Allison Fisher - Part 1 (The Early Years)

Welcome to another edition of Legends of the Cue and Mark Wilson. We have royalty with us today.
None other than the Duchess of Doom, Allison Fisher. I refer to her often as my sister, but she prefers daughter. She is the winningest female player of all time.
Welcome, thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone.
It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to this interview.
Now you kind of have a dual role here as our co-host and the subject of the interview, right?
Yeah, I know this is going to be a tricky one, isn't it? I'll have to ask myself a few questions.
Exactly. Exactly. You're going to be a bit conflicted, I think.
I think so, but we'll see how it goes.
So we've been working up toward this for a long time and before we jump into your life story, which is what we're here to do, we're here to tell your life stories, but before we do that, the listeners would probably be a little bit curious about how
the three of us got thrown together, particularly the question would be, well, who's this Mike Gonzalez guy because you don't fit? You're not a pool guy.
Well, interestingly, we met you, didn't we? Well, I did for the first time teaching you at our clinic.
I think it was in Greensboro, we did a clinic and I had the pleasure of meeting you, Mike, and then you told us a little bit about your story and how you did a podcast or are doing a podcast for the love of the game in golf.
I said to you, how about a pool podcast? That would be a really good idea. You said, I don't know anything about that sport really.
Next thing you know, you're contacting me and Mark, and that's what came out of it and here we are today.
The way I fell in love with Mike was, one, he has a great passion for pool, but two, he likes high-end coffee, which is just like me, and he loves the Beatles and knows them intimately.
So right away, I knew we had a kinship there, kind of a brotherhood.
It's your best day.
As you both mentioned, yeah, I met you last fall. It doesn't seem like it's only been that long, but at a pool school, you guys did, and I came to really like and respect both of you.
The thing that stood out for me is that, in terms of the way I've tried to conduct my life, there seems to be a lot of parallels with you.
You guys are quality class individuals, dignified, high integrity, and I like to associate with folks like that. I think perhaps that's the reason we hit it off so much.
I will say that, for our listeners, nobody's going to be tuning in to hear me talk. They want to hear from Allison Fisher. They want to hear from Mark Wilson.
This may be the only episode where my full name is used, and that's fine. I want to be a traffic cop and lead our listeners through some of these stories.
But most of what we want to hear is the experiences that you two have had in the great game of Pool. And I couldn't be more delighted to be associated with you two greats and look forward to this journey we're going to be on together.
I appreciate it.
And I feel much the same.
Yeah, me too. I think it's a great threesome.
Yeah. Well, delighted to be doing this. Of course, we had a chance to do Mark's life story.
And as you know by now, we want to tell your whole life story and we'll start at the very beginning. So for our listeners who don't know, but they probably do, you weren't native born in the US. You were born in Chesent, England.
I was.
I was born in Chesent, Hertfordshire in England, which is just north of London. When I was four years old, we moved to Surrey, a place called Thames Ditton. And then at the age of 11 years old, we moved to Peace Haven in East Sussex.
So I spent a lot of my youth in Sussex, which was an absolutely beautiful county to grow up in.
Well, good. We're going to talk a lot about your childhood years and how you came to pool, snooker at the time. But I saw a quote, and I'm pretty sure this quote was about Peace Haven, and you can verify whether that would be true at all.
It's from a guy named Sir Nicholas Bernhard Leon Hevzner. He was a German slash Brit, art historian, and he wrote in his volume series of The Buildings of England, this quote, he said, Peace Haven, a rash on the countryside.
There is no worse in England.
I can't agree with that. I don't understand that quote.
Could that have been attributed to one or the other former hometowns?
I have no idea.
Isn't that cruel?
It's bizarre, but it really wasn't like that. It's a beautiful play. I mean, I loved growing up there.
That was the best thing that happened to me. I think it was, if you picture living on a road and at the end of the road are the white chalky cliffs and then looking out into the ocean, and that's where I grew up.
It must have been the German in him that came out there.
Well, I mean, I don't want to say who won the war, but.
