Heather Byer had seen The Hustler many times and dreamed about being that cool. But the first time she picked up a pool cue, she couldn't even make contact with the ball. Today, she's a seasoned player with a decent rank, three teams and hundreds of games under her belt. Byer's unlikely transformation from stuffy executive to bar-dwelling competitive pool player is the subject of her revealing memoir, Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey. Byer not only learned how to hit the cue ball, she became deeply entrenched in New York City's sultry pool culture, eventually emerging as a highly respected player and a woman more possessed of her physical being. Hundreds of games and two affairs with fellow pool players later, Byer is as enamored with the game as she was the first time she watched Paul Newman sink that eight ball in the corner pocket. — Gwynne Watkins

It was nice to live vicariously through your book. I've always loved the idea of being a pool shark, but I never believed I was cool enough. But you weren't cool either — so that's cool! What was it about the game that attracted you?
My personality is hyper-verbal, and there was something about that that seemed very antithetical to pool whenever I watched it. It just seemed so peaceful and still and hushed. People didn't seem to be talking to each other when they played, they just seemed to be involved with the table, and that seemed so soothing to me. I did not want to be a competitor, because I was working in a really competitive industry. But I was convinced to join this league. I was really frightened of doing it. Eventually it became intoxicating. On some level, it seemed sneaky and naughty to live this separate life.

How do you think alcohol affects the game in general?
It gives each evening this hair-trigger quality, like it could take an absolutely weird turn.

I think the only other sport you mention in the book is baseball, when you write about Johnny Bench and being a Reds fan when you were a kid. They seem like very different sports. Why include that?
When I was learning about baseball as a kid, it was a game where the guy comes up to the plate and whacks the ball and runs the bases, the same way that in pool you just randomly hit these balls and hope they go in. But it turns out to be so much more complex. The batter's actually hitting the ball in a particular way to put the ball in a particular place, because he wants to advance, so he's already thinking several moves ahead. And the pitcher is doing to the same thing. The more I learned about baseball, the more it had an intellectual appeal. It was the same in pool — it turns out it's not chaos, it's not random. Both opponents are thinking several shots ahead, trying to make the ball do a particular thing.

Also, they were both sports where the players looked like normal people. When I was a kid — it's less true today — baseball players had little skinny chicken legs and big guts, and they weren't a million feet tall. They looked like human beings, and they were doing something that you could conceivably do in your backyard. I think pool is the same thing. It seemed graspable.

You quote movies a lot, particularly The Hustler. How did your experience as a pool player measure up to your expectations from watching that movie?
[Laughs] At first, my expectations were not met at all. I had this sort of sexy, noir-ish view of what pool was like. In the movies, it just looks so graceful and incredibly cool. And I was not that way at all. But once I started feeling more confident, I really was able to take in that whole pool world and let it affect me. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was living a movie. I was getting into the drama and atmosphere of pool, and letting it affect me, and enjoying it, and carrying myself differently.

Pool really changed your dating life — you started dating pool players.
It sounds really cliché to even say this, but it definitely loosened me up. I'd never thought of myself as a physical person, or a person with a strong physical presence. I've always behaved in a way that was all about wit and talking and the brain. And the idea that I have a body too, and I can communicate with it, whether at a pool table or sitting at a bar — I had not spent a lot of time exploring that. I was being noticed by people for reasons I had not been noticed for in the past. I got a little drunk with it, vamping around these pool bars, getting checked out in this different way by men, and I took it a little overboard. I have two pieces of wreckage behind me after being this way, and I'm thinking, why did this happen? Why did I act this way? It was an interesting thing to confront about myself.

You talk about the history of pool, and how it used to be an aristocratic game. And then it came to be seen as this game for low lifes.
One of the guys that I interviewed and spent a lot of time with, Mike Seamus, said that the divide between the aristocratic origins of pool and when it became the common-man sport is not quite as big as people think. Certainly in the United States, it really was kind of a fluke of proximity. There were these rooms that they called pool rooms in horse-betting halls; they put pool tables in there so the people who were waiting for the outcomes of the races would have something to do. And that's kind of why pool started getting such a bad rap, or being associated with seedy types.

The other thing may also have to do with movies. Even in really early movies, there was a kind of underdog quality to the pool player. Pool became associated with the entertainment industry and vaudeville, with people like W.C. Fields, and it was portrayed in a particular way on the screen because it was funny to have some schlumpy guy playing pool and messing up, or maybe besting someone who was wearing a nice suit. It just made for a good story.

Do you get the sense that it's changing back?
I think the pool table has become this sort of signifier, like I remember in the internet boom, it was the cool thing for all these hot young start-ups is to have a pool table.

Hooksexup has a pool table!
Okay! See? That is like the symbol of being an internet company. So I would say, yeah, the seedy aspect of pool is changing. It isn't so much that it's becoming aristocratic again, because certainly there's nothing aristocratic about internet companies. It's more hip. And now we have access to more pool players because of ESPN. And the women in particular, you get to see their matches on TV all the time. They're proper sporting events, and everyone's very quiet, the same way they are when they're watching golf. And many of the women — Jeanette Lee was certainly the first one to do this — they've kind of developed their own sort of sexy, hip personas. And they've gotten agents and managers and endorsements.

You write about male pool players being down on their luck and full of thwarted ambition, and the women being tough and beautiful and confident. Do you think that's an objective distinction?
Well, there's certainly more women playing pool now in the league than when I started. A lot of pool halls in Manhattan are marketing themselves to women. You walk into Amsterdam Billiards on 11th Street and 4th Avenue, the first thing you see is this oil painting of Jeanette Lee bending over a table. I also think some of it might have to do with women who join the pool league — there are lower expectations. On one hand, it's bad. On the other hand, there's a lot less pressure. Men start at a higher rank, and there are higher expectations. So the frustration and failures may be more palpable for them. And I'm certainly not advocating that, because I think that women and male pool players should be treated the same. But I love playing someone who's a higher rank than me because I'm not expected to win, and it's twice as sweet if I do.