Pool hall philosophers

Pool is all about angles, spin, combinations and placement. On that you will get agreement from physics professors, barfly philosophers and pool sharks, all constituencies who are not to be ignored when you are looking for insight into the mysteries of life.

I myself am not what you would call a “great” pool player (OK, I am, if you must be so harshly technical, not what you call a “good” pool player), but I have always glumly admired pool halls in the way I admire fedoras: They look great in the black-and-white films I imagine myself inhabiting but, if sober, I have to admit I’m just not cool enough to be in them.

With all this in mind, I hatched a quixotic plan: I would roam the diversity of Southern California through its pool halls and seek the shared Zen of a game that (more than the Olympics, soccer or even Fernando Valenzuela) had long linked neighborhoods separated by clogged freeways and their own cultural traffic.

Hollywood Billiards

A natural place to start: Hollywood Billiards, a glorious name brand in the dank religion of L.A. pool. Film mogul Louis B. Mayer opened the place on the corner of Hollywood and Western in 1916 and, the old-timers say, it was glorious in its bleak austerity.

It was in reality nothing more

than a dark basement choked with cigarette smoke and chalk dust, but it was also a way station for every pool pro who mattered for decades. Then the earth moved.

In January 1994, the Northridge earthquake brought the roof down and the grand old pit of a place was shuttered. The franchise was moved to a new location.

Now it’s a huge purple building -- a shade usually reserved for strip clubs or singing dinosaurs -- and it’s across from a Pier One. The menu has a nice Cobb salad and creme brulee, and there is valet service and a digital jukebox.

None of this is to slight the place. The service was very good, the tables (32 tournament-sized, spread over two floors, with table rates from $12 to $17 per hour depending on day and time) are gorgeous, and the manager I spoke to, a pleasant fellow named John Fisher, was candid about the jump shot between past and present.

“People like to say the original was seedy and that the greats all came to play there, and they say it was amazing,” Fisher said. “Obviously, we’re catering more to today’s crowd.” Apparently most of today’s crowd wants the NFL on big television screens while they play, as well as blaring classic rock.

The place still gets plenty of solo players working on their craft, and I chatted with one who would offer only his first name, Peter, and say that he was a 56-year-old Detroit native who made some good cash with the stick.

He waxed about the place’s original venue (“Everybody,” he said, “was comfortable; it was nothing fancy but it was special. It was like walking into a different world”) and then gave a sideways stare when asked about the mystique of the game.

“The game is simple. It’s a matter of discipline; you have to hold your technique in place. It’s all about your game; sometimes the other guy doesn’t matter.”

Pro Billiards Club

My next stop was decided by Bryan Burpee, a 21-year-old player I talked to at Hollywood Billiards. “If you like clean bathrooms, this place is good. It’s nice here, fancy. If you don’t care how clean the bathroom is, then you go to Pro’s.”

More precisely, Pro Billiards Club in Los Feliz, where I met Vanick Gaspriaa, 62, who learned to love the game in his days in the Russian air force.

Gaspriaa’s pool hall (the hourly rates range from $5 to $11) is far less snazzy, but the crowd reflects a more complex cultural mosaic. Homeboys with tattoos and young hipsters in porkpie hats bring their sticks in on weekend nights, but the owner proudly points out that he also welcomes in Armenian and Iranian emigres seeking a round of Russian pyramid and Irishmen reserving the snooker table. The owner says there was a lot of consternation among neighbors when he opened the pool hall in 1993. Now, though, the place is usually mellow and there’s a waiting list on most Saturday nights.

“We have Asians; we have Hispanics; we have retired men who come in with their wives every week and reserve the snooker,” Gaspriaa said. “We have no gang troubles; we give the young people something other than the street where they get in trouble.”

The well-lighted place has a modest menu (the pizza sells best, but try the shish kebab) and burly bouncers who keep the peace. A regular, Ian Flynn, tapped the leather case holding his cue and shrugged when asked about the easygoing polyglot amid the felt tabletops.

“People come here to move balls around, sit back and drink a beer. What’s simpler than that?”

Joe Josts

Simplicity is the watchword at Joe Josts in Long Beach, which is not a pool hall by definition (only three tables, just $4 an hour), but then not every church needs to be a cathedral, does it?

The joint’s namesake, a Hungarian immigrant, opened the doors in 1924 as an inspired combination of barbershop, pool hall and poker emporium. I stopped by for a game of pool and “a special” (it’s sausage on rye with Swiss cheese, a pickle and a swab of mustard) and asked the bartender if there was any universal truth to be found in pool. He said “No.” In my notebook, I jotted this down as “Don’t scratch on the break.”

