Pocket billiards, like bird-watching, is a diversion for the entire year, but it’s only in winter that we take it up seriously as a sport. The game is endlessly engaging because its species of devotees are innumerable: each pool player is unique, with a set of mannerisms gathering to constitute a certain style of play. The game is also, in itself, unfathomable, challenging at any level. Yet it’s only in the colder months, when football games pile up like snow in a parking lot, when college basketball warms with intraconference play, when almost every pro basketball game (while almost meaningless) goes down to the final seconds, that we feel the need to drag ourselves from the television and take an active interest in a participation sport. Pool may not require the exertion of our summer participation sport, golf, but it’s nevertheless healthy in its own unique fashion, good for the mind and body. And, unlike the latest Madonna single, it does not grow more tiresome with increased popularity–although it’s trying, it’s really trying.
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Pool’s explosion, especially over the past year, is not difficult to explain, nor is it aggravating to lovers of the sport. The game is a challenge; everyone should want to play it. Yet it has never attracted everyone because it has always been a little forebidding in its traditional environs. It’s said to be a dangerous game, an impression suggested by blue-stockinged aunts and old movies, but confirmed, for almost everyone, by one’s first exposure to pool, in a smoky bar, where the table is surrounded by bikers or other unsavories. The game is said to be a sanctuary for those who’ve lost control of their lives–except, of course, for those who happened to grow up with a table in the basement. That makes for a completely different environment, and one that is re-created, on a mass scale, in the numerous yuppie pool palaces that have sprung up in the city in the last few months. The atmosphere of these places isn’t at all dangerous. One gets together with one’s friends to shoot pool and the breeze, perhaps to watch the football game on the television in an upper corner of the room or to have a few beers–both these last two depending on just how upscale the individual pool hall is trying to become. It’s no more likely that a biker will come up and challenge one to a game than it is in one’s basement. Good pool can be played in these places– don’t get us wrong–but it’s sort of inconsequential, like a cold-fusion experiment attempted in a high school lab.
This was the line of our development, and its climax as demonstrated by our play at a place like Deluxe retains its charm as certainly the most relaxing and, in some ways, the best sort of pool. One plays against oneself among others in a way much like golf. One allows chance to freely enter the game as an added entertainment value. Golf is a game riddled with chance–even more so in Europe, where the courses are sometimes arbitrarily unfair, than here, where there is still the wind and such things to contend with. In golf, one is to spend four or five hours in a group (please don’t say six, although this is getting to be the norm on some courses), and there is an obligation to be if not sporting then at least fair company. In the most common sort of pool there is no such obligation. We are playing for only a few minutes–the fewer the better–and what we’re playing for is the table, who owns it and who pays for the games. Baser instincts enter the picture, but the pool usually improves.
