G Profile: LoreeJon Hasson

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LoreeJon Hasson

G Profile

• Hometown: Garwood, New Jersey
• Family: Husband,Dave Hasson; three children, Jonathan, Jessica, and Matthew
• Unlikely Fans: The nuns from Mount Saint Mary’s, Jones’s Catholic high school in New Jersey
• Local Business: LoreeJon’s Pool Tables Plus
• Special Recognition: At fifteen, she won the World Nine-Ball Tournament, becoming the youngest player ever to win a world title, noted by the Guinness Book of World Records.

LoreeJon Hasson believes that the lessons of pool are also the lessons of life: Shoot straight, keep good form, don’t lose focus, and most of all, give it your all. Though that might not make you an eight-time world-champion billiards player like Hasson, it could make life, like a game of pool, go that much smoother. It’s worked repeatedly for the multi-titled pro anyway.

Hasson has called Greenville home for thirteen years ever since she and her then-husband, Sammy Jones, and their three children (Jonathan, 18, Jessica, 14, and Matthew, 13) moved here to open an Olhausen dealership, her longtime pool-table sponsor, next to Haywood Mall. Hasson, however, seemed destined to settle down below the Mason-Dixon Line. “Being named LoreeJon, I always tease my parents that because they named me a Southern name, they kind of forced me to go to the South,” she says laughing. Her parents, who divide their time between New Jersey, Vermont, and Florida, had five children, and LoreeJon is the youngest.

With a laid-back personality and youthful looks that belie her forty-three years, Hasson—dressed in jeans, a zippered hoodie, and flip flops that show off her gold-painted toes—seems more California surfer girl than Jersey pool-hall queen. But it was in a pool hall in Garwood, New Jersey—that four-year-old Hasson got her start. (Yes, four years old.)

While watching her older sister, Nancy, shoot pool at the High Cue, one day Hasson picked up a cue stick, and, holding it with one hand, started hitting balls across the table—but they were going in. Her father, an avid pool player himself, noticed his youngest daughter’s adept eye for the angles and soon built a wooden platform around the family pool table in the basement so that she would be at the correct height to shoot. Three short years later, at the ripe old age of seven, Hasson played in her first billiard exhibition with none other than pool showman, Minnesota Fats, and legendary pocket-billiards champ, Willie Mosconi. It was at that first exhibition, with her knees knocking uncontrollably from nerves, after shooting (and making) her first trick shot, that Hasson says she just knew. Knew that she wanted to be a professional pool player, and, as she told her father that day while basking in the glow of the applause from the audience, knew “that she would be doing this for a really long time.”

She turned pro by the age of eleven, joining the Women’s Professional Billiard Association (WPBA), winning (and losing, she says) a lot of small tournaments. “My dad used to tell me, ‘I will never let you beat me, but the first time that you do win will be the first time that you win a major tournament,’” she says.

He was right.

“In the summer that I was fifteen years old, I beat him, legitimately, and I won my first world championship,” she says. “It was very emotional. My dad’s crying. I’m bawling.”

From then on out, there was no stopping her. Hasson racked up nearly as many titles, awards, and prizes as she did balls on tables from Las Vegas to Beijing. She now holds more than fifty major titles—including eight World, three U.S. Open, and three National Championships. In 2002, she was inducted into the Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame, and the Women’s Professional Billiard Association Hall of Fame in 2008.

But for all the winning, Hasson felt like she was starting to lose something inside along the way: her passion for the game.

“Sometimes you set goals for yourself and then you achieve all of them. And then you achieve it again, and again and again and again,” she says. “I wanted to win every title. I did that. I wanted to win them multiple times. I did that. I started to not have the heart. I would practice, and I’d be in great stroke, fully ready for a tournament, and play like garbage and lose to people who don’t deserve to hold my cue stick, in my opinion.”

She had always promised herself that if the enjoyment went out of the game for her, she would stop playing. Knowing when to let up, go easy, and reassess your trajectory is also what makes a champion, and so Hasson quit pool. Instead, she played golf, got into yoga, raised her children, remarried (she and husband, David Hasson, recently celebrated their first anniversary), and for a time, even sold life insurance. “It just wasn’t me,” says Hasson.

Who LoreeJon Hasson is, and has always been, is a pool player, so she is getting back into the game. There are plans for an upcoming tournament early next year, but until then, you might find her “running out the balls” on a local table (she likes Barley’s downtown).

But be forewarned if you feel like challenging her to a game; she hasn’t lost that competitive edge. “I hate losing,” Hasson says, her voice lowering to underscore the point.

Spoken like someone who knows what it means to win.