Why would I got to go there? So what are some of your earliest recollections of growing up as a little kid over there?
Well, I have two older brothers. One's passed away now, Simon, but I have an older brother, David, who's still living, and he's six years older than me. And I was a little tomboy as a kid.
I wanted to be a boy, and one of my brothers wanted to be a girl, and I used to play with the footballs and all the guns and this, that, and the other. And I just loved the rough and tumble outside, playing with their friends.
And I was the one being a little tomboy that took up sport. I was very sporty. And so I was seven years old.
How I got into Snooker was at seven years old, we'd moved to Surrey. And seven years old, I was watching television with my father. And Pot Black was on television.
It was a Snooker show where they had one game of Snooker every week with professional players. And you could hear the music, the intro music. It was played the Sting, the piano Sting music.
And so I came in and sat down and said to my dad, what's this? And he said, this is Snooker. And I sort of was quite fascinated at it.
And I said, how does it work? And he was talking me through how they played the game and the points and everything. And after it, I just said, can I have a little table for Christmas?
So that just came out of nowhere. And I received a little table, when I was my first mistake saying a little table. I got a table that was about one and a half foot long, which is the smallest table ever probably.
But perfect for my size at the time. You just put it on a little table top and had the small little balls, and the tiny little sticks for cues, and a little bit of rubber around the rails. And I used to play that nonstop.
I used to love it. My other favorite game at that time was a shooting game. I had a little thing called Magic Shot, and it had a little screen across it.
And you'd have a little gun with pellets that stuck to the gun, like magnets, and then fire at these different targets within there. So those are my favorite two games as a seven year old.
Is it true that you had the one and a half foot table re-clothed with Simona's 760?
I don't think they were around it. Maybe they were, but I wasn't aware of Simona's at the time. So I was a bridesmaid at my cousin's wedding.
I was seven years old, and I had my two front teeth missing, so I didn't smile a lot in those pictures. But when we went downstairs to the venue at the reception, they had a full-size snooker table.
I knew how to play from my little table, and obviously watching Pot Black. I wanted to get on that table, but my brothers and my cousin wouldn't let me because I was too small, I guess.
So they said, you can do the scoring, because I knew how to do the scoring. By the time my mum came to pick me up from downstairs, I was in tears, saying they wouldn't let me play on the table with them.
So it's quite bizarre really when you look back as a seven-year-old. My desire to get on the table.
Yeah. The commentators for Pot Black were Ted Lowe and Alan Weeks, I guess. Did you ever have a chance to personally tell them that story?
Probably.
To Whispering Ted Lowe, a very famous commentator because he had that low-pitched voice. He would be whispering into the mic. He made it quite interesting like that.
So yeah, he was a great guy. I did meet him on a few occasions.
So what was your experience like playing on a regular full-size 12 by 6 nook or table?
Well, it's how I got there really because that was my first chance and it didn't happen. My mother worked at the Milk Marketing Board in Surrey, and they had a games room there. You had to be 14 years old to play, so I didn't get to play there.
Then we moved to Sussex when I was 11 years old. There was a pub down the road called the Peacehaven Central Club, and the owner was John Copper.
I went down there, and my mom and dad had been going in there for years because my grandparents lived in Peacehaven, which is why we ended up there. But I used to go in there, and one day I was at home and I was crying in my bed.
My mom came in and said, what's wrong? And I said, I really want to get on that table. And John let me come in and play on it.
And I played my dad the first game. We got through about three quarters of the game, and I think that's the only time he ever beat me.
But then the members came in, so I came off the table, but it didn't take long for them to allow me to play with them. So that was how it all started by John saying yes, basically, because I was a kid and they didn't mind me playing.
I was very respectful. And I just remember that. That full-size table, I could never take my eyes off of it.
I used to watch all the time. You know, my parents would go drink down the pub, and you know, common thing amongst the British people. And so, but I couldn't take my eyes off of it.
So I learned a lot from watching, you know, and obviously playing a lot of sport. And I, football, soccer, as you would know, was one of my first sports that I loved, too. And so I was quite coordinated in that respect.
