Tunnel Vision   by Mike Geffner

"Jon Kucharo has a simple plan for his life: to play pool perfectly"

During those rare moments when you catch Jon Kucharo walking through tournament sites, when he isn't compulsively hitting balls at some practice table, he is almost always alone.

The way he likes it.

The way he'd like to keep it, if he could.

Aside from being somewhat shy, he simply doesn't see the point in losing his edge over something as trivial as small-talking with the other players, his potential adversaries across the table, And he especially has no interest in wasting time -- and precious focus -- by whooping it up with his fellow young studs, who mostly seem to run around in rowdy brat packs, entertaining each other with dirty jokes and lurid accounts of either their latest gambling scores or sexual conquests.

Instead, the 23-year-old Iowan, the self-contained kid from nowhere who took dead aim at everybody's jugular last year, gives the impression of someone moving purposely, unshaken, between two points in a straight line -- his shoulders pulled back and his head held high; his freckled face, giving away nothing, blank and smileless; and his blue eyes, locked into place, gazing ahead like a pair of laser beams poised on a single target.

Those few who know Kucharo very well say that despite his age and newness to the pro scene, he's incredibly unfazed by all that's swirled around him the last year, and not only has he absolutely no fear of any of his brethren but feels he's downright supposed-to-win no matter who he's playing.

"He's so centered," says fellow Iowa player and BCA exec John Lewis, who's played Kucharo many times, "that he's the kind of player you really have to be scared of."

At this moment, sitting in the players' lounge at the 1998 Denver 10-Ball Open an hour before one of his matches, Kucharo is doing two things way out of character for him:  he's not hitting balls, and he's talking to a stranger.  Two things that, like nothing else, make him squirm to no end.  Hunched over in his chair, his black cue case cradled between his legs, he's alternately sipping on a Coke and dragging on a Camel.

"I usually smoke Marlboro Ultra Lights," he offers.  "I'm trying to quit, though.  I know it's bad for me.  But it's so hard.  I don't know why I ever picked it up.  I guess it's the pool room.  There's so much pressure in there that everybody has a cigarette."

He looks like anything but scary, more like a preppy college kid: dressed in a brown-striped polo shirt and cream-colored corduroys, his hair clipped short and neat, and so squeaky clean you'd think he just popped out of the shower.  There are self-conscious pauses when he speaks, and when he answers questions he barely goes beyond a couple of sentences before abruptly stopping, which makes him come across as something of pool's version of Gary Cooper.

For example, here's a typical exchange with the brief Mr. Kucharo:

What's the most important thing you learned during your first year on the pro tour?

"That I need to improve my game."

Your biggest surprise?

"I thought there would be more practice tables."

Biggest mistake?

"I gave some players too much respect.  I mean, you got to have some respect.  But you can't look up to a guy wo much that you just let him win.  I need to just play the table more."

Will your approach be any different entering the new Camel season?

"I'm going to bear down more.  I know some of the guys now.  So it's going to be tougher."

Anything you've been working on in particular recently?

"Yeah, my mental game."

Do you think it'll be more difficult now that you're a known quantity, that you can't sneak up on anybody anymore?

"It's been on my mind.  I guess it will."

And is it true, like people say, that you expect to win every match no matter who you're playing?

"Uh, um, yeah."

Despite missing the first three Camel events in the 1998, Kucharo closed the year at a take-notice 47th place, his highest finishes being seventh in the Nashville 9-Ball Open and ninth in the Columbus 10-Ball Open.  But those finishes were only a sliver of his success stories:  He also won the BCA Nationals-Masters Division, swept the Iowa State Championships (8-, 9-ball, team), finished third in the WPA World championships, and finished third in the Sands Regency Open 27.  Remarkably, Reno was only his second pro event at the time, where he stunningly defeated Earl Strickland, Jose Parica, Danny Medina, and Tommy Kennedy (twice).

