate a joint tour in 1990, the Professional Billiard Tour Association (P.B.T.A.), to share administrative costs and stage events in which both the men and women could play, though not against each other. Last De- cember and again this month, the women almost pulled out of the tour, angry that the men were refusing to grant them an equal say in business decisions. Among other grievances the women shared, the men had taken it upon them- selves to ordain their own "Pool saved me from becoming a hooker," says Robin Bell, now a born-again Christian and ranked No. 3. commissioner of pool, a large, breezily self-confident Florida businessman and promoter named Don Mackey, who the men hoped would become pool's answer to Pete Rozelle, giving the game recognition, stature and more prize money. Mackey, who wants to pro- mote glitzy celebrity match- es to rev up viewer interest, never tires of reminding players that just playing good pool isn't enough. "While Willie Mosconi made balls, Minnesota Fats told jokes and everybody re- membered Fats," he says. Mackey's show-biz tenden- cies dismay many of the women, who would prefer to have television concentrate on covering the tourna- ments. "Pool is like chess," Mataya says. "The fans need to be educated. Yes, we want to make more money, but we don't want to be like pro wrestlers. We don't want to put on a show that will make the players sick." The women reluctantly accepted Mackey as their commissioner, but mistrust between the men and the women continues to sim- mer. The sexual politics of professional pool are a little like the struggle colleges went through going co-ed in the late 60's. Only in the case of pool, it is like the Virginia Military Institute trying to merge with Wellesley. L OOL PLAYERS are per capita the most male chau- vinist of any group in Amer- ica," Jacky Moeller says cheerfully. A pleasant-looking woman in a wool business suit and with an ever-present briefcase, Moeller, the marketing di- rector of the P.B.T.A., has come to the Sands Regency hotel in Reno, where a major men's tournament is in progress. One of Moeller's jobs is to make sure that the men there abide by the P.B.T.A.'s rules of conduct and ethics - no mean task. Before the matches, Moeller strolls casually past each pool table in the Imperial Ballroom, peering discreet- ly into paper cups, checking for alcoholic beverages. Moeller doles out fines for gambling, excessive drink- ing, improper dress and ob- noxious behavior. Moeller was the only wom- an attending the tournament in an offical capacity. The fe- male players, who have been invited to the Reno event only twice in 14 tournaments, are unwelcome because the Sands Regency, which puts up the $20,000 in total prize money, contends that it can- not make a profit on a wom- en's tournment. Women don't draw enough spectators, and unlike the men, they don't gamble (and lose) enough money in the casino. If Moeller herself looks somewhat out of place, the male players, who tend to be broad-shouldered, husky and given to open-necked shirts, gold neck chains and heavy rings, seem perfectly at home at the Sands, a gau- dy establishment whose lob- by slot machines are crammed in between an Arby's, a Winchell Donuts, a Tony Roma's ribs outlet and several bars - all the male players' major food groups. Depending on their moods, or winnings, the men treat Moeller either as Nurse Ratched or as Wendy to their Lost Boys. Once, when she sent a male player back to his room, on the grounds that his pants had belt loops and therefore he was obliged to wear a belt, he snipped off all the loops with nail scis- sors. "My job is not to make players happy," Moeller says firmly. "It's to keep them in line." Ewa Mataya's former husband, Jim, 42, who insists on being known by the nick- name Minnesota Fats gave him nearly 15 years ago - Pretty Boy Floyd - is a liv- ing rebuke to a kinder, gentler pool. Throughout his _ career, he has alienated sponsors, frustrated pro- moters and aggravated ri- vai players. The Matayas were divorced last October after 10 years of marriage, and he is the first to admit that his drinking and gam- bling drove them apart. Pretty Boy Floyd is con- sidered the bad boy of pool, which, considering the com- Oetition, is no small achievement. Dressed like Sky Masterson in a black shirt, black pants, black al- ligator shoes and belt - a cigarette dangling danger- ously from his lip - Pretty Boy Floyd plays as fast and loose at the pool table as he does with Jacky Moeller's rules. In open defiance of the prescribed code of con- duct, he orders a Scotch and water from the skimpily clad cocktail waitress and instructs her to put it on his tab. "My credit is good - I owe everybody in town," he tells her, loud enough to cause the officials to wince. But they let it pass. After running the rack a second time in a row, Pretty Boy Floyd cannot resist goading the officials further. "Howze everything?" he asks one. The official, non- plussed, replies: "Uh, fine. How are you?" Pretty Boy Floyd retorts with a smirk: "Just fine - as long as the Charlotte Hornets win to- night, that is." Two hours later, after mowing down his opponent 13 games to 1, Pretty Boy Floyd saunters over to the bar. "Any money I make is from gambling," says Pret- ty Boy Floyd, who has also made an instructional video on how to hustle pool. "If you tried to live on prize money, you'd starve to death - it's an insult." His tournament earnings, which, he says, barely cover expenses, are $15,000 a year. Over another Scotch, he is quick to anger when discussing the status of professional pool and, in particular, the pool industry, which he considers exploit- ive. "Brunswick gives play- ers maybe a total of $40,000 for TV tournaments - Mi- chael Jordan wouldn't sign an autograph for $40,000," he fumes. "The corporate squares treat us like dogs, and want us to act like gen- tlemen." Still raw over the divorce, he blames Brunswick, which sponsored his wife but not him, for driving a wedge be- tween them. Her eclipsing stardom didn't help. "Ewa thinks she can go it alone," he says in the sorrowful tones of a poolroom Norman Maine. "I taught her every- thing, but now she doesn't need me. Now, I can't tell her anything." E WA MATAYA credits her husband for having coached and supported her as she moved up the ranks, but she is re- luctant to discuss publicly her decision to divorce the man she moved in with at age 17. "He is Nik- ki's father," she explains, re- ferring to their 6-year-old daughter. "And we still have to see each other at the tour- naments." The daughter of an awning and Venetian blind manu- facturer, Mataya grew up as a tomboy, skiing and playing basketball and soccer. At 14, (Continued on page 62) 36 PHOTOGRAPHRYDARRYLEIITRINE/ONYX PORTHENEW YORKTIMES,

