Written by Daniel Ben
Like Basketball, Billiards or Pool is a favorite pastime for Filipinos. It’s an open secret that Metro Manila is studded with Billiard halls, mostly unregistered to avoid taxes. Scenes like these are where Filipino legends are born, the likes of Francisco Bustamante, Jose Parica, Dennis Orcullo, including the man who’s regarded as the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of pool, Efren “Bata” Reyes.
Unlike the Vegas Casino undertones that come with the mention of Billiards in the USA, in the Philippines, it’s a game for the masses. Billiards legend Dennis Orcullo is an example. When his father died, he left home for Manila without a place to sleep to play pool. He worked his ways up from the slums, to the halls, to the “money games,” watched by hundreds, that earned him $5000, about 250,000 pesos, a game.
Billiards is almost as prevalent as Basketball, yet there’s a vacuum for media attention and coverage. Did you know that the globally-popular 9-ball Team World Championship moved from the Netherlands to set-up camp in Manila just recently, 2009-2012, and the competition was held in the Philippines for four years straight?
During the time it was held in Manila, the Philippines was the champion once, runner-up once, and reached the semifinals twice. In the whole history of competition, the Philippines is the top-performing country, reaching the top four seven times, just ahead of China.
Billiards sport critics say the time of Efren “Bata” Reyes is over, and so is the craze of Billiards in the Philippines, but that’s simply not true.
In the 2018 iteration of the 9-ball Team World Championship last year, the Philippines lost only in the final. In 2017, Carlo Biado was champion in WPA World Nine-ball Championship all-Filipino final against Roland Garcia. and again reached the final. Last year, he lost the championship to German Joshua Filler.
If anything, the Philippines is in the top 5 in the world when it comes to Billiards. So why isn’t Billiards as a sport more popular locally?
The first obvious reason is the vacuum of professional competitive circuits where Filipino athletes could compete, but the reason for that vacuum is something sinister.
In an article in Vice in 2017, it was said that even when sponsors readily gave money here in the Philippines, such as when the 2008 World 10-ball Championship was held in Pasay, Filipino stars like Orcullo and Reyes didn’t compete. The reason? Greed.
The article points out that these pool players have managers who also take a bite from the cake that the former earn. Instead of letting their players compete where the prize would go straight to the players, the mangers organize independent tourneys from which they get more money.
How do managers manage to keep the stars away? Utang na loob. In the case of Orucullo, his manager helped him when he was still a nobody, a beginner, and it was his gratitude that kept him from playing. Crab mentality; “if I can't have it, neither can you.”
The fact that most decorated Filipino pool athletes aren’t educated didn’t help the problem. Dennis Orcullo and even Carlo Biado, as examples, both didn’t graduate high school.
When the masses didn’t see their stars compete and the media did little to draw attention to the events, Billiards as a professional sport in the Philippines crumbled, leaving experienced Filipino athletes to compete in international circuits or teach pool in more wealthy countries like the US. Even the informal Money Games Orcullo thrived in went away.
The article contends that there is no way for aspiring pool players, thousands of them, to assert themselves into competitive circuits because there’s no system set in the Philippines. However, the article by Vice released in 2017, overlooked the inclusion of Billiards in the Palarong Pambansa in the same year. Young student-athletes have been given a chance at the national level to showcase their abilities.
Finally, there’s a system for young athletes to get discovered and promoted in the competitive circuits abroad, but the vacuum for a local competitive system still exists and continues to prevent the success of Philippine Billiards. The inclusion of Billiards in the Palarong Pambansa draws hope for the future of Philippine Billiards, but with a culture that’s as old as the end of the second world war, the Filipino’s love for Billiards won’t go away anytime soon.
As long as idols like Carlo Biado or Efren Reyes or Dennis Orcullo continue to compete and dominate internationally, there will be aspiring players to compete professionally, and maybe, just maybe, a system will be developed that will allow them to compete here in the Philippines as well.
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