the history of the global pool scene

As far as U.S.-style pool goes there really wasn't any foreign involvement til Efren showed up. The first Euro players i remember were Steve Knight(RIP) and Ralf Soquet. As to why pool took off in Europe i really have no clue.I know a lot of tables went to enlisted/officer clubs on US bases after the war. Where they ended up, who knows. I know in Germany club pool is BIG and has been for a long time. They have all kinds of league play in just about every game but one- hole.

evergruven said:

of course now so many guys from other countries/continents are not just participating in, but are challenging the very top of multiple billiards disciplines.
I love how global a sport pool is, it's a great way to learn about different styles and see what the world has to offer..

how did it start tho? I'm a little familiar with the filipino invasion, but who from countries besides gb and usa were in the mix in the 80s, 70s, 60s, etc.

who, where, and how far back can we go? what was it like here in usa and abroad?

curious mostly about pool, but please feel free to chime in re: billiards (billiart?) in general..

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The USA was the center of the Pool universe until the mid 80's when the Filipino invasion began. We did have a Japanese player or two come over here in the 70's without much disruption to our American dominance (Takeshi Okamura played good though).

Jimmy Rempe was our best pool ambassador making frequent trips overseas to highlight our game. He went to Europe several times and won the English Eight Ball title and traveled as far as Australia to play over there. In the 80's players like Sigel, Varner and Strickland were going to Japan to compete and win!

It is only in the last thirty years that the European and Asian pool players have become prominent and we've seen the steady decline of American pool fortunes. Everything has shifted dramatically in that period of time, although we still host some of the most important (and best) tournaments in the world here. Our multitude of regional events also makes the U.S. attractive to foreign players.

There was a Japanese woman mentioned in mcgoorty's book.

air travel really had to be a point of note on the timeline.

Parica was here before Efren.

Black-Balled said:

There was a Japanese woman mentioned in mcgoorty's book.

air travel really had to be a point of note on the timeline.

Parica was here before Efren.

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Parica pre-dated ER a little but he didn't make near the splash that Efren did. Efren's blitzkrieg at the Red's event made him a star QUICK. I couldn't get off work but some friends went to that and all they could talk about when they got back was " some little Mexican lookin' guy named Cesar". We all knew soon enough.

Black-Balled said:

There was a Japanese woman mentioned in mcgoorty's book.

air travel really had to be a point of note on the timeline.

Parica was here before Efren.

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There was an excellent Japanese woman Three Cushion player (circa 1950's). She competed in several world championships with some good results. Bob Jewett would know who that was.

Black-Balled said:

There was a Japanese woman mentioned in mcgoorty's book.



air travel really had to be a point of note on the timeline.



Parica was here before Efren.

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That would be Masako Katsura who played billiards (caroms) and competed at a very high level I belive she competed in 2 or 3 world professional championships and i think she finished ad high as 4th. She beat players like McGoorty, Davis, Procita, Kilgore and others in both tournament play and exhibitions. Her run though was short before she retired. She ran an ungodly amount of points in straight rail and her sister Noriko was the mens champion in japan in a 4 ball version of billiards.

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KeithS66 said:

That would be Masako Katsura who played billiards (caroms) and competed at a very high level I belive she competed in 2 or 3 world professional championships and i think she finished ad high as 4th. She beat players like McGoorty, Davis, Procita, Kilgore and others in both tournament play and exhibitions. Her run though was short before she retired. She ran an ungodly amount of points in straight rail and her sister Noriko was the mens champion in japan in a 4 ball version of billiards.

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There you go. She was the acclaimed student of the Japanese master player Kinrey Matsuyama, who was called the Japanese Willie Hoppe.
She played in three World Three Cushion Championships (1952-54) and finished 7th, 5th and 4th! She also toured with Welker Cochran and Willie Hoppe,
plus playing an exhibition match against Harold Worst in 1959.

KeithS66 said:

That would be Masako Katsura who played billiards (caroms) and competed at a very high level I belive she competed in 2 or 3 world professional championships and i think she finished ad high as 4th. She beat players like McGoorty, Davis, Procita, Kilgore and others in both tournament play and exhibitions. Her run though was short before she retired. She ran an ungodly amount of points in straight rail and her sister Noriko was the mens champion in japan in a 4 ball version of billiards.

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Masako Katsura

AFAIK, carom/3-cushion or whatever was always popular in France and other French-speaking places like Belgium. I suppose pool US-style was not popular in Europe before the US Army came over.

