A friend of mine wrote this article for the Washington Post a few years back. Just thought I'd dust it off and post it for others to see.
Behind the 8-Ball; Pockets Emptying, Professional Pool Aims to Survive
Copyright The Washington Post Company Oct 2, 2000
It's 2 a.m. and 70 people have crammed into the back room at Shooters, a local pool hall. Appearing to be decapitated by the shades on the table lights and shrouded in a mist of smoke, the crowd haunts eight pool tables like ghouls. Some hunch over beneath exposed plumbing in the tiny bleachers, others waltz awkwardly between the tables to avoid cue butts. A few sit by the wall, playing poker.
The U.S. Open 9-Ball Championships are underway 10 miles away in Chesapeake, Va. But for Open competitor Martin Sawinski, the true billiards championship is here at Shooters: "There will be more than half a million dollars in this place tonight--in cash. It happens only one week of the year, U.S. Open week. . . . The biggest stake- horses and the best players in the world, all in one room. The real U.S. Open."
Sawinski, 28, a nurse in a Michigan hospital, has scrounged up only $100 for tonight's action. Still, he sniffs the Shooters air loudly and pretends to be dizzy with pleasure. It's the smell he knows from the pool bars of Ypsilanti, Mich.: a rich elixir of beer, baby powder and cheap wood wax, given time to ferment by air that never moves. Or maybe it's just the money.
He heads over to Table 2 and says: "This'll be a big game--two great players."
The players, "Kid Delicious"--Danny Basavich--and "The Ice Man"-- Scott Frost--are locked in a match of interchanging games of 9-ball (where players must always shoot at the lowest numbered ball on the table with the object of legally sinking the 9-ball at any point in the game) and One-Pocket (where each player must sink eight balls in one designated pocket).
Spectators tell Sawinski the game is worth $3,000.
"I gotta find a game . . . " Sawinski muses, then, noticing a guy in a faded orange T-shirt at Table 1, he says, "There!"
Sawinski practically has to queue with fellow pros to proposition the guy, Clint Malicoat, 29, a car salesman from Indiana, who's come here to try his game against the pros.
"C'mon, Clint, a hundred and I'll give you the break," Sawinski says. But Malicoat says he's got three pros "in the box" already. "Put me in the box then," Sawinski says.
Malicoat is already locked in a game with Marcus Shamat, the European 9-ball champion. One thousand dollars is stuffed into the brass ring that attaches the chain from the ceiling to the table light. Shamat is deep in conversation with a gaunt middle-aged guy in glasses and a polyester shirt who's re-snapping an elastic on a wad of bank notes.
"Look at that!" Sawinski says, impressed. "That roll has got to be two inches thick, all $100 bills."
Sawinski gives up on the car salesman and settles for a match with another pro on Table 6. He plays fast, showboat pool: table-length banks and jump-shot combos.
By 5:30 a.m. Sawinski has lost his tiny stake, but is philosophical about the defeat: "I don't have the biggest expectations for this week. I didn't even think I could get the time off work."
But something's wrong. Almost all the gambling at Shooters has been between the pros. And the few amateurs like Malicoat who dare to play them are not the gullible marks we remember from "The Hustler" or the rich pool lovers who once gladly offered up losing bets just for the privilege of playing the best in the world. Worse, most of the pros here don't just want the money like Jackie Gleason's movie character, they clearly need the money.
Grady Matthews, the 56-year-old World One-Pocket champion and one of Sawinski's childhood idols, says there is sadness now where there once was glamour in the "dark side" of pool: "Oh, the system's all wrong. Don't you think we hate it that we have to beat our friends to make a living?"
A Sport in Decline
"What do you call a professional pool player without a girlfriend?" tournament director Scott Smith asks over the mike on day one of the 25th U.S. Open 9-Ball Championship last week. "Homeless!" It got a laugh from the 150 spectators, but it cut a little too close to home for most of the 9 o'clock competitors set to play at the Chesapeake Convention Center.
Pool was a viable profession in the three boom years after the release of the 1986 Tom Cruise hit "The Color of Money," and again in the early '90s when ESPN carried the big events on TV. Now, most of the pros here work at least part time in sales, and some were so short of cash that they had to get loans to pay the tournament's $500 entry fee.
The sport has since become so marginalized that the promoter last week asked spectators to write letters to ESPN, entreating the network to cover next year's Open.
