Lunch with Sumiko: From quitting school at 14 to world No. 1, it’s been a lonely path for Aloysius Yapp

There is one thing Aloysius Yapp rues about having dropped out of school when he was in Secondary 2.

Friends.

“I gave up most of my childhood and I didn’t really spend a lot of time with my friends,” he says, sounding wistful.

“But I knew what I wanted, and I knew that to get it, I had to continue what I was doing.”

The “it” he is referring to is to play pool professionally.

In 2010 when he was 14, he quit school to train and realise his dream of becoming a world-class cuesports player.

In October last year, that dream came true. A series of good showings at tournaments

pushed Yapp to No. 1 in the World Pool-Billiard Association (WPA) rankings

.

He is currently ranked No. 3.

I’m meeting the 25-year-old in early January at Rabbit Carrot Gun, an eatery in East Coast Road serving British-style dishes.

We’ve chosen to go there because it’s near Katong Shopping Centre where Cuesports Singapore - the national body for the sport - is based and holds its training.

I’d asked if he could show me a few moves after lunch.

“Sure,” he says over WhatsApp, “no problem. I can set up some tricks for you to do haha.”

We arrange to meet at 12.30pm. He pings me to apologise for running 10 minutes late.

He arrives soon after, looking like he has rushed over. He’s dressed in a grey T-shirt, dark casual pants and cream adidas Yeezy sneakers. His face mask has a logo of Mezz Cues, a Japanese cues maker which sponsors him.

We’ve been given a quiet section of the eatery with high tables. He takes a while to warm up and when he does, he speaks well, although softly, has a likeable vibe and comes across as thoughtful and mature.

He’d told me earlier that he likes pasta and fish and chips. He opts for the latter and gets an iced latte. I go for the all-day-breakfast platter with sausage and eggs, and a passion fruit drink.

He was at a tournament in Virginia in the United States in late October last year when he became the first Singaporean to reach world No. 1 in the sport.

He was so focused on the event that it took a call from The Straits Times for him to realise what he had accomplished.

“I was aiming for the title more than attaining world No. 1,” he says.

The world ranking came towards the end of a successful 10-week tour in the United States.

Among his matches was one at the US Open 9-Ball Pool Championship in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where

he beat top American player Shane Van Boening

.

That match in September created a bit of a buzz in the pool circle.

The American, who is hearing-impaired, claimed he had called for a permitted time extension during a crucial moment of his game. But the time-keeper said he had not heard him say “extension”.

There followed tense moments with the referee reviewing the TV footage. Yapp, who was winning at the point, walked over to try and defuse the situation. He said Van Boening could have the shot and added, at one point: “Buddy, let’s just play some pool.”

The American was finally given the 30-second extension by the referee, though he lost the match to Yapp.

The Singaporean, meanwhile, was praised by pundits and fans for his sportsmanship, which sealed his “cool guy status”, as one commentator put it.

Yapp reached the finals in that tournament, but was beaten by Filipino Carlo Biado.

“I knew he had a situation,” he says of Van Boening, adding that the American would have definitely wanted to use his extension, whether or not he called it.

Can 30 seconds change a game, I ask.

“Thirty seconds is actually quite a lot of time,” he says. “Normally, it takes us about 20 seconds, or maybe 15 seconds, to think what we want to do, survey the table.”

In a way, pool is like faster-paced chess, he says. There is a lot of strategising involved and it can be mentally draining.

“It’s not an easy game. It’s actually a game about decisions,” he says. A player also needs to have the “touch”.

Love at first sight

Born in 1996, he grew up in the Simei area. He has a sister who is older by three years and his mother is a personal assistant in the civil service.

His father had a job in Thailand and returned to Singapore periodically.

When Yapp was nine, his father suddenly died of heart failure. The week before, the elder Yapp was in Singapore when his family noticed that he looked pale, but he brushed it aside.

“He passed away in Thailand. I didn’t get to see him,” Yapp says.

No one in the family played pool. When he was eight and studying at St Stephen’s School, he stumbled on a pool match on ESPN Star Sports when he was channel surfing at home.

“I had never seen the game before and I just wanted to try it,” he recalls.

What was the attraction? He says he gets this question a lot. “It definitely had something to do with the balls going into the pocket. Something like that.”

He asked his grandmother what the game was and she told him it was pool.

When his mother came home from work that night, he asked her: “Can you bring me to play pool? I want to try this game.”

He adds: “I didn’t know it’s a game for adults.”

She got him a small toy table from Toys R Us and he spent long hours on it. “After a while, I told my mum, ‘I want the chalk they use’, and begged her so badly.”

His mother, Ms Angelina Tay, went online to search for pool equipment suppliers and found TheQShop in Bras Basah.

The owner of the shop, Mr Paul Pang, suggested she get him a junior cue. He also offered to teach the boy some basics on a 7-foot pool table at the shop.

Yapp spent every Saturday at the shop practising, and soon turned up on Fridays, Sundays and school holidays too. He surprised the adults with his dedication.

At that time, Taiwanese-born teenager Wu Chia-ching was making waves in the sport. At 16, Wu became the youngest player to win the WPA World 9-Ball Championship. He was one of Yapp’s early heroes.

