#Nearest billiards pool hall movie

Pitsadiotis and his two sisters all met their partners at Billiards Academy, and they’ve attended a dozen weddings of people who had met there. One player who challenged Arsenault is now her husband of 25 years.

The women would put their coins on top of the pool table rail and wait for their turn to go against the winner from the game already in play. “Back in the 1990s, my best friend and I would head out to our local bar and shoot pool on their coin-operated tables,” says Arsenault, a sales manager with Dynamic Billiard in Mississauga.

#Nearest billiards pool hall movie

After the movie was released, women also started playing pool, he adds, “and the stigma that went with pool halls started going away.'Īnita Arsenault was one of these women. Members of the billiards community widely credit the 1986 Martin Scorsese film, “The Colour of Money,” starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, with popularizing pool in North America, says Pitsadiotis.

Now, billiards are not only surviving, but thriving in Toronto. Now the oldest pool hall in Old Toronto, Billiards Academy has stood witness to the changes cue sports have experienced over time: the surge in popularity during the ’80s the dry spell in the mid- to late ’90s the difficulties after Toronto’s smoking ban went into effect in 1999 and most recently, the lockdowns and restrictions that accompanied COVID-19. As a kid, I grew up really quick, being exposed to that culture and seeing that actual life was not sugar-coated.” “Guys worked all day in factories, and would come by after,” he says. Billiards Academy in the ’70s was just one of many blue-collar establishments, including social clubs and bowling alleys, on the Danforth. “(It was a) staple in the community before Greektown was even Greektown,” says Evangelos, who now runs the hall. It’s just that back then, Billiards Academy wasn’t anything fancy. Not that Andreas was new to the sport: he had been playing snooker since immigrating from Corinth, Greece to Toronto in the mid-1960s, and owned and operated a pool hall in Guelph before becoming Academy’s third owner in 1971.

When his father, Andreas Pitsadiotis, bought the place, he had no idea what an institution it would become. Occasionally, a guy would freak out because he would lose his rent money or something.” There wasn’t a lot of noise, because they were playing a serious game. “It was like in the movie ‘The Hustler,’ where a bunch of guys played pool for money. “It was what you’d think a typical pool hall would be,” Pitsadiotis says. By 11, he had developed a second-hand smoker’s cough.īack then, Billiards Academy and Sports Lounge had no TVs, no liquor license, and the air was thick with clouds of nicotine. At the age of eight, Evangelos Pitsadiotis poured his first coffee at his father’s Danforth Avenue pool hall.