ESPN's coverage of pro billiards events is currently "less than half" of what it was six years ago, according to strategic programming planner Doug White, and even that is largely propped up by women-only events.
America's professional billiards association simply died in 1998. And last year, the tour's prime sponsor, Camel cigarettes, pulled out, killing off half a dozen tournaments on the pro calendar.
The sports greatest names--Efren Reyes, Earl Strickland, Francisco Bustamante, Buddy Hall--are virtually unknown to the general public.
And the hero vacuum is starting to tell: According to Billiards Digest magazine, a new study shows that participation in billiards dropped 8 percent between 1998 and 1999--from 40 million players to 36.5 million--and now ranks in popularity behind bowling, basketball and hiking as a pastime.
As another great, Jimmy Rempe, explains: "Who are they supposed to follow? The professional game is in disarray. There is zero organization, zero unity, the best players are bitter and the others are so desperate for money they'll do anything." This from a man who is known as "The Ambassador of Pool."
It is a sport waiting for something to happen, hoping for a Tiger Woods or at least a male player as young and glamorous as female star Jeanette Lee.
Right now, pool's few remaining promoters are blessed with the kind of Woodsian talent that has people talking about "greatest- ever" this and that, but they're stuck for a poster boy. In Reyes, widely considered a greater all-around talent than even Willie Mosconi, they have an affable but shy man who speaks almost no English and who looks for all the world like a peasant farmer. At last week's tournament, he wore the same faded striped shirt two days in a row.
Strickland, the Open's No. 1 seed, is a John McEnroe in a sport where hot-tempered outbursts and complaints generate only the second part of the love-hate relationship. He went on to win the Open for the fifth time Sept. 24, but not without some heavy-handed gamesmanship and repeated complaints about "heckling" from the bleachers.
They are the drab role models of an increasingly poor and unsexy sport.
Their tournament world may be dying just as steadily as their gambling world. But here--even without major sponsorship or TV coverage--the men who once inspired envy and wonder among thousands of fans get to feel like kings again, if only for seven days.
The Open is the biggest thing in pool, and, strangely, this year's tournament was bigger than ever--$211,000 in prize money and 286 players from a dozen countries qualifying.
Most credit this to the efforts of the Open's founder and promoter, Barry Behrman. The championship is also the crown in the game that professionals prefer: one-pocket is mainly for gamblers and straight pool and 8-ball are too easy for competitors at this level. But there was also a sense that these 286 professionals were rallying around the last big-time institution they have left.
None of them wore jeans or sneakers in the competition hall, and everyone respected the no-smoking rule in the building.
In the bustling "9-ball mall"--a 70-yard corridor outside the hall- -entrepreneurs sold every kind of billiard memorabilia, masseuses worked on the players and craftsmen with lathes repaired cues. Designers displayed hundreds of custom-made pool cues inlaid with everything from ivory to silver and diamonds, ranging from $1,000 to $40,000.
Of course, the players themselves couldn't do much more than window-shop.
One pro from Alexandria, Nick Prinsloo, had a typical story: He recently had to swap his car for a cue stick that suited him. He insists on tipping his cues only with custom tips made by an aging Japanese craftsman of 11 layers of cured pigskin--bits of leather the size of an aspirin that cost $50 apiece.
The Purist
"Can you remember the zone, the ease with which you danced the cue ball into perfect position . . . moving with infinite grace and delivering strokes that seemed to fall off your backswing like so much snow falling off a leaf, just at the moment it can no longer carry the weight? This is the mastery, and it fills you with a euphoric peacefulness."
Those words come from an old "sponsor-fishing" essay by 27-year- old pro Max Eberle of Arlington. He started sending packages to potential sponsors after winning one National Junior championship and two National Collegiate championships before his 22nd birthday. But he has more or less given up the search in these lean years.
That mastery is still his goal, though.
If Kid Delicious and Martin Sawinski are "pool realists," Eberle represents a second faction at the Open: the pool purist. He has no interest in the after-hours top-gun prize. He's here to achieve the same dream he had as a 13-year-old: to master his game and to become the U.S. Open champion. Of course, that means he has to coach pool and work two sales jobs on the side, but he says he does it "just so I can play."
If anything, he takes pool's quest for a clean image to a new extreme: Eberle boycotted the Open when it was sponsored by a tobacco company. He badgers fellow pros to abandon "these toxic diets" in favor of a complicated organic regimen he promotes. And he spends $24 every month to help support an 8-year-old Mexican boy.