Josts is an exceptional daytime pool spot. There is a lovely Saturday morning vibe to having a schooner of beer, some peanuts (they roast them there daily) and the sports chatter of the clientele, a lot of them local dockworkers and fishermen and blue-collar locals. I played three games with a buddy and lost every time. Maybe the place is not so great after all.

They sell T-shirts at Josts that are so popular that the bar has become a landmark and enjoys a nice stream of curious first-timers and thirsty out of towners.

Sportsman’s Family Billiards

That’s not the case at Sportsman Billiards & Restaurant in the Jefferson Park district. When I walked in, every head turned with the exception of a napping toddler in one corner and the guys in a side room who were intent on a game of dominos.

The curiosity was not only because I was the only white face in sight; the storefront just off of Exposition is the definition of a local joint -- everybody knows everybody and many see each other there weekly if not daily. Newcomers are welcomed but also inspected.

No alcohol is served and posted signs read: “Respect yourself, no profanity.” There’s no jukebox and, despite the hall’s outdated name, no food is served these days, so the players often bring in their homemade chicken, sandwiches or bags of fast food.

The wide room is fairly spartan except for an elaborate mural of African American icons ranging from Sojourner Truth to Olympics hero Wilma Rudolph. The well-kept tables, 17 of them, are a bargain at $8.50 an hour for three players and $4 an hour for solo shooters. Kids under 14 are free.

“This is strictly a family place, a place you can bring your babies and be safe and welcome,” the day manager, Buford Bates, said. “It’s a social place. We’ve had one fight here. Twelve years, just one fight. People respect the badge on the wall.” The badge is the oversized LAPD shield on a plaque posted prominently on a wall. The name on the plaque is Sgt. Ed Palmer (along with his nickname, “the caped crusader”), who along with his sister, Leslie Palmer, carries on the family business started by their dad. The manager at night is Carl Hughes, and he grinned when I asked him about the game of pool and its role in the life of the people who walk through the door.

“Cemeteries, churches, barbershops and pool halls, that’s where you walk if you want to get to know a neighborhood. It’s like family here. People have conversations here.... We solve every problem here, you know, and they talk about politics, sports, everything. It’s the cross section of where we live, and the game is just what you do while you’re talking.”

Hughes scrunched up his face when I asked whether today’s video-game culture misses out on that type of conversational circuitry. “No video games in here; they asked us early on and we said no way. What can you learn staring at a screen?”

Over at the tables, the topics of the day were recall politics and the Kobe Bryant legal case. I noticed music was being piped in, but it was so quiet it was hard to hear. Hughes walked with me as I left. “I hope we get lots of new customers. Thanks for coming.”

Shark Club

Going farther south, I ended up at the Shark Club in Costa Mesa, where the game of pool has evolved to the point where shapely young women on staff will rack the balls for you when you rent a table for $10 to $12 per hour.

The place is extremely stylish, with plush furniture that manages to somehow be uncomfortable and a vast array of expensive drinks. Well-heeled young Orange County professionals and some college students were the dominant crowd the evening I visited, and the tables, burnt umber in color, are outstanding.

In the middle of the place is a shark tank where, a few years ago, an employee assigned to feed the fish suffered a bite in an incident that became the first ever shark attack in a landlocked California city that, incongruously, has the Spanish word for “coast” in its name. When an employee told me about the various dance club nights offered, I knew it was time to move on.

Broadway Billiard Parlor

Broadway Billiard Parlor in Santa Ana feels like a basement, and that is a good start. The jukebox is packed with Mexican ballads and the walls are lined with yellowed sports pennants and crumbling newspaper clippings about bullfighters and boxers. The place seems like a sealed shadow box from 25 years ago, and the crowd is working-class, almost exclusively Spanish-speaking when I dropped in.

I asked an older fellow there if he thought the game of pool was a way to learn about life, and he fixed me with a stare usually reserved for used-car salesmen. “I’m not going to play you for money no matter what you say.” I nodded solemnly, wrote down what he said and asked him his name. When he refused to tell me even his first name, I bought him a beer.

Later, I called to check the rates. No one answered. So I went back this week, but the wrought-iron door guarding the 15 steps down to the hall was locked. I kind of like that in a pool hall.

Yankee Doodles

A different world greeted me a few nights later at Yankee Doodles, a wildly popular fixture on Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The place is cavernous and an exercise in sensory overload with its deafening music, video screens and mirrored columns. No matter how good your break, no one will hear it.

It was ‘80s night (selections by Bon Jovi, Rick Springfield and the Stray Cats were the first three songs I heard, which made me think of old Joe Jost choking on hair spray) and more people were playing the bar’s electronic trivia game than pool when I walked in, although the tables filled up after 11 p.m.