His mother later bought him a 7-foot pool table, which still sits in their living room.

When he was 12, Mr Pang got him to take part in the World Junior Championships in Reno, Nevada, in the US. It was his first international competition and it cemented his interest in the sport.

“I got my first taste of what competitive pool is like and from then on, I just got hooked on it and felt like this was something I really wanted to do.”

As he was too young to play in pool halls, Mr Pang got him a junior sports membership at Chinese Swimming Club where he could practise on the tables there.

At 14, he won his first national under-19 9-ball championship.

By then, he had entered St Patrick’s Secondary but was skipping classes to practise and take part in tournaments.

Even at that age, he knew something had to give.

“If I really wanted to make it to the top, I had to devote all my time to it, put in 100 per cent, more than 100 per cent, of everything I had to do,” he says.

His mother was naturally against it when he told her he wanted to quit school.

“I didn’t talk to her for a couple of days,” he relates with a wry smile. “I just kept the conversations very short. Then one day she said, ‘We need to talk.’

“I told her I wanted to be fully committed. I did promise her that if I were to do this full-time, I would be very disciplined, that I wouldn’t go astray but would just play pool, and that’s what I really did for many, many years.”

She agreed but they kept it from his grandmother for a year, he says.

While his teachers were surprised, they weren’t shocked as he was already skipping classes to play the sport.

“I’m not really entirely proud of it,” he says about his decision to drop out. “But I’m also thankful that I did it because, at the end of the day, I just want to tell myself that I actually did something. I just don’t want to waste my life away.”

Without school, he would practise at home in the morning, watch pool videos, then head to the club to practise in the afternoon till late at night. “It was pretty much the same every day for a couple of years.”

In 2014 when he was 18, he won the World Junior Pool championship in Shanghai. It was a sweet validation of his decision to focus on the game, although by then he had enrolled in a private school, Coleman College, and eventually completed his O levels.

He didn’t fare as well in the South-East Asian Games the next year. But in 2017, he won a SEA Games 9-ball doubles gold with Toh Lian Han, whom he describes as Singapore’s best pool player. “I find it very tough to play against him.”

He kept up with his training in the evenings while doing national service. He and Toh won silver in the 2019 SEA Games, and then Covid-19 hit, limiting the opportunities to train, travel and compete.

Long and lonely

Topping the world rankings has brought him more mainstream recognition.

He was one of four Team Singapore athletes who went on a victory tour around Singapore on board an open-top bus on Dec 26 last year, 

joining badminton player Loh Kean Yew, bowler Shayna Ng and para-swimmer Yip Pin Xiu

.

But the road has been long and lonely, he admits.

When there are no tournaments, his days follow a routine of about eight hours of practice a day at Cuesports Singapore, and watching pool videos to study other players’ movements and how they play. “You can just not stop learning.”

He rests on Sundays and doesn’t have many other hobbies although he likes football (Manchester United) and plays PlayStation sometimes.

He travels the world for competitions, sometimes alone, sometimes with Toh, his coach, and national teammate Sharik Sayed.

Tournaments were postponed because of Covid-19 but more have been lined up this year. He is scheduled to go to the United States in February, followed by Britain.

Unlike more mainstream sports, the winnings aren’t particularly big in pool.

A top placing in a local tournament might be $800. The winner of the US Open Pool Championship gets US$50,000 (S$67,250) and the runner-up gets US$25,000. He has sponsorships with private companies and also gets funding through the Sports Excellence Scholarship (Spex Scholarship) programme.

It can also be very monotonous doing the same thing day in, day out, he admits.

“It gets very tiring. But I believe that if you really want something, you have to really train and devote everything to it. It’s a long and lonely road out there,” he says, adding more softly, “to the top.”

He loves the thrill of actual competition, though.

“My heart beats really fast. My hands get very cold. At the point like when you’re down the shot, I can feel my hands just start shaking. But I love the feeling. I feel like I perform better if that happens because I’ll be so into it,” he says.

He keeps in touch with his mother over WhatsApp when he’s touring. “I don’t really call my mum a thousand times because I don’t really like to talk too long.”

His friends are those in the pool circle. He met his girlfriend, Silviana Lu, 23, a professional pool player from Indonesia, at the SEA Games. Covid-19 has meant they haven’t been able to see each other for nearly two years. He hopes to meet up at the next SEA Games this year.

He had told himself that if he didn’t find success by the time he hit 30, it would be “time to find another thing to do”.

You made world No. 1 at the age of 25, I point out. You have made it.

“I still feel like I haven’t,” he says with a hesitant smile. “It’s only a start and I feel I have a lot more to learn.”

There’s only one winner in a match and I ask how he takes not winning.

“I wouldn’t say I take it very hard but I always look at failure as a way to learn and get better,” he says, and you believe he means it.

“It definitely makes me feel sad, but I also look at the bright side because at least I feel now I have a chance to learn and do things right.”

After lunch, we walk over to Cuesports Singapore where he tries to guide me on how to shoot some balls, but we give up when we realise it’s a hopeless venture. We ask him to demonstrate his nifty shots instead.

“I just love this sound,” he exclaims suddenly, when a ball lands with a plop in the pocket.

“It’s music to my ears,” he adds with a rare loud chortle.