“A misspent youth!” It used to be one of the standard comebacks around pool and billiard halls. Something you threw at your opponent when he proved that he had misspent his youth much more productively than you by wiping you off the table.
Yes, pool was a slightly dubious pastime, a little dangerous even. We tend to think of dimly lit dens of iniquity, where booze, gambling and cigarette smoke hold sway; where unscrupulous hustlers lie in ambush behind gregarious smiles; where the only ladies to be found are those with already risked reputations.

Jakarta only confirmed that stereotype. Here, those of us who liked to spend hour after misspent hour circling islands of green baize, immersed in the clink and tumble of cues and balls, had little choice but to do so in some pretty dingy locations.

How times have changed.

Today, the game of pool is the fastest growing form of mainstream entertain-ment in town. Pool is hot. Pool is everywhere. Pool in Jakarta is even, believe it or not, a little chic.

July 1998. The smoke of the riots had barely lifted from a year of intense uncertainty. Underscored by 20-odd billion dollars fleeing the country, Indonesia’s joy at earning a new lease of democratic life was tempered by the fact that nobody in his right mind was going to take any risk, financial or otherwise, for some time to come.

Nobody, that is, except the owners of Bengkel. Somebody, somewhere, somehow thought that July 1998 was the ideal moment to open a 118-table pool parlor on what used to be a fairly expensive piece of real estate in the Triangle.

And it worked. Pool exploded. Almost 6 years later, there are now so many tables in Jakarta we can already speak of a social and economic force, even as insiders (somewhat incredibly) predict another 2 or 3 years before market saturation occurs. In January of this year alone, 18 new venues opened in the Greater Jakarta area. Kelapa Gading now has eleven. Meanwhile, the high quality of play by men and women alike is making the sport a cultural phenomenon worth following.

About five hundred years ago, humans began to think differently. This was the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, when the modern mind was born. Forget miracles; the concept of cause and effect held the promise of being able to influence and pre-determine the result of all our actions. It didn’t quite pan out that way, but the idea changed our world forever.

Coincidence or not, round about the same time people began to roll balls over tables. Excited by pretty much the same thrill of being able to control our world with a logical use of physical and mental skill, kings and commoners alike went in search of ‘the higher truth of the green felt’. Over time, Shakespeare, Byron, Tolstoy and Mailer wrote about it; Mozart played it; van Gogh painted it; and Mark Twain once said that “the billiard table is better than the doctor’s”.

Over the centuries we’ve played on tables big and small, with four, five, seven, sixteen or twenty-two balls in front of us. We’ve tried two or four or six pockets, or none at all—we even tried round tables with holes in the middle! Any of those permutations, meanwhile, was played with different rules and handicaps according to local taste and temperament. As a result, the evolution of the sport has been so diverse nobody knows for sure how the current ‘bloodlines’ of pool, snooker and carom are ‘genetically’ related.

Pool began as the domain of the American working class in the mid 1900’s and the game’s shady image was there from the start. The word ‘pool’ actually means a collective bet or ante, and a ‘pool room’ was a gambling parlor for horse racing. Billiard tables were often installed there for the customers’ amusement between races. They were smaller than the known varieties and had larger pockets, giving the underdog a better chance to beat more talented opponents.

Conveniently enough, this also increased betting opportunities and so it was only a matter of time before Christian fundamentalists declared the whole thing sinful. Still, judging by the amount of licenses issued, billiards was the number one male sport in the US between 1850 and the 1930’s. Subtle and elegant, ‘straight pool’—a number scoring game—was most popular.

That immense popularity declined primarily because of a recurring theme in the history of billiards: over time, people get so good at it that it actually becomes boring to watch. Equipment manufacturers, especially, have always tried to think of new ways to keep the game exciting and our current 8 and 9 ball rules are a direct result of that. When Paul Newman portrayed Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961), they still played straight pool. When he reprised his role in The Color of Money (1986) 9 ball had become the game of choice.

In between, however, lay 25 years of deep depression. The Hustler was a great film but it reinforced the game’s seediness and celebrated values that didn’t appeal to the counter culture babyboomers at all. By the mid-seventies, pool’s popularity was so low that experts speak of a lost generation—an actual loss of skill.

There was one upside: it cleaned up the game. Indeed, by the time Tom Cruise played Fast Eddie’s protégé in The Color of Money pool had lost its stigma. Professional hustlers were a dying breed and a yuppie appeal had emerged. All over the US, stylish new parlors thrived on a business model that could charge higher hourly rates and sell oceans of Perrier.

Pool in Indonesia long suffered from the same unsavory reputation for basically the same reasons as in the West: hustlers, gambling and the odd fallen woman or cewek nakal (literally ‘naughty girls’).

No longer. Thousands of Jakarta residents, male and female, play regularly in comfortable one-stop shop entertainment venues offering food, live music, karaoke and good equipment. The triangle of equipment manufacturers, venue owners and Pobsi, the national billiard umbrella, is increasingly active. A professional circuit competes for rising prize money and, last month, Phillippino legend Efren Reyes was brought to town for a sell out series of exhibition matches.
The amount of pool on TV today is larger than ever and in Indonesia the effects are measurable.

Pool—many have tried to explain its attraction. They point out that it’s clean, compact and convenient; how it challenges the body, the mind and the character; how it offers both social as well as competitive opportunities to people of all ages. But there’s something else, too—something which has been there from the beginning. Something magical. Those rolling spheres are really there and where they roll depends on us. We in turn rely on ourselves – our nerve, a clean eye, a cool hand.

All that may sound rather obvious, but in an increasingly virtual world with so much beyond our control, that’s a real nice feeling to have.