BILLIARDS: MORE THAN A GAME, IT’S A GAME SHOW By Jason Moss Two months ago, English game show host Tom O’Connor sadly passed. One of the shows he hosted, though it never aired, was Pick Pockets, which paired traditional trivia with snooker and featured top players. Today, it’s beyond fanciful to imagine a game show dedicated to billiards. Especially in the U.S., no players are household names. Ask most people about the sport, and they’ll stare confusedly at you. To my knowledge, Jeopardy! was the last game show to feature billiards. That was in 2014 with the elementary Pool Shots category. But while modern game shows have not been kind to billiards, TV game show history tells a more complicat56 | BCA INSIDER • HOLIDAY ISSUE 2021
ed story that echoes the rising and receding popularity of our favorite cue sport. The first billiard-themed game show was ABC’s Ten-Twenty, which aired in 1959 and lasted approximately 13 weeks. Conceived by billiard evangelist and promoter Frank Oliva, Ten-Twenty was intended to bring pool out of the murky pool halls. Quite the challenge as this was still two years before both the movie The Hustler popularized the sport and the Jansco brothers organized the first Johnston City Hustler Jamborees. Ten-Twenty pitted top players of the era, such as “Cowboy” Jimmy Moore and Irving “The Deacon” Crane, against one another in games compressed for
30-minute television watching intervals. Though Ten-Twenty was hardly a national success, the fact it ever aired is downright impressive. The first billiard tie-in that I could find occurred one year earlier, when World Straight Pool Champion Willie Mosconi appeared on To Tell the Truth in 1958. Mosconi subsequently appeared on I’ve Got a Secret (1962) and What’s My Line? (1962), in which celebrity panelists questioned contestants to determine their occupations. Perhaps it was a harbinger of the future that none of the panelists successfully guessed Mosconi’s job. Other billiard players similarly appeared on these celebrity panel shows,
