A soon-to-launch Sharks Billiards League is set to bring something new to the world of Pinoy billiards.
Last August 18, Sharks Billiard Association launched their inaugural professional billiards league in a glitzy draft night at Gateway 2 mall.
Veteran Jerico Banares was the first to be drafted by the Quezon City Dragons. The other three teams, the Negros Occidental Pillars, Manila MSW Mavericks, and Taguig Stallions filled up their five-man rosters in the subsequent draft rounds.
Play begins on September 18. The league is being organized by Hadley Mariano, the son of Perry and Verna Mariano, longtime patrons of Philippine pool. Helping them is ex-Wall Street pool enthusiast George Ho.
A team pool league was once supposedly being concocted by Putch Puyat, but it never materialized. Hopefully now this effort from Mariano and his crew will take flight.
Pocket billiards is an individual sport that is only occasionally played as a team game. There is the annual Europe vs America Mosconi Cup, the most well-known team event. Thorsten Hohmann, the German former world champ, once told me during one of his trips here that he had to rush back home to play in the pool Bundesliga. Yes, there is a Bundesliga for pool in Germany, not just for football.
The upcoming Reyes Cup, which will pit sides from Europe against Asia in October, should be one to watch out for. It will be similar but hopefully even bigger than the West vs East King’s Cup team competition that Dragon Productions staged here many moons ago.
But the Sharks Billiards League will be different. It will take place over several weeks and will be between clubs that represent communities, instead of nations or continents.
There have been some attempts to turn individual sports into team competitions in the past, with mixed results. The International Premier Tennis League began in 2014 with five teams, one based in Manila. There was star power, with some big names like Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova involved, including some tweaks in the rules. But by 2017 the league folded, weighed down by financial issues.
A more recent example is the LIV Golf league. Saudi riches have bankrolled the league since its inception in 2022. Every LIV event has both an individual and team competition. While LIV has lured some of the best golfers in the world with colossal money, like Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and John Rahm, the league struggles to rate in the US broadcast market, is still short of major sponsors, and is very much surviving on the wealth of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, worth around US$ 600 billion. The teams have yet to gain the attention and following of the individual players.
So is there hope for billiards to succeed as a team sport in the Philippines? I say yes, if they can make the product compelling enough.
There certainly is a market for pool in the Philippine sports ecosystem. When I commentated on the King’s Cup in 2015, it had been the first pool event I had called for ABS-CBN in a while. The director, Al Neri, told me that it had actually rated quite well, to their surprise.
Of course, this was nine years ago, before the livestreaming revolution had gone into full swing. But since then there has been no shortage of online pool content popping up on my Facebook feed. Some billiard streamers literally just hang up a phone in one corner of the poolhall facing the table, and stream two shooters engaged in a money game. There is enough online pool these days for even the most degenerate pool junkie.
There definitely is a significant demand for quality pool in the Philippine market. It might not be as big as the market for hoops, volleyball, or boxing, but it’s definitely there.
The format of the Sharks League has to be appealing if it will tap into this market. The format sent to me by Mr. Ho is certainly interesting. The teams will presumably play a round robin, with each meeting of the teams consisting of five matches. Two of the matches will be singles, two will be Scotch doubles, and one will be a “King Of The Hill” format where all team players can participate. In the KOTH, the winner of the rack stays, and the loser leaves and nominates a teammate to play the next rack for the team. A player can only win a maximum of three racks in a row before he must be replaced.
Incredibly, all matches are races to 15, longer than most races in the US Open and World Championship! One tie between two teams will take five days.
In keeping with the “Sharks” theme of the competition, sharking, or deliberately distracting an opponent, and trash talking will be allowed, with limits. You can only do it to an opponent before he gets down to shoot. Yes, this is in the rules.
Ho also stipulates that no jump cues will be permitted. This is to encourage kicking, or hitting the rail before hitting an object ball, which is known to be a Filipino pool specialty.
After the round robin stage, the top two teams collide in the final.
The matches are likely to be streamed on Facebook and YouTube but there is talk of a network broadcast.
So will this experiment work or go down in flames or become a roaring success? There are certainly some challenges to sort out.
Firstly, the teams are nominally community based, but there will be no home-and-away feel, because every single match is slated to be held in the Sharks Billiard Arena along Tomas Morato. That means Quezon City will be the permanent home team for this season.
I asked Oliver Villafuerte, a draftee of the Negros Occidental team, if there were any Negrenses in his squad. He said there were none. Villafuerte is from Digos, in Davao Del Sur. If what Villafuerte says is true, and we can confirm that one teammate of his is from Quezon and another from Antipolo, then Bacolod fans might be struggling to make a connection with the side. If only Bebeng Gallego or Johann Chua, who hail from Bacolod, were available for drafting.
The race to 15 seems rather long for my taste. Especially with the reduced attention spans of today’s sports viewers.
There will be hurdles, but really, who cares? This is an innovation in the Philippine billiards landscape that deserves a chance at the spotlight. It just might turn out to be something that pushes the sport into new heights.
If you haven’t noticed, pool is on the upswing in the Philippines. There are new heroes like Anthony Raga and AJ Manas breaking out internationally, new pool halls are mushrooming all over mega Manila, and now this: a brand new concept that will only add to the excitement.
September 18 cannot come soon enough.
Banner Image from AFP.