Tag Archives: billiards TV

Married With Children – “Cheese, Cues and Blood” (Billiards TV)

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During the 11 years that Married With Children was on the air, I never understood the appeal of the show or the humor in watching the dysfunctional Bundy family, with the deadbeat father (Al), the obnoxious wife (Peggy), the dim and promiscuous daughter (Kelly) and the girl-crazy, wiseass son (Bud). Watching and re-watching the billiards TV episode “Cheese, Cues and Blood,” which aired in September 1991 as part of the show’s sixth season, did nothing to make me feel I had missed out.  Its poorly-staged and imbecilic treatment of pool only furthered that discontentment.

Married With Children - Billiards TVThe premise of this particular billiards TV episode is that Kelly (played by Christina Applegate, who actually does have the comedic chops, as evidenced by her terrific role in Anchorman), needs “only $1,000” for a gown so she compete for the “coveted title of Miss Cheese.”  She can’t wear one of her other gowns because they “smell like pork and old men’s hands.” When Al won’t give her the money, she “gets a night job,” earns $1000 and buys the dress herself.  Al isn’t sure how his dim-witted daughter got the money, but he rules out his neighbor’s suggestion that it was from “spanking elderly gentlemen in a tight leather outfit.” Cue the laugh-track, as lo and behold, Kelly then leaves for the night in a lava-hot black leather outfit.  Still confused, Al finally suspects she’s whoring when he gets a call for Kelly and hears a guy “has the money and can’t wait to learn if she is as good as the guys say she is.”

It’s not the worst premise, but the show deteriorates when he realizes that, rather than prostituting, Kelly is “hustling pool.” At the pool hall, which looks more like a campus rec center, the patrons gaggle and ogle, watching Kelly hustle.  EXCEPT, it’s a total mystery to me what possible game she is playing or how she is hustling.  She’s shooting stripes into solids, there is no 8- or 9-ball on the table, and the game suddenly ends when she pockets the 5-ball, though both solids and stripes remain on the table.  It’s like my 7-year-old came up with the rules of the game.  Granted, I realize it’s a sitcom and therefore not best to over-analyze, but really…wasn’t there one person on the set who played pool and could have said, “Hey guys, this might work a tad better if we at least pretended to inject a dose of reality into the game?”

The laughs hit an all-time low when Kelly is challenged by Slick Stick Jackson, who enters proclaiming he’s got “$10,000 that says he can beat any girl in the house.”  (Doesn’t that happen all the time?) To back the bet, Al sells nine pints of his blood (i.e., the “blood” in the title “Cheese, Cues and Blood”), becomes delirious, hallucinates, and inadvertently sabotages the game.  All I can say is given how stale the jokes were and how badly the pool was represented, I’m glad the game was over.

The full episode is available to watch above on YouTube.

Quantum Leap – “Pool Hall Blues”

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Remember the NBC series Quantum Leap that featured the time-travelling Dr. Sam Beckett (played by Scott Bakula), forever body-hopping into history to “put right what once went wrong?” Well, whatever you thought of the show’s five-season run, make sure to steer clear of the 1990 Season 2 billiards TV episode, “Pool Hall Blues – September 4, 1954.” It is both an insult to billiards and a squandered opportunity to provide some real history on the game’s overlooked African-American greats.

The storyline is that Sam leaps into the body of Charlie “Black Magic” Walters, an African-American pool player and one of the greatest pool hustlers in America, who must try to help his granddaughter save her Chicago nightclub before it is seized by Eddie Davis, a criminal loan shark.  Unable to help his granddaughter get a loan, he acquiesces to playing the loan shark in a first-to-seven game of 9-ball, with the nightclub as the winner-takes-all stake.  The full Pool Hall Blues episode is available to purchase on YouTube.

Let’s start with the basics…if you’re going to make a billiards TV episode, get your facts chronically accurate.  It is impossible in 1954 for one of the patrons to liken Charlie to Minnesota Fats, when Walter Nevis didn’t create the fictional character until 1959, the movie The Hustler (with Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats) didn’t come out until 1961, and Rudolf Wanderone, Jr. didn’t adopt the name until sometime after the movie debuted.