And yeah, I just fell in love with it.
So the Peace Haven Central Club was a pretty popular spot in town, run by the Copper family from Rotting Dean. John's father, would he have been around Bob?
Yes, Bob, look at you, Bob Copper. They were singers, local singers, too. They used to travel around.
They would perform music at this place, too, wouldn't they?
Yes, they did.
It was old folk type music.
Yeah.
The family were all into that. But John was a great person. And I was very fortunate that he allowed me on the table, because moving to Sussex wasn't easy for me, having been starting a new school and everything and making new friends.
But that sort of changed my life, I think. That changed everything for me.
Does son Tom still look after the place? Is he still around?
He probably does. I haven't been back there in years. You know, I've lived in America for 30 years.
I have been back, but I never went back to the Central Club because I'm not a member. I don't know if they'd let me in. Apparently, my old Q case still hangs on the wall.
Well, then they'd have to let you in.
They must have.
At least to go look at it, right?
That's such a cool story to see how your roots began. Talk a little bit about how you started. What was the training like?
Or did you just compete? Or did they have you doing exercises?
The other part, just before that, as an 11-year-old, when we moved to Sussex, we went around to my uncle's house, my Uncle Mick, and he had a snooker table leaned up against his wall. It was a six-foot slate-based snooker table.
It didn't have legs, so you had to lift it up and put it on top of a table to set it up. Well, they never used to get it out when I used to go over there.
And then one day, my dad came home with it as a present for me, and he'd set it up in the little room, like a conservatory or a sunroom, off the back of the kitchen, and the snooker table was put on a table there. And I was over the moon.
Before school, I would start on it, and after school, I came home and I started practicing on it. But I got really good at the Masseys shop because the room wasn't big enough, and I broke the kitchen window on the first day, I think.
And then eventually, I got it moved into the lounge, into the great room at home, so I'd have a bit more room. But I used to plan it all the time, loved it, absolutely loved it.
Would David and Simon play with you?
Yeah, on occasion, but they weren't really into it like I was. They would play games with me, but not be into it. They weren't really sporty.
Simon was more of a gymnast, and he was gifted at other things. He was a strong person and played the violin, and Dave was more studious and more responsible. So that was the beginning.
So then I was playing at the Central Club, and they put me in the league team. They tried me out for the last match of the season, because I was getting reasonable player at that point from watching.
They said, we'll just try out in the last match, because it doesn't matter if we win or lose. It wasn't a big game. So I won handedly in that, and then they put me in the team the next season.
They were fighting whether to put me in the A or B team, they ended up in the A team.
Ah, okay.
So that was good. So that was my sort of beginning of league experience. And then with that came a little bit of the old chauvinism, because there were some rooms in that league that wouldn't allow me to play in it, because I was female.
So that became an interesting thing for me. I was a kid playing a game, not thinking about gender, just wanting to play the game. Obviously surrounded by men, I grew up playing with men.
And a boy from my school, who could play in these rooms, but not me. So there were a few conservative clubs that wouldn't allow me to go in, or wouldn't allow women to come in and watch even.
Yeah, and I think this theme will continue itself, won't it? At least up until the time that you decided to make the move to America, but really throughout the career, as it has for many women, faced with this whole gender issue in sport.
Yeah, I mean, it was this is years ago. And by the time, the happy side of it is, it's by the time I left the league, which was 16 years old, because I was pursuing national and international events, maybe. Yeah.
By the time I left the league, I won every trophy in it. I won the juniors, the under 21s, the senior, you know, the open, the doubles, the most breaks over 25, the highest break. I think there was one trophy I didn't win in it.
So I kind of left on a good note and outgrew it. So it was kind of nice, really.
What was your high break when you were 11?
Oh, it wasn't much. I can tell you this, when I was about 12 years old, well, it was more than your seven ball run, I think, that we-
Okay, yeah, good.
Yeah, it was more than that. When you were sub-horrible. Sub-horrible run.
