INDIANAPOLIS — I sat at a rickety card table in the walk-in closet of my bedroom every night for nine straight months where a single, blaring, uncovered light bulb hung from the ceiling illuminating the 1980s-era cream and country blue wallpaper plastered behind makeshift shelves. The closet was stuffed with totes, suitcases and junk that should have been thrown out years ago.
This was no glamorous workspace to write my first book, some might call it distractingly chaotic, but to me it was calm, quiet and cozy with a tiny space heater at my feet, a candle lit by the computer and my mind taking me to places I had never been but needed to go.
I had to transform myself into Jeanette Lee, better known as The Black Widow of pool. I had to understand her, everything about her. I needed to be able to speak in her voice, with her words, her phrasing and her sincerity.
From that closet, I was writing her memoir.
From that closet, I went inside seedy pool dives and to glitzy billiards halls for championship matches. I went to the desolate fields of South Korea to meet a father who had abandoned me. I stood on the podium of the World Games wearing a gold medal around my neck and was forced into a bedroom as a child to be kissed by a guy who was supposed to be an old family friend.
I sat ashamed in middle school, taunted and teased as I wore a full-body, monstrous clunky brace for the severe scoliosis that had attacked my spine. To numb the pain, I stole cigarettes from my grandfather and hung out the window of my shoddy New York City apartment to hide the smell from my parents.
I cut my arms as a teen and ran away from home too many times to count, crashing on the couches of whatever friend’s parents would take me in. I got my first glorious taste of cocaine and then fell in love with pool, became addicted to green felt tables and cue sticks and became the No. 1 women’s pool player in the world.
Then at the age of 49 the world around me crashing in, I sat terrified in a hospital room listening to a doctor saying the scariest two words I had ever heard, terminal cancer. I sat even more terrified inside my living room as I told my three daughters that mommy had Stage IV ovarian cancer.
My closet is where I turned from sports journalist to book author, where I took to heart every minute, every hour, every day, week, month and year that Lee had lived. It is where Lee and I had countless hours upon hours of Zoom interviews.
It is where I sat typing, deleting and typing some more, trying to understand, to feel, to empathize, to grasp what it was like to be a beautiful Korean American woman who fought and battled and struggled and persevered to become the greatest women’s pool player of the modern era.
The weight of the task took its toll inside that closet, where I sometimes cried, wondering how I could do justice to a person like Lee in one book? How could I tell the entire story of a woman who is one of the most incredible female athletes of the past 50 years and not miss something?
But this was my task. I was the co-author of Lee’s memoir, helping her to finally tell the raw and painful story of a misunderstood woman who hid behind red lipstick, high heels and see-through, revealing black clothing with confidence that could have won her an Academy Award.
No one knew that after annihilating the women on the pool circuit, Lee would go back to her hotel room and cry at the way they treated her. She was this beautiful sports icon who ESPN latched onto, airing her matches on Saturdays so the men would swoon. She was a woman with the world at her feet and with hands that had the golden touch.
But in reality, Lee was nothing more than an insecure woman who wanted to be accepted. She still fights to be accepted. She is one of those humble, insanely talented, human beings.
‘The Black Widow: A Memoir,’ hits bookshelves today. Here are five of my favorite passages from Lee’s memoir.
Becoming a monster
The wicked curve of my spine was discovered on a hot, summer afternoon at Long Beach Island, where the sun was glistening, the sand was white, and a perfect breeze blew on our faces. My mom had taken the day off work to spend a glorious day at the beach with us, which was wonderful, and a bit shocking at the same time.
My mom never missed work unless it was for a very good, logical reason, like an important appointment or a funeral. Frivolities weren’t really part of our lives but, on occasion, my mom would make time for them. And on this day, she had taken Doris and me to the ocean.
As I took off my shirt that day at the beach, revealing my skinny, 13-year-old body in a swimsuit, that’s when my mom saw it. She saw the curve in my back. I had just started running toward the water when I heard her scream. “Come back here, Jeanette. Come back here.” The ocean would have to wait for a new insecurity to wash over my body.
My mom stood in the sand, and she pulled me close to her. She put her fingers on my back, and she ran them up and down my spine. I stood there and watched Doris splashing in the waves, as my mom told me to bend over and stand up. Bend over again. Stand up again.
“Walk in front of me,” she said sternly. “Now, stand still.” As my mom looked at my thin body from behind with bones protruding, she knew. She was a nurse, after all. My mom didn’t say the word “scoliosis” to me that day. Thatawful word would come later from doctors, who were stunned that I was even able to function with a spine as crooked as mine.