she started going to the local pool hall to be with the boys, and went pool-crazy instead. In her tiny hometown of Op- pala, Sweden, the game had no stigma. When men slyly ask her variations on how- did-a-nice-girl-like-you? she does not play along. "Pool was always upscale in Swe- den," she tells them. At 17, she won the 1981 Swedish pool championship for women and entered a tournament in New York City with a grant from the Swed- ish Government. There she met Jim Mataya, then 31, and after a five-day courtship the couple moved to his home- town of Grand Ledge, Mich., and got married. She spoke almost no Eng- lish, learning it, she says, "like the mermaid in 'Splash' - from 'The Brady Bunch' and 'Love Boat."' Friends tease her about ear- ly Ewa-isms, like calling a colt a "horse puppy." There were few women's tournaments in those days, so restless and bored she went to New York to be a model "because people told me I should." But she dis- liked it and went home after less than a year. Prodded by her husband, she then went to work for nine months as a Bunny at the Playboy Club in nearby Lansing. That, she loved. "It was like the pool clique," she says. "All the girls, we had so much fun together." She didn't mind the customers ("It they touched you, they were out") or the costume ("Gloria Steinem exaggerated, but it was tight"). She played pool mainly as a hobby, but then, after the birth of her daugh- ter, took the baby with her to tournaments - often to watch her husband play, sometimes to play herself. When Nikki started school and stopped accompanying her mother to tournaments, Mataya's game got better. She was able to practice six hours a day, honing her skills, and saw the work be- gin to pay off with several big victories in 1988. In 1990, she won five out of nine tour- naments. Before then, only Jean Balukas had so domi- nated the tour. Mataya now lives with her daughter in a small ranch- style house with light rose wall-to-wall carpeting in a suburban subdivision in Grand Ledge. The rooms are bare of furniture - her ex-husband took the couch, chairs and bed boards - but the waiis a cril_~wered bv framed color photo rap s of wa and Jim and N' f wa sin at Women's norts Foundation dinners with luminaries like Chris Evert and nMartina Navrati- 1.gv~ In the garage is a -small, sporty turquoise Ea- gle Talon - her symbol of marital independence. Mataya practices on a Brunswick table in her nar- row basement and drives to her favorite poolroom when she feels like a game. There are three places to play pool in Lansing; she consid- ers the closest one, which comes with a full comple- ment of louts and drug us- ers, "too sleazy," and the more upscale one "too yup- pie, too distracting." Pock- ets, a dark, cavernous pool hall that is always open, even on Christmas, is just right. "People come here to play pool," she explains. "That's it." In fact, Pockets could pass for the pool hall in "The Hustler," the one in which the cashier tells Fast Eddie Felson: "No bar, no pinball machines, no bowl- ing alleys. Just pool. Noth- ing else. This is Ames, Mis- ter." The Pockets regulars all know her, and they know better than to flirt or inter- rupt when she is executing a shot "People here know how to show courtesy and re- spect," she says. C OURTESY AND RE- spect were what Ma- taya had hoped for as she flew to Los Ange- les to tape a segment for "The Montel Wil- liams Show," a Phil- Oprah-Arsenio-esque, nationally syndicated talk show. It was Mataya's first talk show appearance - un- less one counts a few minutes on the Jerry Lewis telethon last fall. (In that instance, Mataya hit a cue ball out of Jerry's mouth, while the co- median was lying spread-ea- gle on a pool table.) She was not prepared for the Montel Williams show's rollicking conceit "Games Men Play, and the Women Who Beat Them at It" In addition to Mataya, who was paired against the male pool player, Lou Butera, the pro- ducers had booked Lori Johns, a female drag racer, Zap, a petite, tanned blonde with Popeye biceps who is a regular on the show "Ameri- can Gladiators" and Lynnette Love, a 6-foot-3-inch black taekwondo champion, who was to participate in a fake kick-boxing match against a male opponent half her size. The tenor of the program was decidely more Geraldo than Bernard Pivot. Mataya earnestly tried to explain how to put "English" on the cue ball as she demonstrat- ed trick shots. Smiling gamely throughout, she looked about as comfortable as Audrey Hepburn would at a mud-wrestling contest. - Durina a commercial break. Mataya tiDtoed out- side for a ci arette, sighed eavily and whispered, "I don't like it when they make a big joke out of it." She felt the show was trivi- alizing her sport. "Pool p!ay- ers give their entire lives. ..." Her voice trailed off. Then she stood up, squared her shoulders and prepared to return for the grand finale of the Battle of the Sexes. "Still," she said hopefully, "I suppose it could be good pub- licity for pool."  AME LARCEST SELECTION C OF 400 SOFABEDS. =ALY three cushion Ioose pillow back sotabed. Covered in neutral textured fabric. Includes throw pillows. m $4000 - .,.Q A traditional favorite! Exquisfte!y tailored with swnning A high qua!ity pastel fabric covers this overly plush Sumpriious overs¢ed ctrair convenien6y opens to a fbral accent throw pi!bws irxauded. and stylish Queensize sleeper. Includes coordiriating single bed wfth our own !merspring Mattress. throw pillows. ® W $400. SEALY sofahed. Shn arm wfth scattered back pillows. Twin s¢e sofabed. Irxludes our Inners{x ng Mattress. SEALY sotabed. Latest tlcking stripe on a classic Contemporary and plush. 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