Billiards Digest couldn't help but name Kucharo its male rookie of the year.  And the magazine is not alone in its admiration.  Among his growing legion of fans are none other than Hall of Famers Steve Mizerak and Nick Varner, the former saying he's convinced, "The kid's a future champion, trust me on this," and the latter saying privately that Kucharo's overall style, attitude, and game impress him more than any of the other talented young players.

"And now that he's gotten some experience under his belt," warns Illinois pro Mark Wilson, Kucharo's longtime friend and mentor, "he's going to be really dangerous."

Yet mention to Kucharo how great he's doing, and he quickly cuts you off.  He won't hear of it.  It's one of the few things that gets him talking.

"I know exactly where I'm at," he says matter-of-factly, "and I know I have a lot of work to do to be able to beat these guys consistently.  My banks are weak.  My safeties are weak.  My kicks are a little weak.  I don't know if I'm really a success at all.  Not yet.  But I'll keep trying.  I'm just a guy who works hard and has a killer instinct from playing other sports as a kid."

Don't believe him.  Kucharo does a ton of things well at the table.   His stance and stroke are as rock-solid as you can get, devoid of even a hint of a hitch.

He plays patterns "like someone who's been around awhile, not like a kid," Mizerak says.  He's a tremendous shotmaker.  And he breaks like an animal.  His snap-crackling break is one of the most explosive ones on tour, his cue ball timed smashing into the rack at a sizzling 28 mph.  The most balls he ever sank on the break?  Six.  In a bartable 9-ball event.  Yet, more amazingly, "I was hooked," Kucharo remembers, "and I couldn't get out."

Just before a match, lapsing into his usual ritual, Kucharo seems to turn on an invisible force field that surrounds him, trying to both psyche himself up and "block things out so nothing bothers me." And when he's immersed in that altered state, "He doesn't want people invading his space," says Wilson.  "He's not here for the attention.  He's not here to socialize.  He just wants to beat everybody.  It's like he's coming in here, get out of the way."

Win or lose, good shot or bad, lucky roll or not, Kucharo is not big on showing emotion either.  "He might scratch his head sometimes, but that's it," Lewis says.  Nor will he mutter a word.

"I try not to be a jerk,: Kucharo says.  "If it comes down to it, I'll talk.  But I'm not there to talk.  Maybe after the tournament, but definitely not during it.  Sooner or later, you're gonna run across all these people, and you have to take everyone down.  This isn't a team game.  Pool's a one-man deal."

Wilson rooms with Kucharo during tournaments and reveals that Kucharo's intensity continues deep into the night.  "He'll go to sleep with the lights on, thinking about something he did in a match.  We'll both be in our beds and suddenly he'll say to me, 'On that 7 ball, should I have...?'  He's always thinking about how he could've gotten better position on a ball or played a better pattern.  Then he wakes up very early the next morning and heads straight to the practice room as fast as he can, to try out all the shots he thought about the night before."

Raised in small-town America, a postage stamp of a place called Bettendorf, Iowa, where his grandfather was once mayor and where riverboat casinos and aluminum factories are the big industries, Kucharo had a single dominating fantasy growing up; playing professional baseball with his favorite team, the Chicago Cubs.  Preferably, if things went perfectly, he'd start at shortstop alongside his idol, All-Star second baseman Ryne Sandberg.  There was a time, in fact, when Jon wouldn't think of going anywhere without his Cubs hat.  It was a hat he wore for what seemed to others like an eternity.

To the bafflement of many, he not only refused to replace it with a new one but wore it until it nearly walked around by itself, all but falling apart at the seams right there atop his head.  People even laughingly wondered whether he went so far as to sleep in the damn thing.  "It was so faded and tattered, extremely ratty-looking." remembers Wilson, who's know Kucharo for more than nine years. "But somehow that fact never seemed to bother Jon.  That is, if he ever really noticed it."

Even after reality set in and Kucharo chucked his Cubs dream, when his passion shifted - and his natural gifts gravitated - to pool for good, he nevertheless continued wearing that broken-down hat.  "It became part of Jon's persona," Wilson says.  "It made him very identifiable in the pool room.  And the rumor was, he wouldn't take it off until he beat me.  Sure enough, right after he beat me, I didn't see him wearing it anymore.  I don't know if that was a coincidence or not."