Eberle, who carries the hopelessly misplaced moniker "Mad Max," wins his first two rounds at the Open comfortably, shooting gently and playing slowly, always thinking three shots ahead.
In the third round, he must face Santos Sambajon, "a Filipino," he warns, with heavy emphasis.
Filipinos have treated pool as a national sport ever since the Americans left behind hundreds of tables in World War II. But they've become a force in top-level competition ever since Reyes first whupped everyone at a Houston tournament in 1986.
It's not a feature match, but the crowd swells around Eberle's game halfway through when word gets around that there's a player "in dead shot."
In 19 racks of 9-ball, Eberle does not miss a single ball he was trying to make. But that's not enough. In the eighth game, leading 5- 2, he puts a fraction too much English on the cue ball, blinding himself from the 7-ball after making the 6-ball. He makes precisely two more positional errors in the match, but that's all Sambajon needs, eventually winning 11-8.
Still with a chance at the title via the losers' bracket, Eberle goes back to his motel room at midnight to sleep. The money players are going the other way. A group of about two dozen pros gathers outside the convention center entrance, waiting for the nightly migration to the unofficial Open at Shooters.
Their conversations are suddenly broken by the sounds of running footsteps, a yelp and flesh skidding on tar. They turn to see one player slowing down from a sprint and another lying on his back in the parking lot, laughing, clutching his raw side, and accusing his opponent of cheating him out of $20.
The group yells "Foot race!" and rushes to the curb. Some are laying bets and a few take up starters' positions by a lamppost, 40 yards from a man holding a cue case as a finish flag.
Whooping and heckling, the group soon crams into a handful of rental cars, all headed for the action at Shooters.
Sad, beautiful music fills the silence in their wake.
Vincent Facquet, the former World Trick Shot champion and another purist, is sitting alone at the keyboard of the convention center's piano, playing Debussy's "Clair de Lune."
The piece suits his mood. The 25-year-old Frenchman says, "I think maybe this is my last Open--the money is too little with pool. It is sad for me: I love pool. I play it because I can be a better person with the test of the pressure and the perfect standard. Now I must try to find a job in France.
"But I think my resume is a big problem," he says. "It says only that I am a pool champion."
Behind the 8-Ball; Pockets Emptying, Professional Pool Aims to Survive
Copyright The Washington Post Company Oct 2, 2000
It's 2 a.m. and 70 people have crammed into the back room at Shooters, a local pool hall. Appearing to be decapitated by the shades on the table lights and shrouded in a mist of smoke, the crowd haunts eight pool tables like ghouls. Some hunch over beneath exposed plumbing in the tiny bleachers, others waltz awkwardly between the tables to avoid cue butts. A few sit by the wall, playing poker.
The U.S. Open 9-Ball Championships are underway 10 miles away in Chesapeake, Va. But for Open competitor Martin Sawinski, the true billiards championship is here at Shooters: "There will be more than half a million dollars in this place tonight--in cash. It happens only one week of the year, U.S. Open week. . . . The biggest stake- horses and the best players in the world, all in one room. The real U.S. Open."
Sawinski, 28, a nurse in a Michigan hospital, has scrounged up only $100 for tonight's action. Still, he sniffs the Shooters air loudly and pretends to be dizzy with pleasure. It's the smell he knows from the pool bars of Ypsilanti, Mich.: a rich elixir of beer, baby powder and cheap wood wax, given time to ferment by air that never moves. Or maybe it's just the money.
He heads over to Table 2 and says: "This'll be a big game--two great players."
The players, "Kid Delicious"--Danny Basavich--and "The Ice Man"-- Scott Frost--are locked in a match of interchanging games of 9-ball (where players must always shoot at the lowest numbered ball on the table with the object of legally sinking the 9-ball at any point in the game) and One-Pocket (where each player must sink eight balls in one designated pocket).
Spectators tell Sawinski the game is worth $3,000.
"I gotta find a game . . . " Sawinski muses, then, noticing a guy in a faded orange T-shirt at Table 1, he says, "There!"
Sawinski practically has to queue with fellow pros to proposition the guy, Clint Malicoat, 29, a car salesman from Indiana, who's come here to try his game against the pros.
"C'mon, Clint, a hundred and I'll give you the break," Sawinski says. But Malicoat says he's got three pros "in the box" already. "Put me in the box then," Sawinski says.