Also, there are a frightening number of pool playing errors.  There is a scene when Eddie Davis breaks a 9-ball rack and we watch the 5-ball sink.   He then calls the 3-ball, a script gaffe, both because one doesn’t call shots in 9-ball, and unless he’s caroming the 1-ball into the 3-ball, this would be an illegal shot.  But then it gets preposterous.  Eddie next makes a shot in which he sinks the 5-ball (yep, the same one he already sunk) before the cue caroms into the 9-ball.   Apparently, this 5-ball has more lives than a cat, as it then re-appears on the table seconds later.  Let’s just say I’m aghast Pool Hall Blues won the 1990 Primetime Emmy Award for “Outstanding Cinematography for a Series.”

Mistakes aside, the real insult in this episode is the assumption that the mechanics of billiards – the grip, the stance, the stroke, the bridge – can be mastered overnight.  That’s the necessity since Dr. Beckett can’t shoot pool.  Fortunately, he is ludicrously assisted by Al (played by Dean Stockwell) and his Handheld, a super-computer that can show Dr. Beckett the precise angle to hit every shot.   And there you have it!  Apparently, billiards is nothing more than geometry, and that with a little help from a magic blue guide-line, one can ignore all the other mechanics and become a world-class billiards player in a day.  [SPOILER ALERT!] Even better, when the Handheld goes on the fritz, Dr. Beckett is still able to make a four-cushion rail shot to win the series.

My other disappointment with Pool Hall Blues is the squandered opportunity to educate viewers around African-American billiards players.  First, there is the character Charlie “Black Magic” Walters, who is personified (when Dr. Beckett sees his reflection in the mirror) by the very real Los Angeles pool hustler Robert “Rags” Woods.  Too bad we only see Rags in the mirror and never on the table.  Blown opportunity.

But if Charlie Walters is one of the greatest pool players ever, is he based on a real person?  We’re told he has played the greats and “beat (Willie) Mosconi in Detroit.”   But, to the best of my knowledge, Charlie Walters is both imaginary and not based on a real person.

History has not been kind to African-American billiards players.  Too few are well-known and so there are only a couple of notable candidates to contemplate.  Cisero Murphy is perhaps the most famous, as he was the first black player inducted into the Billiards Congress of America Hall of Fame.  Mosconi, in fact, played Murphy, but he would have been 17 in 1954…a little young for a granddaughter.   Another well-known player was Leonard “Chicago Bugs” Rucker, who was in fact from Chicago, where Pool Hall Blues is set.  But, he also would have been a teenager in 1954, and his game was one-pocket, not 9-ball.  Then there is James Evans, who Minnesota Fats deemed the “greatest Negro pool players who ever lived” in his book The Bank Shot and Other Great Robberies.  While Evans certainly played in the 1950s, there is a lamentable dearth of information available about his life. There are a few others from that era that get occasionally mentioned, but their stories are poorly documented.

So, if Charlie Walters is based on a real player, it’s not clear to me who it was, making it certainly a missed educational opportunity.  But, then again, maybe that person wouldn’t want to be associated with this terrible episode anyway.

Sanford and Son – “A House is not a Poolroom”

There are no amazing billiards shots. There are no dark, musty barrooms.  There are no cameos from billiards professionals.  There is no mention of Brunswick or Olhausen or Viking, just a nameless fold-up pool table and four cues protruding from a milk crate.  But, “A House is not a Poolroom,” the November 1973 episode of Season 3 of the sitcom Sanford and Son is great billiards TV all the same.

Sanford and Son - Billiards TVThe premise of the episode is that after Lamont (Demond Wilson) gets his father Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx) a pool table for his birthday, he neither can get his father away from the table to attend to his family responsibilities, nor can he get any peace and privacy in house, since his father’s gaggle of friends have now ‘moved in’ to use the table.

Of course, what makes this individual episode hilarious (available below in its entirety) is the same ingredient that worked so well for Sanford and Son during most of its 6-year run: the brilliant comedian Redd Foxx, who helped turn racial prejudices on their head through Fred Sanford’s in-your-face antics, quick-witted tongue, conniving personality, and over-the-top selfishness.

