Evenings, I’ve lately been making my way to the pool hall for a little relaxation.
Trouble? With a capital “T” that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool”? Is a game of 15 numbered balls really a devil’s tool, the first steps on the road to the depths of degradation? First, medicinal wine from a teaspoon, then beer from a bottle?
Right; those are the musical words of warning from “The Music Man” stage show, considering whether pool helps you cultivate horse sense and a cool head and a keen eye, whether it takes judgement, brains and maturity…? Or leads to something much worse.
Anyway, the venue I visit is one flight downstairs in my home, where my wife years ago gifted me with a pool table in our basement. For a while, the table went mostly untouched during a morally upright time of earning a living and so on, but the state of retirement has provided the temptation to loaf around that rectangular, green-felt-covered surface, eyeballing side-pocket possibilities, cue-ball control and the occasional employment of English. (I am not bilingual.)
There is the challenge of billiards geometry, the applications of mathematical principles—specifically the law of reflection and circle/triangle intersections—in attempting to pocket balls while controlling the cue ball’s path to set up the next shot. The wrestling with visualization of alignments.
This activity somehow evokes for me the image of a robber baron in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigar and sipping port—a man wealthy via unethical means—immersing himself in a frivolous dalliance while real laborers are out there building railroads and skyscrapers, growing the crops and collecting the garbage.
The pool-hall aesthetic of “The Music Man” if of local youth “fritterin’ away their noontime, suppertime, chore-time to get the ball in the pocket, never mind gettin’ dandelions pulled or the screen door patched or the beef steak pounded; never mind pumpin’ any water, ’til your parents are caught with the cistern empty on a Saturday night. And that’s trouble.”
That’s pool as the gateway drug to a dishonorable lifestyle.
Mr. Google tells me that the exact origins of the game are illusive, but that pool was played in 15th Century European royal courts and is referenced in French nobles’ journals as well as Shakespear’s Antony and Cleopatra. And that Abraham Lincoln called the game “health-inspiring.”
It’s just that by the early 1900s—“The Music Man” was set in 1912—the pool hall came to be seen as a den of alcoholic-fueled gambling, an allure to send innocent children down the path of wickedness.
“One fine night,” the show tune declares, “they leave the pool hall, heading for the dance at the Arm’ry. Libertine men and scarlet women, and ragtime, shameless music.”
And, of course, there have been movies—“The Color of Money,” “The Hustler”—depicting dodgy pool-hall ethics for financial gain, as well as high-profile wagering feuds that made Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats famous. (Here’s a pool tip I stumbled upon: Never gamble with a man named after a City or a State.) And might it tell us something that the word “snooker,” which identifies a specific version of billiards, also is a verb meaning “to fool” or “dupe”?
All that aside, to play the game in fact can feel like an innocent—and safe—form of target practice, no need for guns or a bow-and-arrow, not so time-consuming as golf and requiring less space than shooting hoops. The rare occasion of a perfectly executed pool shot, with just the right touch and spin, can feel like an heroic transaction.
What’s the trouble? What’s the downside? With a capital “D” that rhymes with “P” and that stands for “pool.”