This is Peggy Mallen and Peggy Mallen is with G-Cue Billiards. And you sell - in fact you make - Balabuska. <br />Well that's my other company. Yeah. <br />You sell them here, though. <br />I sell them through my store, G-Cue Billiard Store in Tempe. <br />Are you an Arizona native? <br />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. <br />Okay. So what brought you to Arizona from South Dakota? <br />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. <br />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 <br />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. <br />I had asked you if you had ever seen The Color Of Money. <br />Right. <br />I want you to say the line. <br />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. <br />We purchased the trademark rights to George Balabuska. <br />What are your plans for moving forward? <br />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. <br />More and more people although they're shopping online, they want to buy local. <br />Yeah. <br />They want to try on the clothes. They want to feel the fabric. <br />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. <br />So, it's been great talking to you. Give everybody your website. <br />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. <br />Perfect. Peggy. Thanks for being on.
