For the Love of Billiards

Clubland USA calls for clubs to celebrate the universal club sport

Photo by Hưng Phạm on Unsplash

There’s a satisfying smack that comes from the perfect strike of a billiards ball —clean, sharp, and sonorous. Few things compare to a game of billiards at your club while nursing drinks, chatting and bonding with your club peers. You might be too lubricated to play an actual sport, but never enough to wield a billiard striker.

Clubland today is in dire need of social cohesion and bonding. After all, the heart of club life lies in the casual camaraderie that exists between kindred club rats, brought together by the shared space and institution they inhabit. But bonding isn’t quite automatic; that casual camaraderie doesn’t arise out of thin air. 

It’s for this reason that Clubland USA’s first editorial calls upon clubs to return billiards tables to their clubhouses—with a sense of urgency. We believe this to be the first step to clubs fulfilling their need for greater social cohesion and bonding and eliminating unnecessary stuffiness. 

At the heart of every good club is the club bar, and without something to do, both alone and in the company of other people, there’s rather little to keep you around. Billiards tables present a solution; unlike darts, they’re less likely to cause blindness and unlike beer pong, billiards is more attuned to individuals across generations.

Clubs, for decades, have built unique traditions that perform this, whether in the form of club sports or elaborative activities. The Bohemian Club, for instance, has the Bohemian Grove, an elaborate series of performances and rituals in a 2,700-acre forested grove north of San Francisco. 

Billiards tables bring the joys of play and friendly competition to club rats each evening with the added benefit of being a useful tool in judging character of someone in both victory and defeat. 

Billiards is also self-paced. It is competitive for those who seek to be. You can practice alone, or play with others. And, when you only have the one table, you’re likely to converse with others, ask them to join, or wait in the queue for the table. It is the procession that surrounds the billiard table where the social cohesion and habituation into Clubland begins, and it continues through the course of the game. 

Clubs of all shapes and sizes can adopt billiards tables: you don’t need a massive clubhouse, nor do you need many, many acres of land for a golf course, which is the closest thing to billiards. Step inside the University Club of New York’s billiards room and see the phenomenon for yourself. Members spill directly from the bar into the billiards room, and, into the night, men and women alike enjoy conversation and banter whilst nursing their drinks and hopefully striking the right balls into pockets. 

Embrace billiards as the centerpiece of unstructured time. The club is the one place where you have no agenda, allowing for spontaneous social interaction. If you don’t drink—a round of billiards with a friend, old or new, provides the perfect reason to be there.