Rossman's rule: It's all about the fun

Editor's note: Tom "Dr. Cue" Rossman presented his artistic pool demonstration at the Osage Prairie YMCA on Tuesday. During the show, and in a post-event interview, he shared more about his life as an expert pool player and entertainer, and how it all came to be.

"I've had many shows where I didn't miss any shots for maybe 30 minutes where everything went in. And in many cases, those types of performances were not the best performances because the audience didn't have an interaction with that."

Tom "Dr. Cue" Rossman has made a living out of missing shots on the pool table since the late 1980s, but has become one of the most popular players in the world of professional and artistic pool. Rossman became Dr. Cue in October of 1989 after following the Harlem Globetrotters professional novelty basketball team.

Rossman's intention behind creating the Dr. Cue persona was simply to be an entertainer using a pool table as his medium of expression. That medium has since allowed Rossman to spend his life teaching artistic pool while at the same time entertaining people around the world.

Rossman has been playing the game of pool for the last 50 years, but developed the Dr. Cue personality after taking a year-long break from the game in the late 1980s. Rossman started his career as a professional pool player who held the same mentality as many players at all levels -- making shots is the only way to enjoy the game. But after changing his outlook on the game as a whole and starting to enjoy the act of simply playing, Rossman was then able to move on into the entertainment role he now enjoys.

"Up until 1984, it was pretty much learning the serious side and how to make balls. And then in 1984 when I quit and I came back to the game a year later, I learned how to really play the game professionally by starting to miss balls and enjoying the roll," Rossman said. "It changed my entire life when I learned how to enjoy the game for the beauty of the roll and not necessarily the balls dropping in the pocket."

From that point on, Rossman began to develop what he know calls the art of "Table Trottering," the art of missing shots for the purpose of entertainment. That philosophy has allowed him to continue his career as a player while at the same time, fueling his passion for comedic entertainment of the masses.

"It becomes and interaction of entertainment value with the audience. So, in my case, what I do is I actually have developed the comedic routine and it interacts with the audience in a way where the making of the shot, say for instance, for the pool player in the audience is simply a byproduct of the whole thing," Rossman said. "The main product is the humor aspect and whether the shots go in or not, it's a design of getting the emotions of the audience involved in the presentation. So I actually use that medium of expression, the missing along with the making, to do that with."

Though he never goes up to a table at any point during an exhibition and misses a shot intentionally, Rossman said that his right brain has been trained to intentionally miss the shot at times to provide for entertainment of his audiences. Rossman has done several exhibitions throughout his career in which he made several consecutive shots, but those performances were not as engaging to his audiences, thus making them less successful than shows that featured several missed shots, he said.

"I do miss on purpose, but not the way most people think about missing on purpose," Rossman said. "I don't physically go up to the table and say 'I'm going to miss this shot,' I don't do that. ... If you play the game and you miss, in most cases, the emotion you experience is one of disgust or the fact that you're upset that you missed or you're not really happy and what I try to do is I try to intermingle the fact that the miss is OK and you can have fun with the miss."

Rossman and his wife, Marty, spend nearly all of their time on the road doing novelty shows and educational exercises all over the United States and even around the world. In a given year, Rossman will perform upwards of 200 shows and spend as much as 250 days on the road.

Thanks to nearly seven years of trying, Frank Briscoe was finally able to put Nevada on the list of those 200-plus show stops Tuesday night. Rossman and his exhibition made an appearance at the Osage Prairie YMCA and dazzled fans with his humorous act and impressive artistic shooting.

Rossman normally doesn't do shows in areas with populations of less than 50,000 people, but after Briscoe took the initiative of coordinating the event, he brought his act to Nevada. Rossman performed for roughly three hours in front of a relatively small crowd from a number of different areas from Joplin all the way up to Belton, Mo., and even southeast Kansas.

"We go wherever anybody wants to receive a little joy from the game. We're not restricted by names of towns or cities or states or countries," Briscoe said. "We've been all over the world. ... It just so happened that Nevada came into my journey of my life and I stopped by and Frank coordinated it all. I met him through Vegas and he took it upon himself to coordinate it."

For more information on Rossman and his act, visit his Web site at drcuepromotions.com.

Fans or any other pool players seeking advice or with questions about Rossman's exhibitions or the game of pool are also invited to e-mail any questions or comments to drcue@artisticpool.org.