G Cue Billards
- 5 years ago
This is Peggy Mallen and Peggy Mallen is with G-Cue Billiards. And you sell - in fact you make - Balabuska.
Well that's my other company. Yeah.
You sell them here, though.
I sell them through my store, G-Cue Billiard Store in Tempe.
Are you an Arizona native?
Well no, I'm not. I'm originally from North and South Dakota. Moved down here 31 years ago. Met my husband after I moved down here and we were married for 28 years and we worked several jobs before we got in the billiard business.
Okay. So what brought you to Arizona from South Dakota?
That one winter when the windchill was 99 below and the only reason it wasn't wasn't worse than that was because they only track it to 99 below.
Yeah well so now if I recall the conversation we had before, your husband was a restaurant owner. He had worked for many restaurants over the years and we met at Arizona Biltmore
One day we decided to go down to this place on Elliot and Priest and just have a beer and bang some balls around and somebody came up to us and said hey do you want to put a team together and join a league. So my husband who was a really good recruiter grew his league by a hundred teams. We went ahead and bought our own league and grew it almost 200 teams. We started selling pool cues out of our home and pretty soon I had pool cues in my bathtub and cases in my closet and my laundry room was full of product and I said hey we've got to open a store so that's how G-Cue Billiards came about.
I had asked you if you had ever seen The Color Of Money.
Right.
I want you to say the line.
Well Tom Cruise didn't have his pool cue with him. and the guy behind the bar said "Here. I want you to play with my Balabuska" and handed the cue over to Tom Cruise and so all of a sudden became like everybody wanted to have a Balabuska cue. George Balabuska was a cue maker in the 50s and an excellent cue maker. hat's how his name became synonymous with billiards.
We purchased the trademark rights to George Balabuska.
What are your plans for moving forward?
Well I have plans on growing my business and moving it to an internet-based business. So we're going to slowly move into that venue. However, we still want to be a place where you can get education as well as just products.
More and more people although they're shopping online, they want to buy local.
Yeah.
They want to try on the clothes. They want to feel the fabric.
Absolutely. I feel the same way you do. I don't know why anyone would buy a pool cue over the internet without actually feeling and touching it using it, trying it. It baffles me but people do it.
So, it's been great talking to you. Give everybody your website.
My website is Gee See You Ee (like pool cue) billiards dot-com and We're on the northeast corner of Warner and Priest in Tempe, Arizona. And that's on the northeast corner of Warner and Priest.
Perfect. Peggy. Thanks for being on.
Well that's my other company. Yeah.
You sell them here, though.
I sell them through my store, G-Cue Billiard Store in Tempe.
Are you an Arizona native?
Well no, I'm not. I'm originally from North and South Dakota. Moved down here 31 years ago. Met my husband after I moved down here and we were married for 28 years and we worked several jobs before we got in the billiard business.
Okay. So what brought you to Arizona from South Dakota?
That one winter when the windchill was 99 below and the only reason it wasn't wasn't worse than that was because they only track it to 99 below.
Yeah well so now if I recall the conversation we had before, your husband was a restaurant owner. He had worked for many restaurants over the years and we met at Arizona Biltmore
One day we decided to go down to this place on Elliot and Priest and just have a beer and bang some balls around and somebody came up to us and said hey do you want to put a team together and join a league. So my husband who was a really good recruiter grew his league by a hundred teams. We went ahead and bought our own league and grew it almost 200 teams. We started selling pool cues out of our home and pretty soon I had pool cues in my bathtub and cases in my closet and my laundry room was full of product and I said hey we've got to open a store so that's how G-Cue Billiards came about.
I had asked you if you had ever seen The Color Of Money.
Right.
I want you to say the line.
Well Tom Cruise didn't have his pool cue with him. and the guy behind the bar said "Here. I want you to play with my Balabuska" and handed the cue over to Tom Cruise and so all of a sudden became like everybody wanted to have a Balabuska cue. George Balabuska was a cue maker in the 50s and an excellent cue maker. hat's how his name became synonymous with billiards.
We purchased the trademark rights to George Balabuska.
What are your plans for moving forward?
Well I have plans on growing my business and moving it to an internet-based business. So we're going to slowly move into that venue. However, we still want to be a place where you can get education as well as just products.
More and more people although they're shopping online, they want to buy local.
Yeah.
They want to try on the clothes. They want to feel the fabric.
Absolutely. I feel the same way you do. I don't know why anyone would buy a pool cue over the internet without actually feeling and touching it using it, trying it. It baffles me but people do it.
So, it's been great talking to you. Give everybody your website.
My website is Gee See You Ee (like pool cue) billiards dot-com and We're on the northeast corner of Warner and Priest in Tempe, Arizona. And that's on the northeast corner of Warner and Priest.
Perfect. Peggy. Thanks for being on.