What Killed Straight Pool?
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| Straight pool defined the careers of 1970s young guns like Mike Sigel, who quit pool soon after 14.1 faded. |
The barbox, 8-ball and the 1950s pocket billiards slump
8-Ball is a game extensively played on bar tables and commonly featured in amateur leagues. Because most beginners pick up pool in bars, many know no other game. But the coin-operated tables haven't been around forever. Dave Courington, promotions director for tablemaker Valley-Dynamo, now under the Brunswick Billiards umbrella, says they really didn't take hold until the late 1950s.
Now, remember that during the 1950s, pool itself was in steep decline - almost dead, really. So the importance of the barbox (which appeared during this break in pool history) became magnified greatly as the sport revived itself. Think of it this way: Before the barbox, a relatively small number of Americans were playing any sort of pool at all; whatever new game the barbox brought with it … became the game.
Courington estimates that there are now probably 320,000 co-operated tables in American bars and restaurants, and perhaps just as many retired tables in basements and home rec rooms. He says barboxes probably equal - and may even outnumber - traditional billiard room tables.
But you can't really play 14.1 on the traditional coin-op table. Straight pool is a multi-rack game, and so anyone who's running balls and winning has to keep pumping quarters. I suspect you'd also burn through quarters at a much quicker pace playing straight pool than you would at 8-ball. Plus, the typical 3 1/2-by-7-foot barbox is too small for straight pool.
"Straight pool is time consuming," says Courington. "It's not made for the coin-op crowd. The coin op [table] is for the casual social game. Those [straight pool games] are not social games. … Also, one of the things that coin-op tables have done real good is that the 9-ball and 3-ball shooters have been pushed off to billiard rooms. The coin-op community hasn't served their needs much.
"Remember, 9-ball is a game where you go for someone's jugular. That's not the case for 8-ball. And there are 15 balls on the table, and so [customers] feel they get the complete game [on a coin-op table] when they play 8-ball."
What does this all mean? One can conclude that unlike their predecessors, the beginning players of the 1960s largely learned to play on barboxes. These beginners would have become familiar with 8-ball, not straight pool. And then 20 years later - in about the time it took for that generation of beginners to come of age (and for barboxes to really take hold in America) - 14.1 straight pool was dead.
To me, this all fits together. But historian Shamos remains unconvinced. He says that if 8-ball and barboxes pushed out straight pool, then why didn't they also push out the other big pocket billiards game? "Why is 9-ball still popular?" he asks. But I believe that 9-ball always had other factors working for it. For instance, 9-ball is easier to understand and it's more popular among gamblers.
But, if like Shamos, you need other theories, then read on.
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