Always an outcast
I would go home after school to a towering co-op apartment building in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn where I grew up, where almost all the families were Black. I was so jealous of those girls with their bodies that curved. I would sometimes wear two or three leggings under my jeans to make my thighs look thicker, and put socks in my bra to look bustier.
I was so skinny, so concave. When I put my feet together, you could see a gap between my thighs. I would walk into my homeroom in seventh grade and hear the chants, “Fall into the Gap,” like the Gap commercialjingle at the time. There were rumors that I was a slut, and that I had the gap between my thighs because I was having sex with all the boys.
At home, I hated my parents’ rules and the strict regimen. After I took a bath or shower, I was required to get down on my knees and scrub the tub. There was a time set to get homework done, brush my teeth, and go to bed. Sleeping in wasn’t allowed, even on Saturdays when there was no school, and I loved sleeping in.
I remember as a teenager being so angry and frustrated, and screaming, “Mom, why won’t you just leave me alone?” She told me I was wasting my life away in my bed, that I needed to be awake when the world was awake. I ran away too many times to count, crashing on couches of whatever friend or teacher would take me in. I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, and I tried cocaine and acid.
I took needles and jabbed them into my lobes making homemade pierced ears. I took a razor blade once and cut my forearm repeatedly so that a friend and I could be blood sisters. It took 28 slashes before my forearm started bleeding. I thought maybe my close friendship with her would make life better.
But nothing made life better. Nothing, it seemed, would ever take away the loneliness of feeling like an outcast
Hated by the women: ‘Pretty doesn’t make the ball fall in’
One day, I went to my mailbox and found a package from one of the top women players on the tour. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe I was wrong about the way they felt about me. I tore into that padded envelope, only to find the gift was a copy of the Dr. Seuss book ‘Yertle the Turtle.’
Inside, on the cover page, was a handwritten note from a player I won’t name: ‘I think you will connect with this book. I think you will connect with Yertle.’
In the book, Yertle is a self-absorbed creature, obsessed with being the loftiest turtle in the kingdom. He eventually demands that other turtles stack themselves beneath him, so he can sit atop the highest throne. As he revels in glory, the turtles beneath him, holding him up, are in pain.
That book was about how you step on people, without any compassion, to get what you want. When I got that package, I realized that’s what the women thought of me, that I was only out for myself.
“The difference between Jeanette and me,” Allison Fisher would say, “is Jeanette always wanted to be known as the most well-known player in the world, and I wanted to be known as the best player in the world.”
Allison was wrong. It was never about being well-known or famous. Those women misunderstood me. I didn’t care about Jeanette Lee getting notoriety. I wanted to be the best in the world just like they did. It had nothing to do with fame. I just had this deep love, this raging passion to play pool.
‘The men: They sexualized me, mentored me, gave me humility’
On Comedy Central’s ‘The Man Show’ in 2003, as I trounced Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla on the table, they took breaks drinking beer, watching me as they pretended to read books on how to pick up hot Asian chicks. I didn’t back away. I kept up with the act. And I showed them just how good I was.
‘You bitch,” they said as I hit a winning shot.
“You told me not to touch your balls,” I said, knowing exactly what I was saying. “So, I didn’t.”
Kimmel and Carolla poured talc powder down their pants, saying they needed to “chalk” their cues, and ate pretzels. They called me “honey” and told me to get them beers. Then, when my skills at the table had done all the talking, they finally acknowledged they could never beat me at pool.
“You know what?” Kimmel said to me. “This is ridiculous. You really want to play some pool? You want to play pool my way?’
“I’ll play pool any way,” I told him. The show ended with me lounging in a swimming pool, wearing a black bikini, as Kimmel told me the entire gig was a diabolical scheme to get me into fewer clothes.
‘Was it time for The Black Widow to die?’
The odds were dire. I was 49 years old, and it was almost certain I wouldn’t make it to my 50th birthday. But for some reason, I didn’t listen to the prognosis or the odds, not even when I was told that my cancer meant a less than 15 percent chance of surviving more than two years.
What did odds really mean anyway? I had beaten the odds so many times before. I was, after all, an outcast, a high school dropout and runaway teen who had conquered the world of pool. I had overcome racism, scoliosis, feelings of abandonment since my parents’ divorce, and shame — and, more than that, a lifetime of surgeries and chronicpain from ankylosing spondylitis and fibromyalgia.
As that unwelcome opponent named cancer came demanding a match in January 2021, I was bound and determined to overcome again.
“Jeanette is the fiercest, most competitive player I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t back down and she doesn’t give up. And she took that fighting spirit from the pool table into her battle with cancer.” — Don Wardell, Lee’s longtime physician and friend
‘The Black Widow: A Memoir’ is $30 and available for purchase at Amazon, Walmart and Barnes & Noble.
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via e-mail:dbenbow@indystar.com