CHESAPEAKE

He has five sponsors, and a cranky personality when he's tired.

Keith O'Dell Jr. is drawing a crowd at this week's U.S. Open 9-Ball championships, and he's not even among the 256 billiards professionals vying for the $180,000 purse at the Chesapeake Conference Center.

He's been featured on CNN, "The Today Show" and Time magazine. His parents turned down Oprah.

Keith is 3 years old.

"He probably won't compete until he's 8 or 9," said his father, Keith Sr. "If he's even interested in pool by then."

Little Keith is interested in pool now, along with Matchbox cars and the movie "Ice Age" humming on his portable DVD player. He has been a celebrity since a video of him on YouTube at 23 months showed him firing shots that would humble an accomplished pool player.

"I was a horrible pool player," said Keith Sr., a vendor for McDermott Handcrafted Cues, one of a plethora of specialty booths set up outside the center's ballroom. Inside that ballroom, spectators need a sweat shirt to comfortably watch the ongoing spectacle of billiards that begins at 11 a.m. and extends past midnight.

His wife bought him a pool table for Christmas a few years ago that fascinated Keith Jr. from his high chair.

While Senior honed his game, Junior watched and soon enough got his own minitable.

It didn't take Junior long to graduate to the bigger table, where he plays three racks of 9-ball with his dad before bedtime every night.

If the mood strikes, Keith Jr. will dazzle the curious few who evolve into a crowd when they see him standing on a chair making a combo shot.

He shows off his jump shot, when the cue ball rises off the bed of the table, and squeals in delight.

"How old is he?" Mark Tafoya asks en route to his midafternoon match. "He already knows how to jump?"

"Jump, jump, jump," Little Keith sings while bouncing up and down in his chair.

The buzz around the building is that Little Keith, who hails from upstate New York, is the Tiger Woods of the game. He has his own website (poolprodigy.com) and is the reason McDermott offers a line of cues designed especially for children.

His black polo shirt reads "APA" for American Poolplayers Association. His sneakers read "Lightning McQueen," the overconfident car from his favorite movie, "Cars."

Little Keith travels with Big Keith several times a year and shows off his shots, though Dad is careful to let him be a regular toddler, too. When the little boy buries his pizza-stained face into his father's shoulder, Keith Sr. tells the spectators apologetically, "Come back in a little while. He's tired."

Even at nap time, Jennifer Barretta gets a smile out of him. The two starred together in the independent film "9-Ball," with Barretta, one of the top female players in the world at 9-ball, playing the lead role. The movie is scheduled to be released in 2011.

Blond and dressed in tight black, Barretta stood apart in the room full of male players Wednesday afternoon. She appeared in Playboy in 2005, the same year ESPN proclaimed her one of the 25 sexiest athletes.

For the first time in his 35 years of promoting the U.S. Open, founder Barry Behrman included women to compete alongside the men. Years ago women competed in their own division here. This year the women's pool tour had an abbreviated schedule, so 16 women agreed to play in Chesapeake.

"Our goal was to have a full field; the last time we did that was in 2000," said Behrman, who owns Q-Master in Virginia Beach. "Love having Jennifer Barretta here. Everybody loves Jennifer."

Barretta said women's pool lags behind the men's game in this country, where she's relatively anonymous once she steps out of the conference center.

"You go to Asia, women's pool is huge there," she said. "Every time I play there, it's live on TV. I go into a 7-Eleven, people know who I am."

The event will be standing-room-only until it concludes late Saturday, even though Barretta said the average person doesn't understand the intricacies of the game.

"It's not about pocketing balls; these guys play so well; they make every ball. It looks easy," she said.

"What they don't understand is, the position, getting to the next ball, is so meaningful. It's like a puzzle. Unless you know that, you can't appreciate it."

Vicki L. Friedman, (757) 222-5218, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.