But billiards was mainly a sport for the nobility in older times - a nice example of a billiards table can be seen inside Hohenschwangau castle (right across Neuschwanstein, the "original" Disney castle). King Ludwig played on that one with ivory balls.

https://www.tripadvisor.co.za/Locat...nschwangau-Hohenschwangau_Swabia_Bavaria.html

Black-Balled said:

There was a Japanese woman mentioned in mcgoorty's book.

air travel really had to be a point of note on the timeline.

Parica was here before Efren.

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She was a billiard player, not a pool player. And at that time the internationals had already left the previously dominant American 3C scene far behind. Which is likely to be the outcome in pool before too much longer, the way things are going.

A famous English Billiards champion named H W Stevenson , in the early 1900s was beating all the top players at English Billiards. He decided to take an extended tour of the world and show everyone how magnificent he was at the game.
At the time English Billiards in Europe and its territories and the 3 and 4 ball game in the US were the main games, that were played competitively.
According to his autobiography , Stevenson stopped in the Phillipines and got beaten by everyone he played.
He warns travelers not to go there and expect to beat anyone, because there were just too many great players.{Sound familiar?}

Then he goes to Australia to lick his wounds and they bring out a 12 year old boy to play him, the boy beats him soundly and Stevenson retires from billiards .
The boys name was Walter Lindrum.
Talk about bad timing.
I know some of the trolls on here will say , but that wasn't nine ball, or eight ball, or one pocket, or some other recent game
. The fact of the matter is , the game doesn't matter , it's a table with balls and a stick and if they could beat a world class player at that game , it was only a matter of a short time and they would beat them at any other game on the same equipment.

Very cool.

Walters grave stone

Guess he really lived and died billiards

Denis The Kid said:

Guess he really lived and died billiards

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A friend is gonna be buried in a Valley bar-box. This is waaaaaaay cooler. Somebody spent some coin on this. Very nice.

book collector said:

A famous English Billiards champion named H W Stevenson , in the early 1900s was beating all the top players at English Billiards. He decided to take an extended tour of the world and show everyone how magnificent he was at the game.
At the time English Billiards in Europe and its territories and the 3 and 4 ball game in the US were the main games, that were played competitively.
According to his autobiography , Stevenson stopped in the Phillipines and got beaten by everyone he played.
He warns travelers not to go there and expect to beat anyone, because there were just too many great players.{Sound familiar?}

Then he goes to Australia to lick his wounds and they bring out a 12 year old boy to play him, the boy beats him soundly and Stevenson retires from billiards .
The boys name was Walter Lindrum.
Talk about bad timing.
I know some of the trolls on here will say , but that wasn't nine ball, or eight ball, or one pocket, or some other recent game
. The fact of the matter is , the game doesn't matter , it's a table with balls and a stick and if they could beat a world class player at that game , it was only a matter of a short time and they would beat them at any other game on the same equipment.

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Do you now the name of his autobiography? I can't find details online...

As Jay Helfert has noted, American pool was the only pool until the 1980's. A few had earned an important place in American pool earlier than that, with the most obvious being Cuba's Alfredo D'Oro, but foreign players were a very small part of the American pool scene until the 1980s.

The Filipino invasion is well known and well documented. The first time I saw a Filipino player compete live in America was Jose Parica at the 1978 PPPA World 14.1 Championship, but he did not have a high finish. The Filipino invasion was only getting started in the 1980's, and most of the Filipinos (Andam, Luat, Kiamko, Lining, Sambajon, et al) didn't come to America until the 1990s. The Filipino invasion continues today in full force.

The European invasion began, for the most part, in the late 1980's and the first European player to make a big splash in America was Oliver Ortmann, who won the US Open 14.1 title in 1989. Aside from the obvious example of Souquet, not many of the top Europeans came to America more than occasionally in the next years, and I'd suggest that Europeans in the American pool scene were few until about 1997, when Chamat, Lely and a couple of others began to frequent the American pool scene more than occasionally, with Feijen and Vandenberg following a few years later, and then, Hohmann and another German named Roschkowski. For the most part, though, the European presence in American pro events was minimal until about 2005, and it has been very substantial ever since. I think the WPA World 9-ball Championships in Cardiff, Wales in the first few years of the new millennium lit a spark for European pool,and European players have excelled for many years now.

I'm really struggling to remember which foreign women first hit the American pool scene, but the first foreign woman that I can remember making a big impression at an American pool tournament was Sweden's Ewa Mataya, who played here as early as 1981 in the World 14.1 Championship, and she was a major force in women's pro pool within a few years of that. There was also a capable player from Japan named Meiko Harada, who preceded Ewa, but was less successful.

To sum, Jose Parica, whose nickname in his PBT days was "the leader of the invasion" is deserving of that nickname. The leader of the European invasion is, without question, Oliver Ortmann. The rest is history.