Jeanette Lee, aka, The Black Widow is one of the most celebrated and decorated billiards champions in the history of the sport. The Brooklyn born, first-generation Korean-American pool star emerged onto the scene in the early 1990s and has remained active within the sport in various roles since. While she has reached great heights as a pool player (she’s won every major title in the sport), it was her sharply-stylized, arachnid self-presentation at the tables that set her apart from every other professional in the game.
Lee’s parents immigrated from Korea. The racist abuse that she suffered as a kid from her peers in school was incessant and was something that caused her to rebel. Photos from this tumultuous point in her life—highlighted in the 2022 ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about Lee—show a young Lee with chopped hair, wearing graphic rock ‘n’ roll tees, military garb, and bandanas around her neck. This early visual was a possible precursor to the later-developed dark and stormy persona that propelled her into sports stardom.
The Black Widow moniker didn’t in fact come from Lee herself. Around the time that she was gaining traction in the local and regional pool scenes in the early ’90s, she started playing at the Howard Beach Billiard Club, in Queens, which at the time was the first-ever million-dollar pool hall owned by Gabe Vigorito.
“One night, the owner, Gabe, said, “I remember when I first saw you playing pool, it was closing time at the end of the night. You were a pretty young thing, so sweet,’” Lee recalled to me over the phone “‘Then when you got to your rack of balls, chalked up, and got down to shoot, your entire personality changed. You reminded me of a black widow because you would lure your opponents to the table and eat them alive.’” What started out as a joke between Lee and Vigoritio ultimately became one of her most distinctive attributes. Following Vigorito’s astute observation, Lee began to transform into The Black Widow.
“I was still steadily rising, my game was getting stronger and stronger,” Lee recalls. So strong that she was invited to play in a tournament in the women’s pro tour in 1991. “I had never flown, I didn’t know how to get there, and they had a dress code and I had no clothes to wear. I still had to cover airfare, and I didn’t have the relationship with my mom that I could go and ask her to help me–I was very independent from her at the time. Gabe said ‘I’ll tell you what. I will take care of all of your expenses with one condition: Your wardrobe has to be all black.’”
Lee was already comfortable wearing all-black, but she was now tasked to cultivate a specific aesthetic. At events, in tournaments and elsewhere Lee could often be seen in netted black blouses, leather bustiers, a range of halter tops that emphasized cleavage and revealed just enough of her back to be seen through her waist-length, lustrous black hair. She wore leather trousers, palazzo pants, a variety of black cocktail dresses, and her signature “Black Widow” billiard glove that covered one half of her hand, exposing a large diamond ring on a perfectly manicured finger. “I would wear bold earrings and different types of jewelry to accent the look because I didn’t want the black on black to look boring,” she says. “I think it’s how you carry it.” In 1992 the New York Times magazine described her as “A bad Bond girl with a vampish appearance.”
Her uniform couldn’t interfere with the balls on the table, so it had to hug her figure. She credits her graceful, modelesque presence to a surgery for scoliosis that fused her spine together. “I have excellent posture,” she says.
The Black Widow’s style was the antithesis of how women in the world of professional pool dressed in the 1990s. At the time, women in the sport wanted to command the same respect as their male counterparts, so many of the players wore vests and bowties that resembled a Blackjack dealer’s uniform. Lee didn’t feel like she needed to sacrifice her femininity or “act like a man,” to be taken seriously as a competitor. “I think a lot of women felt that I was getting way too much attention too fast and that I didn’t deserve it,” she says.
Lee remembers other women in the sport alienating her due to her autonomy at the tables. “They felt that I hadn't earned my wings yet, or I didn’t pay my dues, that I was getting all this attention because I was pretty. I kept saying, ‘pretty doesn’t make the nine-ball go in.’” In group photos at the time she stands out among the other women players foremost as an Asian woman, but also thanks to her sexy, all-black uniform.
“I remember the number of times that I got told to change clothing,” she says. “They had a strict dress code. I remember I was wearing this halter top that crossed around my neck, and you couldn’t wear a standard bra with it. They had this thing where your straps had to be three inches wide.”
The pool star was eager to make a change as she felt the conservative views around dress didn’t reflect the times. “We were in the ’90s, you know?” she says. “And so I had to learn, how do you change the dress code? And then eventually I got myself on the dress code committee. Then I started a petition and I went around to all the women pros to adjust the dress code committee and I rewrote the dress code.”
20 years later, her own dress code has rarely deviated from peak Black Widow style. She still adheres to an all-black wardrobe, something she describes in the documentary as a “fetish,” and even lets her youngest daughter borrow her clothes. Her 2021 stage four ovarian cancer diagnosis meant that pool had to take the back seat for a while until she completed her treatments. These days, as she’s feeling better and regaining her strength, Lee looks forward to going back on tour when she’s physically able in a legion of new Black Widow looks.