Tina Malm
Downs Linda Shea twice, hot seat and finals, to claim title
It was a very active weekend for ladies’ pool across the country. Over the Oct.15-16 weekend, Texas held two ladies events while Florida held a Cues for the Cure fundraiser for breast cancer research. Intent on not being left out of the ‘females on the felt’ fun, the state of Delaware held its 1st Annual Ladies 9-Ball Championships. It was replete with well-known and respected women who’ve been plying their trade in the regional and national tour fields for many years, including the woman who went undefeated to win it, Tina Malm, and runner-up, Linda Shea, who’s as, if not more well-known for being at the helm of the J. Pechauer Northeast Women’s Tour for as long as a lot of female competitors can remember. The event drew 28 entrants to Milford Billiards in Milford, DE.
As Shea has begun a process of turning over the reins of the JPNEWT to Briana Miller, officially in 2023, she’s ‘getting out’ a bit more these days, appearing away from the JPNEWT tables and testing her mettle at other tour and independent events. In particular, she’d been noticing that there’s a lot of money being offered in barbox competition.
“In this (Mid-Atlantic) area, everything is going barbox,” she said recently. “I took 2nd in an 8-Ball, Jack & Jill tournament at Brews & Cues (Glen Burnie, MD) recently and won $4,000, so I decided that I was going to investigate these barboxes.”
She was runner-up in this past weekend’s 9-ball event, only her second time playing on a barbox table, and will be playing in another Jack & Jill barbox event this weekend. She “enjoyed it very much,” she said of her experience at Milford Billiards, while noting that since a great deal of her tournament experience has played out on 9-ft tables, she’s having to make adjustments to the smaller, 7-ft tables.
“It’s totally different,” she said, “like a completely different game. There are a few things that are different; bank shots are a little different, you can’t do three-rail shots the same way and you have to take some of the power out of your game, shorten your stroke.
“I’m having to learn how to dumb down my stroke,” she added, “and it’s renewed my interest in learning how to downplay my game to accommodate the smaller table. I haven’t gotten that touch yet. It’s slower, but I still stroke it.”
Like Shea, Malm has a spent a lot of her title-winning career playing on 9 ft. tables and finds herself engaged recently in more 7 ft. match play because there’s a lot more of it here on the East Coast.
“It seems like I’m playing a lot more barbox pool,” she said, “but I’ve been a big table player for most of my career.”
Originally from San Diego, Malm got her start on that side of the country, winning a lot of her early titles on that side of the country. She was 1995’s Women’s Western Regional 9-Ball Tour Champion, 1999’s California State Women’s 9-Ball Champion and 2005’s Arizona Women’s Billiards Tour Champion, to name just a few. She and Shea crossed paths during a time when she was here about midway through the second decade of the century to be (among other things) the 2017 Delaware State Women’s 8-Ball Champion and Pennsylvania’s Women’s 9-Ball Champion, as well. She won this past April’s Women’s Player Championship at the SBE, too.
Though she and Malm have similar longevity curves on the ladies tour/event circuit, neither of them has a clear recollection of ever having played against each other.
“I feel like I’ve played against her before, when I was here in 2017-2018,” she said, “but I couldn’t tell you what our record against each other was.”
“This may have been the first,” was Shea’s recollection. “She came out (on the JPNEWT) once or twice, but I don’t recall ever having played her.”
It’s likely to be the last time that Shea ever says that.
Set up on opposite ends of the bracket, if they were going to meet at all on the winners’ side of that bracket, it was going to happen in the hot seat match. And it did. Malm got by Lisa Haas Kerrigan, Danielle Denola and Rachel Walters to arrive at a winners’ side semifinal against Nicole Nester. Shea downed Belinda Parker, Sharon O’Hanlon (long-time assistant to Shea on the JPNEWT) and Jennifer Tully to arrive at her winners’ side semifinal match against Sandy MacDonald Labar.
Shea defeated Labar 6-4, as Malm was busy sending Nester over 6-4. In their first of two, battling for the hot seat Malm and Shea went double hill, but not before some early and late drama.
“She had me down 4-1,” Shea recalled, “and I came back to 5-5. I broke the last rack, scratched and she ran out.”
She noted that overall, “some funky things happened” in their two matches. She wasn’t being critical or making excuses for her play in either match. Just noting one of the fundamental axioms of the games.
“She definitely got the balls down and won,” she said. “That’s the way it works.”
On the loss side, in the semifinals, Shea drew Nicole Nester, who, following her loss to Malm, had not given up a rack. Nester shut out Jennifer Tully in her first loss-side match and in the quarterfinals, shut out Rachel Walters, who’d chalked up her own shutout against Labar to reach her. Shea turned the tables on that 10-rack run for Nester, giving up only a single rack to her in the semifinals.
Malm didn’t lose a step in the delay between sending Shea to the loss side and her return. She completed her undefeated run with a 6-2, single set win over Shea in the finals and claimed the 1st Annual Ladies Delaware State Barbox 9-Ball Championship.
Tarek Elmalla, event organizer, thanked Leo and Sherrie Weigand and their Milford Billiards staff for their hospitality, as well as Ray Netta with Tuff Cuts (for streaming the event), Alyssa Solt for commentating on the stream, Ran Ji, and the newly-married Ben and Andrea Thomas-Davis for “helping with everything.”
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