Doodles has locations in Woodland Hills and Long Beach as well. The staff is genial and the food is pretty good. “If you want to play pool, this is the place,” a manager told me proudly.

Well, the tables are nice and the layout is smart (two floors and the tables are angled to give you good views of the bar, which is the length of a city bus), but places like Doodles are beholden to televised sports. There are a lot more conversations about the Minnesota Vikings than Minnesota Fats. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just not pool purity.

A patron, 25-year-old Chris Ratliff, a recent transplant from the Bay Area, said the Yankee Doodles scene is great for socializing and has warmth that he didn’t find in the sterner pool halls in Hollywood or San Francisco. “The music here, first of all, is great, and you meet people here. It’s not just about drinking or playing pool.”

Hard Times

By those standards, Ratliff will not want to be driving down to Bellflower to visit the 48 tables at Hard Times. No drinks are served here; there’s no time for that. The place has top-of-the line Black Crown tables and a vast snooker table that, of course, is nicknamed Big Bertha. There are pictures of the world’s top pros on the walls and, if you spend enough nights there, you probably see most of them wander through like visiting gunslingers.

If Yankee Doodles is the flashy aesthetic of Tom Cruise and “The Color of Money,” this place might be the ominous austerity of Paul Newman’s dens in “The Hustler.”

Inside, the stern looks of methodical snipers greet you as you roam the room (Did I mention the name of the place is Hard Times?), and there is the sense that money is changing hands, although I would never suggest that illegal wagering is present. There’s a tournament room in back. The whole place is 21,000 square feet. Do not lean on the tables.

Surely, here, I would find the math and magic of the game that puts everything, even Southern California, into tidy triangles.

“Pool is like golf for poor people,” said Ray Halleran, who learned to play from his dad in Flint, Mich., in the 1950s. “It tests your patience with yourself. No two breaks are ever the same.... I’ve been around the world and everywhere you go you can find a game of pool. The rules change in some places, but everyone shoots the same.”

A buddy of his, bald as a cue ball, interjected with a different take: “Whatever. Less talk; it’s your turn.” I dutifully wrote this down in my notebook.

A little later, Halleran invited me to play, and he promptly ran the table after I flubbed my third shot. Serendipity, however, gave me an unlikely victory when he scratched on the eight-ball shot. “Sometimes all you need to do to win is stand there,” he said.

He gave me a funny look: “Aren’t you going to write that

down?”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Breaking points

Hollywood Billiards, 5750 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Facilities: 32 tables, hourly rates from $12 to $17 depending on day and time.

Hours: Mon.-Thu., 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.;

Fri., noon to 3 a.m.; Sat., noon to 3 a.m.;

Sun., noon to 2 a.m.

Info: (323) 465-0115 or www.hollywoodbilliards.com

Pro Billiards Club

3126 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Feliz

Facilities: 32 tables, hourly rates range from $5 to $11.

Hours: Mon.-Sun., 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.

Info: (323) 644-1444

Joe Josts

2803 E. Anaheim St., Long Beach

Facilities: 2 pool tables and 1 snooker,

$4 an hour

Hours: Mon.-Sat., 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sun.

10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Info: (562) 439-5446 or www.joejosts.com

Sportsman’s Family Billiards

3617 Crenshaw, Los Angeles

Facilities: 17 pool tables, $8.50 an hour for three players, $4 solo.

Hours: Mon.-Sun., 1 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Info: (323) 733-9615

Shark Club

841 Baker St., Costa Mesa

Facilities: 11 tables, $10-$12 per hour

Hours: Tues.-Wed., 11:30 a.m. to midnight; Thu.-Sat., 11:30 a.m. to 3 a.m.

Info: (714) 751-6428 or www.sharkclub.com

Broadway Billiard Parlor

225 N. Broadway, Santa Ana

Facilities: about a dozen tables

Hours: Mon., Wed.-Thu., about 1 p.m. to midnight; Tue., Fri.-Sun., about 1 p.m. to

2 a.m.

Info: (714) 543-4043 (phone is rarely answered)

Yankee Doodles

1410 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica

Facilities: 23 tables, $8-$16 per hour

Hours: Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., 9 a.m. to 2 a.m.

Info: (310) 394-4632

Also: Woodland Hills (818) 883-3030; Long Beach (562) 439-9777

Hard Times

17450 Bellflower Blvd., Bellflower

Facilities: 48 tables, $3.50-$9.95 per hour

Hours: Mon.-Sun., 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Info: (562) 867-7733 or www.hardtimesbellflower.com

Geoff Boucher can be contacted at geoff.boucher@latimes.com.