Kucharo's father, Jon Sr., offers a simpler, less mysterious reason for The Death of the Cubs Hat:  "It's just that Jon got sick of the other kids teasing him about it so much."

Jon's story?  Even simpler.  "Since I knew that you couldn't wear it in big tournaments, I just wanted to get used to playing without it."

Though Kucharo started playing pool when he was only three, lifted up to the table by his father, who himself was a barroom 9-ball gambler, Junior didn't take the game seriously until he was 13.  He suddenly found himself unable to keep from daydreaming about it during classes, from practicing his bridge at the dining-room table, from seeking out action any where he could find it, and, most of all, from yearning to play his every waking hour.  "And when Jon sets his mind to do one thing, no matter what it is," says his father, "he becomes very good at it."  Jon quickly became known to the locals as not just a rising young pool stud, but a notorious practicer who spent between 8-10 hours daily doing countless drills in one of two nearby rooms -- either Miller Time Billiards in Davenport or Leisure Time Billiards in East Moline, Ill. -- or at his home, where he eventually had three tight-pocket tables of varying sizes from which to choose.  "For many years, I worked a 3-to-11(p.m.) shift," says Jon Sr., "and there were times he'd be practicing when I got home and still be down there when I woke up the next morning."

There's a triple-shimmed 5'x10' Brunswick in the garage and both a three-footer ("Which I never use") and a quadruple-shimmed regulation table ("with wall trouble") in the basement.  "Jon's tried everything known to man on those tables," Jon Sr. says. "And he's developed an eye like you wouldn't believe.  Our tables play like snooker tables, but Jon pockets balls like it's nothing.  You could take a great pool player and put him on these tables and Jon would eat him alive.  He wouldn't have a prayer against him."

The elder Kucharo has always believed that pool was deeply imbedded somewhere in his son's genes.  "I knew for sure that it was in his blood," he says, "because it's always been in mine."

In 1968, seven years before the birth of his son and soon after returning from the war following a two-year stint with the Navy in Vietnam, the senior Kucharo took a job on one of the riverboats as a deckhand; it was during stopovers where he hustled pool in small rivertown bars.

"In the '70s, I was a barroom road player," he says.  "Aside from Iowa, I ended up playing in Illinois and Kentucky and for a short time in Alabama, going from bar to bar to find games."  His best game by far, he says, was 9-ball, and he claims a high run of six consecutive racks.  "In these parts, most of the action is in bars, and the biggest action is bar-table 9-ball.  I went where the money was."  Later, working as a crane operator for Alcoa Aluminum, he spent nights and weekends playing pool in action spots closer to home, like Bob's Bullpen, Al's Lounge, the Buckhorn Tavern, and Alibi Inn.  "Way before he worked with my son, I even played Mark Wilson for money once," he says.

He admits, however, that it was his obsession for pool that led to his divorce from his wife Marie, a high school English teacher, in 1980.  "It was especially the late-night playing," he says.  "She just had enough of it and left me.  But I just had to go play.  For me, it was live, eat, [go to the bathroom] and play pool.  That's all I did.  I was gone all the time.  The minute I came home from work, I was getting ready to go out playing again."

Indeed, all during childhood, Jon recalls his father always playing pool, either playing for money in some tavern, snapping off some weekend bar tournament, or practicing endlessly in the basement. "Jon would sit for hours watching me," says the senior Kucharo.  "That's how he learned to play -- by watching.  I used to tell him, 'You know, you don't need a cue in your hand to pick up this game.'"

After working at Alcoa for 25 years, the 52-year-old Kucharo still avidly plays pool but in bar leagues, and while still advising his son on the game (especially warning him about "all the shady characters"), he stopped from trying to show his son how to play a long time ago.

