Huge pool halls, bowling alleys...
I was reading George Fels June column in which he talks about the old Bensinger's billiard hall in Chicago. His description of the old downtown Bensinger's seemed lavish so I was wondering what such a place looked like. Thanks to a google search and the awesome website that belongs to the Chicago Billiard Museum I was able to find this image, and man is it full of win. The place is enormous (78,000 sq ft) and has multiple locations. It's hard for me to believe that places like this for pool and billiards once existed in America. What a different world that was. Also, I love that it pitches playing billiards and bowling "for your health". Apparently pool prevents rheumatism and bowling prevents apendecitis! Who knew?
When television came on the scene (when I was in grade school), there wasn't a lot of sports on tv. It was a long slow process to bring even the big dollar sports to the screen.
But bowling experienced a huge boom because it was easy to film and required only one camera in the beginning. Not the same of the big time sports, or for pool, that besides having a bad name, could not be recorded properly or viewed with one camera.
So bowling took off, while pool languished.
In the late '50s, enormous bowling establishments appeared in big cities all over the country. In 1960, I competed in a tournament at the Lemon Grove Bowlero near San Diego that had 120 lanes! Bowling grew and grew in popularity until the '70s, when the big money from the "major" sports simply outbid bowling for TV time and bowling began a decline and is still struggling, despite the fact that bowling, like pool, is a major participation sport.
After the release of "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money", pool came back and a number of large establishments opened. But they didn't last because they couldn't compete with the $$ of the major sports. The "majors" marketed their "heroes" as people to be admired, honored and worshipped (despite the gambling scandals, violence among "stars", and later of course, drug use, etc.) and it worked. The large bowling houses and pool halls disappeared and the sports have never recovered.
