By George Fels
[Reprinted from August 2004]
Tony’s table really pisses me off. And there’s nothing to be done about it.

The Tony under scrutiny would be one Tony Soprano. Tony is the head of a New Jersey organized crime family, as well as the patriarch of his own family, in “The Sopranos,” the highly acclaimed show on HBO. The pool table, which stands in the ostensible social club where the gang members meet, has not figured in any plot in the least way. That’s what makes me so angry.

Five or six different members of the ensemble cast have taken turns at the table so far (the show is in its fifth season). You can tell by the way the balls roll that the table is about as level as your typical kitchen stove; none of the actors can play in the least. (You’d expect at least some manual dexterity from Steven “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, still a guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band besides portraying a mob lieutenant here, but no, he takes the same klutzy poke at the ball as everybody else.) The actors do know enough to understand that it’s appropriate to hold the cue upright while waiting for their turns; that’s what Tony was doing a few weeks ago when he smashed his cue in fury over something having nothing whatsoever to do with the pool game. In other words, he was holding the cue only so he could then break it.

And that’s the real crux of the matter: that pool table exists solely for the purpose of reminding us that these are bad, bad guys. From “The Sopranos” on down, TV — and for that matter, movies too — resorts to this cliché on a near-weekly basis. If you want to imply any nefarious scheme, or merely the presence of evil people, then simply set your scene in a poolroom. Not a table tennis center, not a miniature golf course, but a poolroom or, as in “The Sopranos,” around a single table. In close to 50 years of following both television and the movies, I can think of a single exception: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” a really excellent film in the 1980s starring Robert Mitchum, had the no-goodniks meeting in a bowling alley. But after that, everybody’s favorite way to vilify anybody is to juxtapose that person or persons with pool.

As you might suppose, “The Sopranos” is already under considerable fire for its portrayal of Italian-Americans, and far more so than the ancient TV version of “The Untouchables” from the 1960s, which did not single out Italians to nearly the same extent. Even Tony’s psychiatrist is Italian in this show, as is the actress playing her. Only a tiny handful of roles have gone to non-Italian actors and actresses. And what’s most infuriating to the show’s critics is there is not a single truly benevolent Italian role — possibly excepting the mob’s “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” housewives and Tony’s shrink — in the huge cast.

Thus the show has folded the pool cliché into the much larger cliché of Italian-Americans as universal goons. There are plenty of people around to decry the latter; who besides me is going to speak for pool? As noted, “The Sopranos” is hardly alone in mistreating our game. A few years ago, a truly mindless series called “The Pretender,” whose gist was that the protagonist could become virtually anything he decided to be, offered an episode called “Pool” which was nearly as stupid as anyone could ask for. The hero when from a non-playing pool novice to a pro 9-ball player in a few hours. The pool story told on “The Twilight Zone,” quite a few years before that, was possibly the dumbest single thing the late Rod Serling ever wrote.

Does TV ever get our game right? Now and then, yes, although you wouldn’t want to sit on a hot stove in between those occasions. There was the “Then Came Bronson” episode I wrote about a few years ago, an absolutely charming tribute to love of the game. Heralded actor Jack Albertson has played the pool hustler’s role in two separate TV shows, and the hustler he created in “Gunsmoke” was a true gentleman, longing for the days when “pocket billiards was still a gentleman’s game” and cheerfully refunding the losses of a farmer who had blown his mortgage payment in a pool game. And the immortal Fred Astaire also played a charming hustler on a two-part “Dr. Kildaire” episode, reportedly insisting on playing all his pool on-camera, with no cutaway shots. (I’ve used a line from that show myself: In producing his custom cue and case, the Astaire character admitted that the mere sight of it used to give his wife a rash.)

But generally, the assault on pool marches right on. At a recent BCA Hall of Fame banquet, actor Jerry Orbach told me that he was excited about “a real pool scene” on his long-running “Law & Order.” When I reminded him that he had played pool on camera twice previously on the series, he said, “Yeah, but I didn’t really do anything.” This time, he made both a force-follow carom shot and three-times-across side pocket bank that begins from the exact center of the table. Good shots to watch? Sure. But he was only playing pool in the first place to ingratiate himself with still more bad guys. Orbach is a true friend of pool, but he doesn’t rule over his show’s storylines any more than actors in “The Sopranos” do. And the writers of those shows, and just about all the rest, aren’t about to let go of any tool as enduring as pool-means-evil.

Professor Harold Hill’s famous rant about “Trouble,” from the brilliant “The Music Man,” is set in the first decade of the 20th century. We haven’t come very far since, not if “The Sopranos” is any yardstick. And I wouldn’t look for relief any time soon.