The Viking Tour event held at Cornfed Red's Billiard Cafe in Columbus, OH on the weekend of Oct. 29-30 saw a new winning face on the tour. The evnt was $1,000 added and saw 57 players competing in the event.
With regular Viking Tour players in the event like Shawn Putnam. Howard Vickery and Adam "GQ" Smith it came as a surprise that the evnt was won by a relatively unknown player. Shannon Murphy a 20 year old from the Cincinnati area made his debut showing on the Viking Tour with a win.
Shannon started off on his winning trek with wins of Jake Cooper 9-2, Steve Lavey 9-2, Shawn Putnam 9-3, Mike Cantrell 9-3 and Adam "GQ" Smith 9-2. The spectators at the event that thought Shannon's win over Putnam was a fluke, immediately had there minds changed when Murphy started his set off against Smith by running seven (7) racks in a row. After defeating Smith, Murphy lost a bit of steam while vying for the hot seat against Kevin Tomlin and lost the match 9-4.
Kevin Tomlin, a native Ohioan who recently moved back from California, was making some waves himself. Tomlin won matches over Joe Brown 9-8, Brian Nichols 9-0, CR Henderson 9-2, Shane Albaugh 9-5, Chris Mitchel 9-8 and Shannon Murphy 9-4 to win the hot seat.
After Tomlin defeated Murphy for the hot seat, this sent Murphy to the 1-loss side where he ran back into Adam "GQ" Smith. GQ was having a pretty good tournament himself. While on the winners side he defeated Danny Nole 9-3, Paul Hartley 9-4, Justin Daniels 9-5 and Joey Arbuckle 9-2 before his loss to Murphy. When GQ hit the 1-loss bracket he made his way through Howard Vickery 7-5 and Chris Mitchell 7-4 before he ran back into Murphy and lost 7-2 which gave GQ a decent 3rd place showing.
This set up the final matches between Murphy and Tomlin. For Murphy to win the event he would have to beat Tomlin twice in the true Double Elimination format on the Viking Tour.
In the 1st set, a race to 9, both players exchanged wins until the score was 8-7 in favor of Murphy. In the 16th game it looked as if it was going to be a tied up game at 8 each until Tomlin scratched on the 7-ball and handed Murphy the 1st win. In the second set which was a race to 7, it was all Murphy with Tomlin never getting a decent shot to make any balls or win any games. The final score was Murphy 7 and Tomlin 0.
The complete results are:
1. $1120 Shannon Murphy
2. $700 Kevin "The Crow" Tomlin
3. $500 Adam "GQ" Smith
4. $300 Chris Mtchell
5/6 $100 each - Howard Vickery, Mike Cantrell
7/8 $80 each - Joe Brown, Shawn Putnam
9-12 $60 each - Paul Hartley, Joey Arbuckle, Dave Csornok, Shane Albaugh
13-16 $40 each - CR Henderson, Rocky Phipps, Justin Daniels, Dallas Smith