Malicoat is already locked in a game with Marcus Shamat, the European 9-ball champion. One thousand dollars is stuffed into the brass ring that attaches the chain from the ceiling to the table light. Shamat is deep in conversation with a gaunt middle-aged guy in glasses and a polyester shirt who's re-snapping an elastic on a wad of bank notes.
"Look at that!" Sawinski says, impressed. "That roll has got to be two inches thick, all $100 bills."
Sawinski gives up on the car salesman and settles for a match with another pro on Table 6. He plays fast, showboat pool: table-length banks and jump-shot combos.
By 5:30 a.m. Sawinski has lost his tiny stake, but is philosophical about the defeat: "I don't have the biggest expectations for this week. I didn't even think I could get the time off work."
But something's wrong. Almost all the gambling at Shooters has been between the pros. And the few amateurs like Malicoat who dare to play them are not the gullible marks we remember from "The Hustler" or the rich pool lovers who once gladly offered up losing bets just for the privilege of playing the best in the world. Worse, most of the pros here don't just want the money like Jackie Gleason's movie character, they clearly need the money.
Grady Matthews, the 56-year-old World One-Pocket champion and one of Sawinski's childhood idols, says there is sadness now where there once was glamour in the "dark side" of pool: "Oh, the system's all wrong. Don't you think we hate it that we have to beat our friends to make a living?"
A Sport in Decline
"What do you call a professional pool player without a girlfriend?" tournament director Scott Smith asks over the mike on day one of the 25th U.S. Open 9-Ball Championship last week. "Homeless!" It got a laugh from the 150 spectators, but it cut a little too close to home for most of the 9 o'clock competitors set to play at the Chesapeake Convention Center.
Pool was a viable profession in the three boom years after the release of the 1986 Tom Cruise hit "The Color of Money," and again in the early '90s when ESPN carried the big events on TV. Now, most of the pros here work at least part time in sales, and some were so short of cash that they had to get loans to pay the tournament's $500 entry fee.
The sport has since become so marginalized that the promoter last week asked spectators to write letters to ESPN, entreating the network to cover next year's Open.
ESPN's coverage of pro billiards events is currently "less than half" of what it was six years ago, according to strategic programming planner Doug White, and even that is largely propped up by women-only events.
America's professional billiards association simply died in 1998. And last year, the tour's prime sponsor, Camel cigarettes, pulled out, killing off half a dozen tournaments on the pro calendar.
The sports greatest names--Efren Reyes, Earl Strickland, Francisco Bustamante, Buddy Hall--are virtually unknown to the general public.
And the hero vacuum is starting to tell: According to Billiards Digest magazine, a new study shows that participation in billiards dropped 8 percent between 1998 and 1999--from 40 million players to 36.5 million--and now ranks in popularity behind bowling, basketball and hiking as a pastime.
As another great, Jimmy Rempe, explains: "Who are they supposed to follow? The professional game is in disarray. There is zero organization, zero unity, the best players are bitter and the others are so desperate for money they'll do anything." This from a man who is known as "The Ambassador of Pool."
It is a sport waiting for something to happen, hoping for a Tiger Woods or at least a male player as young and glamorous as female star Jeanette Lee.
Right now, pool's few remaining promoters are blessed with the kind of Woodsian talent that has people talking about "greatest- ever" this and that, but they're stuck for a poster boy. In Reyes, widely considered a greater all-around talent than even Willie Mosconi, they have an affable but shy man who speaks almost no English and who looks for all the world like a peasant farmer. At last week's tournament, he wore the same faded striped shirt two days in a row.
Strickland, the Open's No. 1 seed, is a John McEnroe in a sport where hot-tempered outbursts and complaints generate only the second part of the love-hate relationship. He went on to win the Open for the fifth time Sept. 24, but not without some heavy-handed gamesmanship and repeated complaints about "heckling" from the bleachers.
They are the drab role models of an increasingly poor and unsexy sport.
Their tournament world may be dying just as steadily as their gambling world. But here--even without major sponsorship or TV coverage--the men who once inspired envy and wonder among thousands of fans get to feel like kings again, if only for seven days.
The Open is the biggest thing in pool, and, strangely, this year's tournament was bigger than ever--$211,000 in prize money and 286 players from a dozen countries qualifying.