"He's so much better than I ever was," he says, "that it's impossible for me to teach him anything anymore.  I took him as far as I could.  I think the most important thing I taught him was table manners.  I told him, 'You take what the table gives you, and you don't complain about it a whole lot.'  I think Jon's done a really good job at keeping his temper controlled to it doesn't affect his game.  That boy, I'll tell you, he's never been a problem."

Wilson, considered one of pool's gentlemen as well as an ardent student of the game, has been the junior Kucharo's biggest pool influence for the last decade.  Wilson started working with Kucharo when Jon was 14, playing together mostly in Kucharo's home and at Leisure Time Billiards.  More than 20 years Wilson's junior, Kucharo started beating his mentor within only four years.  "All he wanted to do or talk about was pool," remembers Wilson, who lived in nearby Moline, Ill., in those days.  "But the thing that really stood out about Jon was his fierce competitiveness.  There was no quit in him.  I mean, even when we played chess, it was for blood.  And when we played basketball against each other, he was always incredibly rough under the rim."

during Kucharo's junior year in high school, "I saw all this talent coming out of him," his father says, and following his high-school graduation, despite his parents' urging to get a "real" job, Kucharo grabbed his pool stick and hit the road.  Mainstream life,, which never felt right to him anyway, was officially over.

"I've worked 'real' jobs twice in my life," he says, "I delivered newspapers for two years, when I was 12 and 13.  And when I was 16, as part of a work-study program for school credit, I worked as a janitor, which only lasted a month because I just couldn't take it anymore."  Ultimately, staked by backers, Kucharo did roadwork in Baton Rouge, La., Las Vegas, Parts of Texas, and all through the Carolinas.  It was an experience that provided him with the final piece of the puzzle.  He feels he emerged from it a much tougher, more solid overall player.

"Playing different people, getting away from the comfort of home, playing for bigger money, it made a difference."  Yet, just to make sure, at 19 he visited famed instructor Jerry Briesath in Madison, Wis.  He wanted Briesath to merely double-check his game for flaws;  Briesath couldn't find any.  So Kucharo left after one day.  "I thought maybe I was doing something wrong." Kucharo says.  "He just basically OK'd my game."

Kucharo eventually reached the point where he could run as many as 156 balls in straight pool, eight racks of 9-ball on a bar table, and spot any of the locals the world.  Deaine Bowman, who once managed Miller Time Billiards but since 1993 has owned Leisure Time Billiards, has known Kucharo since the very beginning.

"When Jon started, I didn't think he'd be all that good of a player.  Then all of a sudden his game just shot up like a rocket.  And it became hard for him to get games around here.  But Jon's a strong-headed kid, and he'll do anything to get a game.

"He'll give up any kind of spot, like the last five to some pretty strong players.  Anything that'll get him to play hard. But the thing about Jon is, he'll give up the nuts and then he'll outrun 'em."

It has been said by some that Kucharo probably hits more practice balls and studies more videotapes than any other player alive.  Kucharo disagrees.  "Not really," he says.  "I've been slacking off lately.  I'm trying to get my desire back for doing both those things like I used to."

This past off-season, Kucharo says he stayed sharp by, among other things, playing a slew of tournaments and spending 21 straight days playing for money on the road.  What he stayed away from -- like the plague -- was thinking too much about all the gushing talk of how great he played last year, of being this rising young superstar.

"Once you think you're doing well," he says.  "that's when you get into trouble.  You start relaxing.  I want to just keep doing better and better and work even harder.  It's like what my friend said to me the other day, 'You know, you just might be a flash-in-the-pan.' And, you know, it might be true.  There's been a lot of guys like me.  A lot of guys who had talent.  But a lot of them never went anywhere.  I've got to prove some things to myself first.  Prove that I can win some tournaments."

He pauses for a second, then comes up with his own theory on why some players never really reach their full potential.

"I think they get caught up with the little bit of fame they get -- like being on ESPN, doing interviews, getting their pictures in the magazines -- that they start slacking off and maybe get burned out a bit.  You accomplish some of your goals, and your mind gets weak.  You have to learn how to deal with that.  That's what i'm going through right now.  That's why I need to work harder."

And why he'll never feel there are enough practice tables.