“Face it, America. You only watch pool because of Jeanette Lee.”
While billiards has always had its share of colorful personalities, perhaps no other player – certainly, no other woman or American – has possessed such magnetism and star power as the Black Widow, aka Jeanette Lee. Combining unapologetic swagger with knockout looks, an eye-catching wardrobe, and exceptional, rapid-fire, pool-playing prowess, Jeanette Lee captured imaginations, provoked controversy, and generated admiration, all while propelling the popularity of billiards in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Whereas many of the sport’s global superstars have had their stories told on screen (e.g., Jimmy White the One and Only; The Strickland Story; Shane Van Boening – The South Dakota Kid; Alex Higgins: The People’s Champion), it took more than 30 years for a biopic of this BCA Hall of Famer to appear. Fortunately, Ursula Liang, director of the award-winning films 9-Man and Down a Dark Stairwell, has gifted us “Jeanette Lee Vs.,” a 50-minute film as part of ESPN’s sports documentary series 30 for 30.
With its jarring, in-your-face title, Jeanette Lee Vs. makes it clear this is no ordinary life history. This is the account of one woman who has been battling opponents – the kids of Crown Heights, the tight-knit players within the Women’s Professional Billiard Association (WPBA), the hound-doggish media, and her biggest rival, a never-ending onslaught of health maladies – determined to undermine or destroy her. At her core, Ms. Lee is an undeterred, imperturbable fighter, which makes her story so compelling.
Jeanette Lee Vs. begins with Ms. Lee’s upbringing in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. As the only Korean-American girl in a predominantly African-American school, she was mocked with racist taunts, such as “Ching Chong” and “Cholly Wong.” Her father split when she was five; her mother was absent, working around the clock as a registered nurse. She was close with her older sister, Doris, but otherwise developed a chainmail exterior and a fiercely competitive mien. “I wanted to destroy the boys,” she recalls from an early age.
That tough childhood got tenfold worse when she was diagnosed with scoliosis at age 12. “They ripped apart my spine…it destroyed me. I was really tortured…I was in a very bad place,” Ms. Lee recounts.
Sadly, in what has now been well-documented, the scoliosis was just the beginning of a tortuous and agonizing medical journey. Now 51, Ms. Lee has had more than 10 neck and back surgeries. In a 2016 CNN profile, she shared, “I have developed multiple conditions including deteriorated discs, degenerative disc disease, carpal tunnel syndrome and severe sciatic pain. I have bursitis in both shoulders and both hips. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis.” And that was before she learned in 2021 that she had Stage 4 ovarian cancer, which even after six rounds of chemotherapy, has not and will not go into remission.
Jeanette Lee Vs. doesn’t skirt the fact that it is not clear how much longer Ms. Lee has to live. But, the documentary also doesn’t overly dwell on these chapters of her biography. Rather these diseases and their side effects are members of her rogue’s gallery, opponents that she must crush or die trying. Is it any wonder that Ms. Lee was once a spokesperson for Rocawear in their 2008 “I Will Not Lose” campaign?
Back to young Ms. Lee. The teen years were full of drugs, skipping school, and “punching holes in her ears.” It was only the opening of Chelsea Billiards, a 24/7, 15,000 square foot upscale pool palace, that fortuitously gave Ms. Lee a respite from her rebellion. One night, she witnessed straight-pool legend Johnny Ervolino playing, and she was mesmerized and hooked. She became a regular denizen and was fortunate to have billiards great Gene Nagy take her “under his wing.” Though she was “always in pain” and understood billiards was “the last thing she should be doing,” she threw herself into the sport. “Before pool, I wasn’t sure why I was here. I finally found something I loved. Everything changed. I could escape from all the things that made me unhappy.”
As Ms. Lee has often declared in interviews, she turned pro at 21 and became number one in the world 18 months later. It is during this chronicle of time when Jeanette Lee Vs. shines brightest. Her skills and sex appeal drew adulating fans and masturbatory manchilds (seriously – the footage from The Man Show with Adam Corolla putting cornstarch down his pants to ease the genital burn of watching the Black Widow is beyond the pale).
There is no denying Ms. Lee’s incredible billiards skills. She received more than 30 titles and awards between 1993 and 2005, including the WPBA U.S. Open 9-Ball Championship (1994), the 9-Ball Tournament of Champions (1999, 2003), and the gold medal at the World Games 9-Ball Singles in Akita, Japan (2001).
But, as the documentary makes clear, her meteoric rise was also fueled by the times. She discovered billiards right on the heels of The Color of Money, which created a national resurgence of interest in the sport (as well as led to the opening of the aforementioned Chelsea Billiards). ESPN2 had launched in 1993, hungry for programming that would appeal to younger audiences. Women’s billiards became a network staple, anchored by the allure of the Black Widow. For Koreans, who were attacked in the 1992 Los Angeles riots and longed for national icons in a country that now felt more foreign than ever, Ms. Lee personified a can’t stop-won’t stop grit and determination. And for the rest of America, which wasn’t used to seeing Asians on TV, Ms. Lee was a mystery, a modern-day domineering “dragon queen” (an unfortunate phrase that Ms. Lee said she heard more times than she can count). “I started to own the Black Widow,” says a glinting Ms. Lee.
That same persona, however, also provoked the anger and jealousy of her WPBA peers – some of whom are interviewed on-screen – who dismissed her talent and questioned her style and conduct. “I was thoroughly hated,” Ms. Lee shares. At one point, one of Ms. Lee’s opponents anonymously sent her a copy of Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle, accusing her of “stepping on everyone” to get to the top. Allison Fisher, her one-time “nemesis,” doesn’t mask her emotions when she decries the fame heaped upon Ms. Lee. Ms. Fisher matter-of-factly states she was the better player, yet no one seemed to know.
I can’t but wonder if, during the interview, Ms. Fisher was thinking about the proposed 2015 documentary The Fisher Queens (about Alison, Mandy, and Kelly Fisher, three unrelated snooker champions), which was never made due to the inability to raise more than $11,000. Apparently, there was a lack of interest in her billiards story.
Ms. Liang recognized the potential minefield she was walking in by asking Ms. Fisher, Loree Jon Jones, Kelly Fisher, and others to participate in the documentary. As Ms. Liang shared in an interview with The Moveable Feast:
[I made] a really specific point of asking each of these women in the interview what their reaction was to us doing a 30 for 30 on Jeanette, knowing that there has not been another 30 for 30 done on another female pool player and I think to a person, they each took a pause. Not that many female pool players are getting a documentary period, so I think they all have their opinions about where she falls in greatness in terms of physical skill and that everyone also puts an asterisk next to that, knowing that her career was derailed in some ways by her physical pain.
But they all [also] acknowledge that Jeanette is the most well-known player out there period and she came in at the right moment and she was not only incredibly visible, but incredibly charismatic and whatever she got for herself, she lifted all boats. They were all making more money because of what she was doing, so I think they understood how much she has given to the sport.
Jeanette Lee Vs. is a chronological account of The Black Widow; at the same time, her life and narrative is a complex web. Ms. Lee is the hero of this tale, which sometimes is almost hagiographic. But, she also was forced into the role of villain and otherized as an Asian-American stereotype. Her survival story is one of hope and incredible perseverance, but is also undergirded by loneliness. The story is rich and full of interesting chapters, but it’s also incomplete, at least according to Ms. Lee. Her final sentiments bring no closure, only more questions: “God, if you have a greater purpose for me, tell me. This is not all I was meant to do.”
Jeanette Lee Vs. is available to stream on ESPN. The episode aired in December, 2022.