Most credit this to the efforts of the Open's founder and promoter, Barry Behrman. The championship is also the crown in the game that professionals prefer: one-pocket is mainly for gamblers and straight pool and 8-ball are too easy for competitors at this level. But there was also a sense that these 286 professionals were rallying around the last big-time institution they have left.
None of them wore jeans or sneakers in the competition hall, and everyone respected the no-smoking rule in the building.
In the bustling "9-ball mall"--a 70-yard corridor outside the hall- -entrepreneurs sold every kind of billiard memorabilia, masseuses worked on the players and craftsmen with lathes repaired cues. Designers displayed hundreds of custom-made pool cues inlaid with everything from ivory to silver and diamonds, ranging from $1,000 to $40,000.
Of course, the players themselves couldn't do much more than window-shop.
One pro from Alexandria, Nick Prinsloo, had a typical story: He recently had to swap his car for a cue stick that suited him. He insists on tipping his cues only with custom tips made by an aging Japanese craftsman of 11 layers of cured pigskin--bits of leather the size of an aspirin that cost $50 apiece.
The Purist
"Can you remember the zone, the ease with which you danced the cue ball into perfect position . . . moving with infinite grace and delivering strokes that seemed to fall off your backswing like so much snow falling off a leaf, just at the moment it can no longer carry the weight? This is the mastery, and it fills you with a euphoric peacefulness."
Those words come from an old "sponsor-fishing" essay by 27-year- old pro Max Eberle of Arlington. He started sending packages to potential sponsors after winning one National Junior championship and two National Collegiate championships before his 22nd birthday. But he has more or less given up the search in these lean years.
That mastery is still his goal, though.
If Kid Delicious and Martin Sawinski are "pool realists," Eberle represents a second faction at the Open: the pool purist. He has no interest in the after-hours top-gun prize. He's here to achieve the same dream he had as a 13-year-old: to master his game and to become the U.S. Open champion. Of course, that means he has to coach pool and work two sales jobs on the side, but he says he does it "just so I can play."
If anything, he takes pool's quest for a clean image to a new extreme: Eberle boycotted the Open when it was sponsored by a tobacco company. He badgers fellow pros to abandon "these toxic diets" in favor of a complicated organic regimen he promotes. And he spends $24 every month to help support an 8-year-old Mexican boy.
Eberle, who carries the hopelessly misplaced moniker "Mad Max," wins his first two rounds at the Open comfortably, shooting gently and playing slowly, always thinking three shots ahead.
In the third round, he must face Santos Sambajon, "a Filipino," he warns, with heavy emphasis.
Filipinos have treated pool as a national sport ever since the Americans left behind hundreds of tables in World War II. But they've become a force in top-level competition ever since Reyes first whupped everyone at a Houston tournament in 1986.
It's not a feature match, but the crowd swells around Eberle's game halfway through when word gets around that there's a player "in dead shot."
In 19 racks of 9-ball, Eberle does not miss a single ball he was trying to make. But that's not enough. In the eighth game, leading 5- 2, he puts a fraction too much English on the cue ball, blinding himself from the 7-ball after making the 6-ball. He makes precisely two more positional errors in the match, but that's all Sambajon needs, eventually winning 11-8.
Still with a chance at the title via the losers' bracket, Eberle goes back to his motel room at midnight to sleep. The money players are going the other way. A group of about two dozen pros gathers outside the convention center entrance, waiting for the nightly migration to the unofficial Open at Shooters.
Their conversations are suddenly broken by the sounds of running footsteps, a yelp and flesh skidding on tar. They turn to see one player slowing down from a sprint and another lying on his back in the parking lot, laughing, clutching his raw side, and accusing his opponent of cheating him out of $20.
The group yells "Foot race!" and rushes to the curb. Some are laying bets and a few take up starters' positions by a lamppost, 40 yards from a man holding a cue case as a finish flag.
Whooping and heckling, the group soon crams into a handful of rental cars, all headed for the action at Shooters.
Sad, beautiful music fills the silence in their wake.
Vincent Facquet, the former World Trick Shot champion and another purist, is sitting alone at the keyboard of the convention center's piano, playing Debussy's "Clair de Lune."
The piece suits his mood. The 25-year-old Frenchman says, "I think maybe this is my last Open--the money is too little with pool. It is sad for me: I love pool. I play it because I can be a better person with the test of the pressure and the perfect standard. Now I must try to find a job in France.
"But I think my resume is a big problem," he says. "It says only that I am a pool champion."