But I remember vividly my first 20 break, right? So I'm practicing in there and playing, and I hit 22, I was on 22, and I ran over to my dad who was sitting and watching. Said, Dad, I'm on 22.
He said, just go back and focus. Of course, I missed the next ball because I was so excited. It was breaking 20, then you try and break 30, then you try and break 40, you go like that.
So I just remember that very vividly. I missed the next ball after that because I was all over the place.
So for our listeners that aren't snooker aficionados, describe what a 20 break looks like.
Okay, so the game of snooker is made up of 15 red balls and six other colored balls and a cue ball. And the objective is to score more points than your opponent. And a red ball is worth one point, and then the other colors are worth different points.
The black is worth seven, the pink is worth six, the blue is worth five, brown is worth four, green is worth three and yellow is worth two. Every time you shoot a red ball, it stays in the pocket, doesn't re-spot.
Every time you shoot one of the other colors, it re-spots on a specific area of the table or spot on the table. To accumulate points like that, you go red color, red color, red color, red color, till all the reds are gone.
And then the colors are shot in order, yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black. So, for example, I might have gone red, black, that would be eight points, red, nine points, black, 16 points, red, 17 points and maybe a blue, 22.
That's just an example of making up 22 points. So you can see how it goes.
Yeah, and for those that haven't played on a regulation table with one and three quarter inch balls and those skinny cues, it's a lot harder than it looks.
It is. It's, I don't remember the exact size of the pockets, but it's quite tight and you can't run balls along the round unless you do it sort of at a certain pace. You can't force balls in.
12 by six foot table, so quite a bit bigger than a pool table. But what it does is it makes you technically sound. You don't use a lot of side spins.
You might be one tip, if any, or half a tip outside the edge of the vertical axis and the horizontal axis.
So you're very precise with precision on a tip, and with your technique, I think that's the thing that's the key, is the technique is all about technique at Snooker.
Tell us about when Frank Callan came into your life, and did that allow you to make a step change in your skills and knowledge?
Yeah, well, previous to that, a couple of other people came in. So I think at 13 years old, I was, as you know, playing in the league.
And then my dad found out about 11 to 17 year old club, it was called the 11-17 club in Worthing, which was near where my uncle lived, Uncle Mick, who had that table initially. So we started going along to a Saturday morning club.
And Mark, you would have loved this, because this is all your people, but juniors, right? So they range from 11, obviously, to 17 years old. Seemed like there was some younger, but I'm not sure.
Probably 30 kids, let's say, walking along the road in their tuxedos, some of them, with their full-length one-piece cues. Some of them had two-piece cues.
And to this club, and we waited all outside to get in, and then a guy called Frank Sandel ran this club, junior players. And he made it so that we had some league system.
So if somebody was above you, you might play them that week, challenge them that week, and if you beat them, you go up. So you're working your way up the ladder, the ladder of success.
And in this club, they had obviously multiple snooker tables, which is always wonderful to see, because bear in mind I was brought up in a pub with one table. So to me, it was like, wow, I'm in a club full of tables. It's just unbelievable.
You go upstairs and then there was a room that had a spectacular table and a sitting area in it. And one day Jim Medecroft, who was a local professional player and Frank Sandel, who was the coach, were in the room.
Jim was in the room and he said, bring that boy over and let's get him in the room to coach. He said, she's got a really good cue action and it happened to be me.
They were looking at me from behind thinking I was a boy, because it was just pretty much boys there. And they were like, oh my God, we've got a girl here and she's like, cueing really well.
So they went out and straight away got me a decent cue, because I walked in with a two-piece cue with a screw-in tip that I had since maybe I was 10 or 11 years old when I got my little table. And that was from my dad's friend.
And I treasured that cue, that little screw-in tip. I didn't know any different. And then they got me a one-piece Horace Lindrum cue.
I'd never felt anything like that before. And so I played with that. And that club, I just loved it, but I outgrew it very quickly because I became the best player in there very quickly.
So rather than my dad traveling 45 minutes every weekend or whatever, we stopped after a while. But Frank became a big part of my life, Frank Sandale. He used to take me to some tournaments and teach me a little bit about the game.