Billiards, a sport requiring incredible mental stamina, has always provided a great stage for taunts, boasts, jests, and, in general, any kind of oral one-upmanship. (For a refresher, check out how Jonathan Winters rattles Jack Klugman in the seminal billiards TV Twilight Zone episode “A Game of Pool.”)

In “A House is not a Poolroom,” Redd Foxx unleashes his acerbic wit on his friend Grady with one-liners such as, “I’ll whip you like I was your daddy”; “I can roll you big fat guys up into one big round ball, and use you for a cue stick and beat both of you”; and “Grady, I could beat you blind-folded, one arm tied behind me, and the other one in a cast wearing armored shoes in the hospital having an emergency appendectomy.”

The other wonderfully humorous thing about the episode is how it captures the lure of pool.  Once the table is in the house, Fred ignores all his other responsibilities, as well as his romantic interest Donna, to keep playing.  The table becomes Mecca for his friends.  In fact, the cruel irony is that Fred must ultimately get rid of the table, lest he have to keep putting out money to feed his friends.

Finally, it’s worth noting that “A House is not a Poolroom” was likely the first in a history of black sitcom episodes to prominently feature billiards.  Three years later, there was another Sanford and Son TV episode indirectly about billiards called “Carol.”  And then in the ‘90s, billiards was prominently featured both on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (“Bank Shots” (1991)) and twice on The Steve Harvey Show (“Pool Sharks Git Bit” (1996) and “What You Won’t Cue For Love” (1998)).  Were there others?  Let me know.

Twilight Zone: A Game of Pool (Billiards TV)

In almost 60 years of billiards TV, one episode is consistently – and perhaps, rightfully – lauded as the best:  “A Game of Pool” from Season 3 of The Twilight Zone.   Aired in October 1961, just 3 weeks after The Hustler was released on the big screen, this 25-minute show is about “the story of the best pool player living and the best pool player dead,” according to Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling.

Jack Klugman stars as Jesse Cardiff (the best pool player living) and Jonathan Winters stars as James Howard “Fats” Brown (the best pool player dead).  That’s it.  Two great actors in a single room pool hall on Randolph Street in Chicago. How these two come to play pool is because Jesse yells aloud, “I’d give anything, anything to play him one game!”  And, since this is the Twilight Zone, the deceased Fats suddenly appears, saying to the dumbstruck Jesse, “[Am I] dead?…Not really…as long as people talk about you, you’re not really dead.”

Faced with an once-in-a-lifetime (literally) opportunity to play Fats, Jesse accepts the terms of Fats’ deal: “Life or death.  You beat me, you live; you lose, you die.” And so begins a game of 14.1 continuous pool (i.e., straight pool, same game in The Hustler) to 300 points.  For those that don’t know, straight pool is played by pocketing any called ball into a designated pocket.  Each pocketed ball is a point.  For a given rack, when one ball is remaining on the table, the opponent re-racks the remaining 14 balls before game play continues.

While the filmed pool playing is at best average (except for a couple nice three-cushion shots), there are two aspects of the billiards that are noteworthy.  First, there’s nothing brief about straight pool.  As one reviewer noted, given the final score approaches 299-266, that translates into about 40 racks, or easily 5-6 hours of play. It’s no wonder both men are sweating considerably.

The second aspect is the trash-talking. Pool, like so many sports, is a true mental game.  And pool players will often do what they can to rattle their opponents.  In this match, the taunting starts before play even begins, as Fats says to Jesse, “You like to play with fire, but you don’t like to cook…deep down you know you’re second rate.” As the game progresses, Fats condescendingly lectures Jesse that “pool is geometry…a science of precise angles and forces.”  And, in the final points (for reasons we only understand at the very end), he resorts to cheap tactics to distract Jesse.   Since this is the Twilight Zone, we know there will be a final twist.  I won’t give it away.  Watch the episode.

The full episode of “A Game of Pool” is available to watch above.  “A Game of Pool” was also remade in 1989, starring Esai Morales and Maury Chaykin.

And as a final postscript, let us say R.I.P. to Jonathan Winters, who passed away just 3 months ago.