Action starts Oct. 2 in popular winter pool league

The Color of Money
By MATT WARD
Sun Advocate Editor
Gustavo Mendoza finally knows sweet victory.
The shooter—what they call a pool player who knows just how to kiss a ball to send it into a billiards table pocket—won his first top shooter award in this year’s local summer pool league.
He only lost 10 times in 56 matches over 14 weeks.
His team, representing the famed Regis Club in Helper, also took the top team award, besting seven other teams from bars across the area. Made up of Mendoza, John Solice, Orlando Gomez and Jose Sanchez, the Regis Club lost only two matches in 16 outings.
Now it’s time for winter league, a tradition among Carbon and Emery pool players for more than three decades. The 40-week pool extravaganza begins Oct. 2 and runs through May.
Penny Popejoy, the league’s president, said she expects there to be about 16 teams. The lowest participation ever was about 13 teams, the highest more than 20.
Winter play is more strict than summer, she said. During the summer, players get to joke around, heckle their opponents and generally get rowdy. During winter, not so much.
“In the summer we laugh and joke and tease each other and stuff,” said Ringo Schade, the league’s vice president, who has played every year since the early 1980s. “In the wintertime you can’t do that stuff. You can’t mess with the other players. You can talk to each other away from the table, but when you’re at the table, you can’t.”
League play is not just for fun and camaraderie. It is for cold hard cash. Mendoza earned a cool $400 for taking the top shooter spot in summer league. His team also earned $400.
In winter play, the stakes, and the cash prizes, are higher. Instead of four players per team, there are eight. Each bar pays $50 to sponsor a team, and each player pitches $4 a week into a pile that determines the prizes at the end of the season.
At 16 teams and 40 weeks of play, that can spell as much as $20,000 at season’s end, which always features a blowout hosted by the winning bar, with prizes, trophies and cash going to the league’s top victors.
“You are playing for your team, to move up in the rankings because the higher you go the more money you get back. But you are playing for yourself to be the top shooter,” Popejoy said.
During the season, the league hosts a Cream of the Crop tournament. It’s an all-day affair, a double-elimination tourney pitting each team’s top two shooters against one another.
“It goes all day long and in almost every bar. It is awesome,” Popejoy said. “If you want to see some really good shooting, you want to come see that one. There’s some awesome shooters, best of the best out of the league.”
She said some players are good enough to go to Las Vegas and give the amateurs a shot.
“We can name quite a few who have come a long way. When they first started out they couldn’t even hold a pool stick,” she said. “We actually have some shooters who could go to Vegas and play in the amateurs.”
Mendoza is one such player, she said. A few years ago, he had trouble even hitting the ball. But after so much practice and the lessons imparted by senior members of the league, he is a dangerous competitor to face.
“Gustavo has come a long way. He couldn’t even hit a ball when he first started and look where he is now. He just won the summer league,” Popejoy said.
Regis Club fields one team each year, joining Price bars such as the Tipsy Tavern, Silver Dollar Saloon, Elk’s Club, Wooly’s and others. The Cowboy Club in Wellington has fielded a team since the early days. For a number of years Scofield, Green River, Ferron and Huntington all had teams competing in the winter league.
The league was originally started to help local bars stay in business, Popejoy and Schade said.
“Kind of one of the reasons we got this started. There wasn’t much to do. You could go to the bowling alley or the movies and that’s it,” Schade said.
The league play takes place on Tuesdays each week, a typically slow day for bars.
The Sun Advocate for many years posted the results each week inside the paper. This year the newspaper will return the league to prominence inside its pages with weekly stats and results.
More than 100 local players are expected to participate this season.
Popejoy said the large group is a tight-knit one.
“You can not find a better group of people who will help each other,” she said. “Everybody is really good friends.”
A dart league, around since the 1990s, is also expected to start its winter season in mid October, with partners 301 the game of choice each Wednesday in bars across the area.
“We’ve had bars come and go. Every bar that’s been (in business) has been in the pool league,” Popejoy said.
People interested in joining the league this season are encouraged to contact Popejoy at the Tipsy Tavern, 435-637-9831.