And he's taught many kids over the years. He's now 80 years old and still going. And so that was the beginning for me of having somebody there in my corner sort of teach me a little bit.
And he took me to a guy called Jack Carnham, who was a former professional player and became a commentator. And I just didn't gel with him. I didn't like his toot and how he was.
So fast forward, I was at a tournament. I don't know which one it was, but Frank Callan, who you mentioned earlier, came up to me, to my parents. And he said, I'd like to coach your daughter.
I'm not going to charge you anything, but I'd like to coach her. I was 16 and he coached Steve Davis and some of the top male snooker players. So I wasn't going to let that opportunity go by.
And I went and spent a weekend with him in Blackpool, up in the north of England. And that's where I learned about the hesitation or transition in the stroke, the pause, whatever we want to call it. And I developed that at the back of my stroke.
And I spent months doing that. Nonstop. And it was three months before the World Championships.
And my dad came home one day. And at this point, I was practicing hard. But I'll come back to that.
I want to go back to that a little bit. But I was practicing hard and I was in tears, really. Because it put a strain on my triceps and biceps, like your triceps, that hesitation at the back.
And my dad just said, you've got to trust in what you're doing. Trust in Frank. And I kept with it.
And by the time the World Championships came around, I just didn't feel like I could miss. I felt so ingrained with it and in sync. And I felt like my timing was really great.
And that's when I won my first world title. So that was a Frank Callan. And I think that set the bar for me.
And just to talk about that World Championships, I was supposed to win it the year before and didn't. I got to the final and I think I lost five blackboard games or something like that.
But when I finally did win it, I went back to the guest house we were staying in. And my mum was up in the bedroom with me and I just collapsed in a heap and started crying. And she's like, are you okay?
She said, and I was like, you know, I was in bits and she said, Ali, you've won the World Championships. You can quit now if you want. And then to me, it was just the beginning, but it was just the relief, the pressure.
So I was releasing just, you know, that whole build up of, you know, a year before I was supposed to win it and didn't. And getting over the winning line, as you know, is always a big deal to know that you can do something.
That's the biggest part, isn't it? It's the getting over the little hump. And then that's where your sort of self-belief starts kicking in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, for our listeners, we're talking about the 1985 Women's World Snooker Championship.
This would have been contested at Breaks Snooker Club in Sullyhull, England. And we need to remember that Ali won her first national title at age 15. She's now at the ripe old age of 17, winning World Snooker Championships for women.
This was a win by the score of five to one over Stacey Hilliard.
All my family watching, you know, Karen, we all know Karen Core, Stacey Hilliard and a few other players would have been in it. And, yeah, Stacey was my rival at that point. She was the total opposite.
It was interesting, the transition of play, because I was always steady paced. Stacey was a very natural, faster player, as was Karen Core way back.
And what's interesting is they completely changed their games to be more consistent and became a little more methodical. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but certainly made consistency.
And on a snooker table, it's hard to be fast and loose. So I think, you know, I was doing my best at that time, training. And Mark, you said, how did you train at that time?
There came, there was a little story to that, was I was in a tournament, first of all, from league to get into tournaments on a national level, I picked up a newspaper in the Central Club where I was playing.
And it had Women's World Snooker Championship, sponsored by Guinness at the time, I think it was. I was 14 years old and I'm like, women playing women's tournaments. I was like, because I'm a kid playing with guys at a local pub.
Didn't even occur to me. I wasn't even thinking about tournaments. I'm like, well, I want to have a go at that.
You know, so Frank said, oh, I can, I can find out about getting you on that tour. That's no problem. So my parents were okay about it.
So I entered my first tournament. I was 14. So they took me along to London.
And I played a seeded player in the first round. Bear in mind in snooker, it's knockout. There's no double elimination.
You lose, you go home. Well, I lost 3-2 on the last ball. I shook hands, walked behind a curtain that was over the window of the club.
And I started crying for a bit. And I came out, we left. We were on the way home and I said to my mum and dad, can you take me to the next tournament, please?
