A Photographic Exploration of the Current State of the Game in America

POOL – A Game on the Wire

presented by The Billiard Almanac

Project Summary

The games of pocket billiards and 3 cushion seem to continually rise and fall in popularity in the United States.

Documentary photojournalist and founder of American Reportage, Pete Marovich is pursuing a photographic project to illustrate the current state of the game, focusing on amateur players and professionals, bars, old dingy pool halls, as well as upscale rooms.

It will include people who are preserving the history of the game as well as restorers of antique tables and cues and current cue makers who are adding their art to the legacy of the game.

Patrons playing pool at Gold Crown Billiards in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Photo: Pete Marovich/American Reportage
Long time patron, Bill Mistick looks on as pool players hone their games in Pinky’s Rack & Cue in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania. Pinky’s Rack and Cue is one of the last remaining pool hall in the Pittsburgh area, Frank Evanovich Sr. (Yunko) bought the business in 1949 from Walter Stauffer for “$2,200 above the table and $2,200 below the table. The original location was located at 506 1/2 penn ave. It moved to its current location in 1969. Frank Evanovich Sr. Passed away at age 94, July 25, 2008. Yunko owned Pinky's Pool Hall in Turtle Creek for 62 years. It was his brother, Joseph, who’s nickname was “Pinky” Photo: Pete Marovich/American Reportage

Background

In the last 60 years, pool has had two big revivals, the first in 1961 with the release of the movie “The Hustler.”

New billiard rooms opened all over the country and for the remainder of the ‘60s pool flourished until social concerns, the Vietnam War, and an increase in outdoor activities led to a decline in the game. At one time there were over 3,000 licensed pool establishments in Manhattan
alone.

Then, in 1986, “The Color of Money,” a sequel to “The Hustler,” brought the excitement of pool to a new generation.

Upscale rooms opened to cater to a new type of player whose senses may have been offended by the old cliché of poolrooms.

A Hard Business

Today many of those upscale rooms from the 1990s have closed. Retired cue maker Paul Mottey who owns Breakers, a billiard hall and lounge in the Dormont neighborhood of Pittsburgh, says that rent is the number one issue owners of pool rooms face — rooms have to be large to be profitable.

Jim Gottier, owner of the now-closed Greenleaf’s Pool Room in Richmond, Virginia, was quoted as saying, “It is a very hard business because you need so much square footage to have these big tables, and you can’t charge a lot to play on them, so there’s not much revenue from each table.”

Today it is hard to gauge whether a resurgence is again taking place, but there seems to be an increase in leagues and more women interested in the game.

Professionals, such as Earl Strickland, are pushing to make the game respectable and remove the stigma of the dark pool rooms where gambling and hustlers used to be prevalent. Strickland insists that gambling needs to be removed from pool and is a strong advocate for above-the-board tournament play.

Preserving the History

Michael Shamos, a career professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a contributing editor to Billiards Digest magazine, is the creator and curator of The Billiard Archive, a Pennsylvania non-profit foundation set up to preserve the game’s history.

The Billiard Archive holds the largest collection of prints and paintings on the subject of billiard in the United States.

It is the goal of this project to contribute to the preservation of the history of the game while providing a snapshot of the current state of billiards through still images, audio and video interviews with
subjects featured in the essay.

Ideally, portions of the work will be published in billiard magazines and news outlets.

The scope is to include coverage of the professional and amateur worlds of pool as well as cue makers, historians and curators of historic memorabilia.

Famed cue maker Paul Mottey in his pool hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo: Pete Marovich/American Reportage
Michael Shamos, curator of The Billiard Archive, a Pennsylvania non-profit foundation set up to preserve the game's history. The Billiard Archive holds the largest collection of prints and paintings on the subject of billiard in the United States. Photo: Pete Marovich/American Reportage
A patron heads into Pinky’s Rack and Cue, one of the last remaining pool halls in the Pittsburgh area. Photo: Pete Marovich/American Reportage

Pete Marovich is a documentary photojournalist based in the Washington, DC, Metro area. His clients include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Getty Images, European PressPhoto Agency and United Press International.

His photography is contained in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He is the founder of American Reportage.

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All original content, both text and photography, on this website is the exclusive intellectual property of Pete Marovich and protected by United States copyright law.

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