For as long as I have read your posts, you have always put down gambling in pool. That's fine, you certainly are entitled to your opinion. But both The Hustler and Color of Money had A LOT of gambling in them. Practically what they were about. And both of them gave pool a great boost.
You could have a movie exclusively about 'legitimate pool' and the world's greatest players in tournaments, certainly doable, a good script doesn't have to include gambling. But I don't see it as the negative that you apparently do. If anything gambling is more widespread and accepted than it was when those other movies were made.
What is needed is a good script, a good director, and star power. How about Tarantino or the Coen brothers? Would love to see what they could come up with, but I'm not sure the result would do any cleaning up of pool's image. But pretty sure it would increase interest.
Thanks for a thoughtful, well-considered post.
I'm not anti-gambling. I know that "The Hustler" and "The Color of Money" both gave the game a temporary boost in popularity, and another film focusing on that side of the game might do the same again.
That said, either of those films would have put up a red flag for parents who steer their children into whatever leisurely pursuits they see fit, and, at least for my money, these films tended to present the pool scene as a dangerous world that some, and not others, learn to navigate safely and successfully.
The Queen's Gambit, on the other hand, focused on the beauty of chess and the classiness of the chess tournament scene. Any parent having watched it would be 100% comfortable involving their children in the chess scene.
For me, I feel that pool players, as a group, have gotten older, and I think it's, at least in part, attributable to the fact that our sport has failed miserably at making the pool scene attractive to young people or to the parents who have a great say in whether young ones will be encouraged/permitted to be part of the pool scene.
Hence, I feel that pool, as portrayed in film and other media, has never shown its best side, and I feel it has done some damage by scaring off the young. Any pool event producer or poolroom owner will tell you how hard it has been to attract the younger demographic to their businesses, and things have been that way for quite some time.
I do feel, however, that these movies, though entertaining, show pool at its worst, not at its best, and I feel strongly that these movies tended to reinforce just how seedy the pool scene can be and not on how beautiful the game and the pool scene can be.
Where you are right, however, is that I don't see the gambling side of pool as the lure we should be using to attract new, and especially young, players. Pool, to me, has the inner beauty of chess, and its top events have a certain majesty about them, and I feel we'd have a better shot at attracting new players long-term if we take steps in the direction of emphasizing that inner beauty, much as The Queen's Gambit did for chess.
... of course, that doesn't make me right, but it's how I see things. We've lost an entire generation of players, and it's time to do something about it.