Cultural Icon: Pool Goes Respectable

Think pool. Smoke filled pool halls. Fist fights. Men with overhanging gut. Americana at its seedy best. Now, forget all that.

Try this. Immaculate top-of-the-line pool tables sans cigarette burns. Men (and women) in their casual best contemplating shots over glasses of wine and microbrews. Soft golden lighting and walls covered with oil paintings. Custom-made pool cues priced from five to twenty-five thousand dollars apiece. There is a sharp satisfying crack of a clean break and the gentle thud of a well-aimed ball landing in a designated pocket.

Welcome to billiards in the 90s.

Billiards--long the object of moral opprobrium, cigar smoking hustlers, and dire warnings about wasted youth--has become downright respectable. Gone are the days of Fast Eddie Felson, the no-good huckster portrayed by Paul Newman in the 1961 film noir The Hustler. As dusky as the myth may be, pool has come into the light at various new upscale billiards halls nationwide.

"The face of pool is experiencing a makeover," says Sue Backman of Chalkers Billiard Club in San Francisco, "The association with backrooms and shady characters is fading." As one the most elegant billiards rooms in the country, Chalkers defies expectations. It doesn’t take long to see that Chalkers' industrial opulence, inhabited by a mix of men, women, and unwinding business people, is set to reinvent billiards for the modern age.

Pool, and those who played it, has long been associated with vice, vagrancy, and high-stakes hustling. Just a few decades ago men with names like Cornbread Red, Boston Shorty, and Minnesota Fats were legendary actors on pool’s dimly lit stage. These men played for high stakes and it was dangerous to get in their way. Disturb them when they were eyeing up a shot and you risked a broken jaw from the butt of a cue stick.

At Chalkers, as I watch a mix of men and women sinking balls amidst the smoky-gray, mustard-yellow interior and tables lit golden, I appreciate the contrast between reality and myth. Though Chalkers could appeals to the young professional set, it is infused with rock-and-roll informality proper yet closer-to-the-streets atmosphere that makes it approachable for anyone who loves the game. Kind of like the pool itself, Chalkers plays off the duality of a sport that is graceful yet muscular, genteel but with an edge.

At Chalkers and other clubs like it, pool is no longer an excuse to display testosterone-charged competitiveness. Instead, pool becomes a social event. As the third most popular recreational sport in North America, pool is right behind bowling and basketball with 40 million Americans considering themselves recreational players.

The billiards renaissance still has the satisfying crack of ball meeting ball, but the smells of a thousand smoked cigarettes and as many spilled beers are no longer the norm. We contemporary Americans love our heritage, and continually look back for things to resurrect...traditions that answer the needs of a busy, and ritualistically lacking, modern world.

Like so many cultural resurrections (think cigars) pool is undergoing stereotype meltdown gender, class, and otherwise. Pool is one of the few sports where you can come casual, or dressed to the nines, and never worry about working up a sweat (appealing to those who want to do the town in style). Though working men in blue jeans come to pool’s collective mind, entrepreneurs like Backman (who has been hooked on pool since age 13 and is ranked 42nd in the nation) will continue to challenge stereotypes as more and more upscale clubs establish themselves across the country.

As pool becomes acceptable, even fashionable, the game is likely to be seen as a perfect antidote for the stress ridden 90s, something that encourages conversation, quiet reflection, as well as a great way to meet the opposite sex in an inherently ice-breaking environment. For those who visit Chalkers Billiard Club, the only hustling you are likely to encounter is of the flirtatious kind, and any "grunge factor" will be something playing on the jukebox. Pool, like martinis, cigars, and swing, is a classic American icon that has once again arrived.