There was a time when the Philippines was regarded as the hotbed of world pool events.
Yes, billiards was once widely known as among the top three most popular sports in the country, next to basketball and boxing.
The sight of Efren “Bata” Reyes hoisting and weaving the Philippine flag right after he won the World Pool 9-Ball Championship in Cardiff, Wales in 1999 has certainly elevated the sport into a new level.
From there on, everybody wants to be ‘Bata.’
Pool houses were packed, it even complements yuppies and students during their nightly hangouts.
Men and women. Young and old. People from all walks of life all wanted to take center stage at the pool table, take a careful aim at the cue ball and sink the targeted colored balls.
Sinking one ball after another, provided them a great feeling of something they could relish on while zipping their favorite booze.
But Reyes, who also won the World 8-Ball Championship in Fujairah, United Aran Emirates in 2004, did not only elevate billiards to new heights, but also cemented a legacy by becoming the sport’s most iconic figure.
Banking on the sport’s brightest star, the Philippines was able to produce a deluge of world champions and staged the biggest events in pool the next decade.
After Reyes, Ronnie Alcano pocketed back-to-back world championships, winning the 9-Ball title in 2006 at the Philippine International Convention Center in Pasay City, then also ruled the 8-Ball event in Fujairah, UAE the following year.
In 2007, the Philippines brought the World 9-Ball Pool Championship back on local soil and was on the verge of creating yet another world champion in unheralded cue artist Roberto “Superman” Gomez.
But the young and inexperienced Gomez succumbed to pressure and lost in a tight encounter to his English rival, Daryl Peach, 17-15.
The Philippines once again hosted another world championship, this time the inaugural World Ten Ball Championship 2008 won by Darren Appleton of Great Britain and Mika Immonen of Finland the following year, but the country didn’t come up empty-handed when a separate event for women was held at the Robinsons Place in Ortigas with Rubilen Amit bagging the 10-Ball crown.
She duplicated the feat four years later to join the list of the country’s multiple world-title winners in Reyes and Alcano.
Carlo Biado joined that elusive circle when he captured the World 9-Ball Championship in 2017 and just recently, the World Ten Ball Championship.
Other world champions the Philippines produced were Bustamante (2010 World 9-Ball Championship in Doha, Qatar), Dennis Orcollo (2011 in UAE) and Chezka Centeno (2023 in Austria).
But staging world championships isn’t just the solution to uplift the sport of billiards.
While the country’s billiards federation has been contented on its band-aid solution through its pick-up system each time the country needs representatives for major events like the Southeast Asian Games and the Asian Games, the absence of a more comprehensive program has definitely hurt the sport, not to mention its close association to gambling.
What we need are the new prime movers of Philippine pool that will carry on this new vision of coming up with a solid program and a much noble objective of transforming billiards as a true sport, setting aside gambling.
Billiards had been constant producers of world champions in the absence of a program.
Winning world championships are in the Filipinos’ DNA, but a new direction in developing future great athletes had been the missing piece.
Time now to act fast.
