Putting some English on the ball.

Putting some English on the ball

Big-time pool halls in Los Angeles, at least most of 'em, are dark for good reason.

Their shadows conceal dog-legged cue sticks, missing 8-balls and cigarette-burned rails. The carpet's torn and the barmaid's shorn (she had skull surgery and will tell you the story, if you've got the time).

Sure, it's cheap: A pitcher of beer is $3, and a table rents for less. But the vomit dried behind the jukebox still hasn't been cleaned up.

Two months ago a pool hall opened up in Hollywood with fresh cut flowers. Behind the immaculate, faux-marble bar top sit eight different ports, including a '63 Croft for $14 a glass, seven Italian grappas and 14 single-malt Scotch whiskeys.

You don't drink?

Read on: With 45 tables, and room for 60, Hollywood Athletic Club is big-time And each brand-new felt-topped Brunswick Gold Crown III - retail price $4,500 apiece - is flanked by new, true cues and balls shiny as caviar.

"When the publisher of Billiard Digest magazine came here, he nearly wet his pants," explained part-owner Tom Salter.

Vaulted ceilings, tight overhead lighting and freshly filtered air make uncommonly crisp pool conditions.

"We went into a little overkill here," said London-born Salter on a recent Friday, with some understatement.

A breakshot clacked over in the corner and Salter walked past tables where patrons sunk their cripples softly. One hunted for his mechanical bridge. It was quiet at 5:30 p.m., and Salter, also a one-time rock tour promoter and power boat racer, walked towards Drones. The adjoining restaurant creases its white table cloths. The chef is Peter DeLucca of 72 Market Street and Darwin Restaurant, if that means something to you.

A gold crayon had penned on the bar-room mirror that a Beaujolais est arivee. Typical poolroom graffiti. . .

The part-owner of L.A.'s newest nouveau pool establishment is gray-haired, blue-eyed and genteel. Tanned, he wore a bygone-era leather jacket and houndstouth check pants.

Salter's too classy, maybe, for Sunset Boulevard at Hudson.

In fact, he has none of the smarmy attitude contagious among newly arrived Brits who somehow nail a choice, rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica, with an ocean view, and end up being your boss without knowing your firm's business.

The ex-Carnaby Street boutique owner, who left Britain for New York and managed its ritzy Chelsea Billiards, continued west to Malibu. He looked to duplicate Chelsea's $5,000-a-night success with "a kind of place where you could take your wife or girlfriend and not feel intimidated by the smoke or, or - pool sharks."

It's not the collegiate pool of Q's Billiard Club in West L.A., where Tom Cruisy tyros hark to "The Color of Money" antics. Not to put down Q's' red felt tabletops and five-foot beer mugs shaped like tusks.

The Hollywood Athletic Club is public, yet clubby. Anyone can wander in and gaze at historical prints of billiard scenes that hang on walls.

Hip clientele favor snakeskin cowboy boots and shoulder-length hair, or iridescent micro-mini skirts and Michelle Pfeiffer looks. You've got show-biz glitterati and rock 'n' rollers from Club Lingerie on the same block, with a few of us thrown in to leaven the dough.

The club did it up hip: sinking $1.2 million into renovating a 1924 Mediterranean Revival edifice, the haunt of Bogart and Chaplin; restoring its copy of a Florentine palace room; and posting a doorman with a topcoat; all that for a game.

With no advertising. No advertising.

That's hip.

"I wanted to make it very difficult to imitate," said the Londoner dryly, having funneled New York investor David Harrison Gilmour's cash into the mid-Hollywood landmark and securing himself a one-third interest.

Haute pool can pay off. Look to The Shark Club in Costa Mesa, with its 100-year-old chandelier, fireplace and 2,000-gallon aquarium; or to Mr. Lucky's Bistro Billiards in Chicago or Chelsea in New York; or to Jillian's in Seattle, with a dramatic view of Lake Union.

Like Salter's club, they typically charge $10 an hour in prime time. Their players brandish fewer tatoos and milder coughs than the pool hall across the tracks. Telegraph: Rich.

So how do they discover this un-advertised hall?

"Word of mouth," offers Salter.

He declines to say whether he spots free games to fashion-model dabblers and to a few fine players who have lighted in the club to rack, lag and kiss the club's balls into pockets.

"I've been travelin' for about 25 years, gamblin' for a living," said professional Robert LeBlanc. The Memphis native with a shock of silver hair said back room gambling is dying in America. "I used to go to a city and just find who the better player is and play 'em," he explained deliberately. I've been gamblin' since I was 15," said Le Blanc, who now teaches for $35 an hour at the club.

"Now it's tournaments. There's a tournament in Chicago with a $50,000 first prize in March . . ."

"I organize tournaments here," he added. Nine-Ball contests launch three-times weekly at the Hollywood Athletic Club.

Ambitious ideas may continue, like private quarters for pool upstairs. That's provided the club clears its one-year review next October by city regulators. (A special "conditional-use" permit was granted to Salter, granting him a 2 a.m. closing time and perks he said he stubbornly lobbied for.)

"It's deeply entrenched in the American psyche, the desire to play pool," comments Salter. "But a lot of people who come here are not `shooters.'"

World Top Five players Johnny Archer and Nick Varner haven't visited. But Robin Bell has, the Costa Mesa-based winner of the world open in Germany this summer, said Le Blanc.

Actor Richard Lubin rolled in later Friday night, well before the 11 o'clock crowds.

"I want to be a player and meet people in the `business,'" said Lubin, 36, who played across from Tom Cruise in the hospital scene in "Born on the Fourth of July." Originally of Baldwin Hills, Lubin is in a wheelchair, thanks to a sports accident. Still he's at the club about four times a week, pushing for a good high run.

He likes the poshness. "You make people feel comfortable and they'll spend money," said the actor featured in the Monday evening drama series "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill."

In fact Salter and partner Gilmour, who they say owns an island in Fiji, are merely the latest in a long line who have some luck easing gentlemen into a seedy game for brawlers or hustlers.

In 1922 New York State made it a crime to display the word "pool" in connection with a billiard parlor. It didn't work, according to Mike Shamos, curator of the Billiard Archive, established to preserve the game's history.

The game lost fire in America during World War II, although it kindled in army and USO outlets.

After the war, anxious table manufacturer Brunswick built its prototype "Room of the Future" not in Harlem, N.Y., but in Springfield, Ill. The civic-minded "church city" would re-launch the game, said Shamos.

Brunswick, he said, hoped to christen pool with a new morality. It rented space for its showroom in a building whose landlord, by pure coincidence, was Springfield's mayor.

PHOTO : Hollywood Athletic Club: New, true cues and balls shiny as caviar

PHOTO : Vaulted ceilings and tight overhead lighting: The publisher of Billiard Digest nearly `wet his pants' when he saw the place

PHOTO : Setting the mood: Patrons rack up for $10 an hour during prime time