Team USA Players Reflect on the 2009 Mosconi Cup

By NYC Grind Contributor, Geoff Conway

At the Mosconi Cup press conference after the event had finished, one of the main things that USA team captain Nick Varner emphasized was that he felt that they had established a true team in every sense of the word. They met for breakfast every morning at 8:30 am to eat together and to discuss team strategy, weaknesses, and simply to create a tightly-knit family of players that were pulling for each other and encouraging one another, etc. 

Team USA also met for a number of practice sessions, and both Nick and Johnny paid tribute to pro pool player and table mechanic Ernesto Dominguez, father of Mosconi Cup rookie Oscar Dominguez, who spent hours with several of the players to work on their breaks. He would watch each of them break during the tournament, tell them what he thought they should change, then take them to the practice table as soon as possible to correct the problem.

I then asked Johnny Archer, as the senior team member who has played in more Mosconi Cups than anyone else there, if the reaction of the crowd this year was larger or smaller than other years, and whether he thought the that crowd’s support has a direct bearing on their performance. He replied that this was definitely the best crowd he had ever seen in all of his years competing in the Mosconi Cup, and also mentioned that the crowd’s definitely helped the team’s performance.

One of the questions posed to Dennis Hatch was how he managed to segway from playing at the table to within seconds turning into an almost raging bull that was pumping his fists and grimacing… looking like he was a boxer waiting to kill his opponent.  He said he had no explanation for it, but that he can somehow go from the height of excitement, straight to the table to play the most difficult shot that requires the utmost of finesse.

Corey Deuel was asked how he overcame his period of bad play, but turned it around. He said that for some reason he was very nervous and after a couple of uncharacteristic misses, he began to preempt that the bad shot coming. However, in the scotch doubles with Johnny, he said that he just had to knuckle down and try not too think about  making a mistake, but just just let his stroke out and he then suddenly made some clutch shots to help his partner win their match.

Final match winner Shane Van Boening was asked about his two matches against Ralf Souquet–beginning the last day with a loss, then recovering to defeat the Kaiser soundly, 6-2. He said that after his loss in the singles, he said to himself, “How could I have been beaten by Ralf?” He then vowed that it would never happen again. Shane was then asked how he went about defeating Ralf, and he said, “I just took him down.” Shane was definitely upset at his first loss, and soon got retribution.

Mosconi Cup veteran Johnny Archer said that in all of the years he had been involved with the Mosconi Cup, he thought that this was the best USA Team ever. Johnny, along with Nick Varner, said that he would not be surprised if this same team would be playing next year.