So that's what happened. They took me and obviously my parents been absolutely fabulous. But they took me to the next tournament.
And I think I got to the quarterfinal. And I'll never forget, we got a check for £12.50, which is about $18, $15, $18. We were so proud of that check.
We took it home. We photocopied it, took it down the club. I've still got that photocopy of that check.
I found it the other day. And we were sort of in the club. We probably spent a lot more money than that winning it, going to the place, staying overnight, two nights in a hotel or whatever.
But it was just the first victory and first money that I made. And so another time, I was at a tournament in London again. And my mum and dad, it was probably about midnight, the final.
Bear in mind, my mum and dad would drive home and then go up to work the next day, get up and go to work. So they were spending their weekends with me. And we went to this tournament.
I played in the final and it was very late. And I took it a little bit easy. I'm playing my friend Caroline.
She won't mind me saying this because she'll vouch for this. But I used to give Caroline 40 points star at Snooker. So that's quite a lot because we've talked about the points.
So I'm playing Caroline and I took it a little easy and I was a bit not in the zone, so to speak. I wasn't very focused about winning and I lost. Well, got in the car on the way home.
You could cut the air with a knife in that car and I'm like, oh. My mom calmly said, we don't mind if you want to go and get a job when you leave school down at the shop at the end of the road and we support you in whatever you want to do.
We're not going to give up our time and our money to drive you around to these tournaments if you're not going to give it 100 percent. So it's up to you. You can do whatever you want to do.
You can choose what you want to do in your life. But we're not going to give you the time and money if you're not going to choose to do this properly. Well, there's times in your life when you hear things and it doesn't sink in.
There's times when you hear it and it's like hits home. That was the hit home because I've never forgotten it. That was a change in attitude and everything for me because from that day on, I was practicing four hours a day.
To your question, Mark, I drew a chart on the wall, and I would do 15 minutes of this, 30 minutes of that, 15 minutes of this, 30 minutes of that. I'd make sure I got to four hours. I wouldn't cheat myself, and that's what I did.
And that, and then speaking to Caroline now, who's still my friend, of course, to this day, she says that was the change.
She said there was one day you came back and you were almost unbeatable, and that was the change for me, the talk and the practice.
Very interesting.
Talk a little bit for people that don't know, Frank Callan, the guru of snooker, and I've watched some of his videos, he'd be the Hank Haney or Butch Harmon of that sport, and then for you to get involved with him in a very young age, was there any
No, not at all.
I went to Frank and I didn't, do you know over the course of my years of playing, I probably only saw him several times. You could probably count it on two hands. It was just I spent the weekend with him and diligently did what he told me to do.
I said to him once, you and I teach together, Mark, I said, Frank, are you fussy about the way I stand or how anyone stands? He said, I don't care as long as you cue straight. The hard part is getting you to cue straight.
It wasn't about how I stood, what I did, it was about what I am above the table. He used to chomp on this cigar, I'd have a cigar in his mouth. He was probably in his 60s at this stage, I would think, seemed that way.
Grew up as a fishmonger and everything, but loved playing snooker and became a coach. Coach Steve Davis, one of the best players of all time. Then he's saying, are you with me?
He would be on his cigar, a cigar in his mouth and he'd say something to me and he'd go, are you with me? I just had a great relationship with Frank. I loved him.
It was just so fun to be around for me. You have to have a rapport with somebody you're learning from. I think you have to trust them and you have to enjoy being around them.
And he was that for me and I wasn't, like I said, I went to Jack Cannon before that. That, no, not at all. I didn't have any instinct to be around him just because I didn't like what he said to me.
Frank Sandel was a great coach, but I had to go to the next level and Frank took me to the next level. I knew that there was something missing in my game and he got it for me.
He nailed it and I did what he did and I emulated myself on Steve Davis, who he coached anyway. And so there was a great role model. And I think there's no jealousies of anyone.
I think I was putting the work in and I chose to go to Frank Callan and Frank Callan chose to teach me. More so, I was very fortunate.
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