HomeAbout Billiards DigestContact UsArchiveAll About PoolEquipmentOur AdvertisersLinks
Tips & shafts
By George Fels
Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.


Archives
• March 2024
• February 2024
• January 2024
• December 2023
• November 2023
• October 2023
• September 2023
• August 2023
• July 2023
• June 2023
• May 2023
• April 2023
• March 2023
• February 2023
• January 2023
• December 2022
• November 2022
• October 2022
• September 2022
• August 2022
• July 2022
• June 2022
• May 2022
• April 2022
• March 2022
• February 2022
• January 2022
• December 2021
• November 2021
• October 2021
• September 2021
• August 2021
• July 2021
• June 2021
• May 2021
• April 2021
• March 2021
• February 2021
• January 2021
• December 2020
• November 2020
• October 2020
• September 2020
• August 2020
• June 2020
• April 2020
• March 2020
• February 2020
• January 2020
• December 2019
• November 2019
• October 2019
• September 2019
• August 2019
• July 2019
• June 2019
• May 2019
• April 2019
• March 2019
• February 2019
• January 2019
• December 2018
• November 2018
• October 2018
• September 2018
• July 2018
• July 2018
• June 2018
• May 2018
• April 2018
• March 2018
• February 2018
• January 2018
• November 2017
• October 2017
• September 2017
• August 2017
• July 2017
• June 2017
• May 2017
• April 2017
• March 2017
• February 2017
• January 2017
• December 2016
• November 2016
• October 2016
• September 2016
• August 2016
• July 2016
• June 2016
• May 2016
• Apr 2016
• Mar 2016
• Feb 2016
• Jan 2016
• December 2015
• November 2015
• October 2015
• September 2015
• August 2015
• July 2015
• June 2015
• May 2015
• April 2015
• March 2015
• February 2015
• January 2015
• October 2014
• August 2014
• May 2014
• March 2014
• February 2014
• September 2013
• June 2013
• May 2013
• April 2013
• March 2013
• February 2013
• January 2013
• December 2012
• November 2012
• October 2012
• September 2012
• August 2012
• July 2012
• June 2012
• May 2012
• March 2012
• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011
• August 2011
• July 2011
• June 2011
• May 2011
• April 2011
• March 2011
• February 2011
• January 2011
• December 2010
• November 2010
• October 2010
• September 2010
• August 2010
• July 2010
• May 2010
• April 2010
• March 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• August 2009
• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008


Best of Fels
 
April: Spreading the Word
April 2012
IT WAS the players' room of choice here in Chicago roughly 35 years ago and it's still going, although both its neighborhood and crowd have changed. For years, its marquee-like sign has boldly proclaimed, in all upper-case type, "we have smooth shafts and clean balls." (There's no telling how many drivers passing by have been forced off the road by the sheer hilarity of that.) The other side, missing a letter, merely pleads, "go bear", an unintentionally dismal reminder that that team has endured seasons in which a single player would indeed not have been much less efficient than all 11. Either that or they're advocating human reproduction, which really wouldn't seem to be much of their concern.

But however interpreted, the original intent of that signage was to entice prospects inside. It's highly doubtful that specific results, or any results for that matter, were ever tabulated, but the cue games' relationship with signage and advertising has had its bumps in the road from the beginning. For instance, how many rooms have you visited or just seen that housed a sign (often grimy, or worse) beaming, "Ladies Welcome"? Historically, ladies were about as welcome in poolhalls as cobras; that was where men went specifically to be away from women, in the manner of the Roman emporiums but with spittoons instead of pillars. (Indeed, the late sociologist Ned Polsky, in his great book "Hustlers, Beats & Others," theorized that the current malaise among American billiard rooms is precisely because society no longer needs such polarizing venues.)

The forerunner of this magazine dates back to the '20s and earlier; the company has a partial collection of those back issues, and the ads are practically more fun to read than the journalism (which was basically tournament reportage and little else). Some distinguished individual rooms could afford to advertise nationally back then, and their messages are replete with such patrician phrases as "healthful recreation" and "a tonic for the legs and back." Obviously the game remains both those things and more, even though that's not the way people speak or think of it if they ever do so at all.

Pool's best relationship with advertising, and by a goodly margin, remains the seven spots the late champion Steve Mizerak did for Miller Lite beer (although the first of those, "Just Showin' Off," is probably better-remembered than the other six combined).

The story of how the Hall of Fame player required 192 separate tries to get the single take that viewers ultimately saw has been oft-told by now. What's less well known is how he was chosen in the first place.

Out of some scores of hopefuls who answered their agents' casting calls, the final round of auditions (or, as they're referred to, "call-backs") came down to eight full-time actors and four pool players (Mizerak, his then brother-in-law Peter Margo, and two more future Hall of Famers, Ray Martin and Allen Hopkins). The spot's famous director, Steve Horn, in concert with personnel from both Miller and its ad agency, Backer & Spielvogel, first correctly decided that the pool playing needed to be genuine - no cutaways to hand shots - and thus sent the eight actors home. Of the four bona fide players, the Miz was favored both because of his better education and, probably more important, better diction.

"Just Showin' Off" also represents the only known legal test of whether or not pool is a sport. It didn't take a court case to decide this, but Mizerak was still active as a player at the time, and Federal Trade Commission regulations expressly forbid any active athlete from endorsing any form of alcoholic product. Miller, their lawyers, the networks and the ad agency simply took it on themselves to declare that pool was no sport and the Miz was no athlete. That decision is not likely to be tested again.

Mizerak's six subsequent appearances in Miller commercials were all shared with other of the so-called Miller Lite All-Stars (obviously all retired jocks, except for him). Some, but not all, of the All-Stars were also called upon for personal appearances, at trade shows and the like, and Steve Mizerak was clearly among the most successful of these. Not only was he still active and highly proficient at his specialty, but he could take it with him, doing the same trick-shot routine that made him famous, along with some corny patter approved by Miller, while pretty girls in fishnet hose retrieved the balls from the pockets. Apparently the patter included references to his helpers; at one show in Miller's own hometown, somebody officially objected to one or more of those comments as sexist. Miller, having approved and been fully aware of the comments, saved face and covered corporate ass by letting Mizerak go. We know the rest.

But more contemporarily, advertising usually butchers pool. One pleasant surprise was seen in the mid-'90s, when another brewery, Anheuser-Busch, was wooing the younger end of the legal-drinking spectrum with a series of spots in which people challenged one another at trivia in various settings. One such setting was a poolroom, and I especially appreciated that the spot's producers had gone out of their way to find young actors who could actually play, at least to the extent of displaying credible stances, strokes and results. Yet in a recent spot for Bud Light, two halfwits actually placed open bottles on a table rail - can there be any greater gaffe? - a move approved by at least a dozen people. And a current print ad for cigarettes not only rends the game utterly meaningless, but doesn't even match up object balls from the same set.

It would be great to see pool, and poolrooms, advertising themselves legitimately again. But that would necessarily include an economy, and especially a mass perception of the game, that simply do not exist at the moment and may never. Pool is nothing that its players need to be reminded to do. Maybe it's better that way.

MORE VIDEO...