The Carom Cafe is like a Babylon these days. You can hear Danish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Dutch, Korean, French, and a lot of Spanish spoken around you. That's a good thing: when people travel, understanding goes up and prejudice goes down.
But wait, it gets better. The vast majority of these travellers have a common interest: billiards. "They all suffer from the same disease" would be a different way of putting it. And this is where the miracle starts to happen. Billiard players are able to communicate. And they do not let the language barrier stop them.
Is it because everybody speaks at least a little English, you may ask? No. English may sound like the logical choice: it is the best common ground, it is the language of the internet and the world. But many good players have not (yet) travelled for years, and they don't know six words in English.
They speak billiardese though, and so does their opponent, regardless of his country of origin. From the warm-up to the lag to the first few innings of the match, a conversation starts between two total strangers. Player A sees that his opponent has missed, but remains in his seat for just a few seconds: he does not want to storm the table before the other guy is on his way to the chair. That's respect. Player B makes a point that was maybe not a fluke, but he still considers himself a little lucky. So he puts up his hand in apology. That's good sportsmanship.
They tap their cue. "Good shot". They exchange a look. "That was unlucky."
Not even five minutes into the match, and they both know: this is a good guy. "He knows that the game can be as kind and as cruel to me as it is to him. Maybe he'll beat me today, but he's not going to steal it."
For two men who don't know a single word in each other's language, that's pretty impressive communicating.
In the field of the Verhoeven Open, American is one of the smaller native tongues. The best players in the USA are immigrants (Pedro Piedrabuena, Jae Cho, Hugo Patino, Mazin Shooni, Sonny Cho and others). But one of the guys from the Mid-West grabbed the spotlight this afternoon: Fred Lamers. He's as American as apple pie, a 0.750 - 0.800 player from Minnesota, who had the daunting task of taking on Martin Horn.
The 21-hour drive to New York did not affect him: he took a 12-2 lead against the world-class German. Horn won 18-25 in only thirteen innings, and Lamers could be very proud of his performance. "He did everything right, I needed to dig deep to win that one" said Horn.
Come to think of it: Fred Lamers, that sounds suspiciously Dutch...