There was a time when you could be flipping through cable television, land on ESPN, and suddenly find two people under bright lights staring down a nine ball.
No YouTube search. No subscription to a niche streaming service. You did not have to already be a pool fan to find it. Pool was simply there, mixed into the same sports television world as boxing, tennis, bowling and everything else that filled the schedule.
For anyone who came up around the game in the 1990s or early 2000s, that image is hard to separate from the era itself: the television graphics, the quiet room, the click of the balls, and players who became familiar faces even to people who had never entered a tournament.
Pool Was Part of the Channel-Surfing Era
ESPN's relationship with professional pool was not a one-off novelty. Women's professional pool in particular built a long television history with the network. By the 1990s, the WPBA was working to turn televised events into a regular part of its tour. ESPN produced events that put the women's game in front of a national audience, and in 1995 even staged a tournament with men's and women's divisions, scotch doubles, and a heavily promoted Battle of the Sexes match between Vivian Villarreal and C.J. Wiley.
The names from that period still sound like a roll call from cable-TV pool: Jeanette Lee, Allison Fisher, Ewa Laurance, Vivian Villarreal, Robin Dodson, Earl Strickland. Mike Massey's trick-shot appearances were another part of the package. You did not need to know every rule or understand position play to recognize that these people had personalities.
An old AZBilliards discussion about ESPN pool captures the feeling better than a ratings chart ever could. Fans remembered seeing men's matches live, including Earl Strickland, and one poster recalled a match finishing earlier than the television window, leaving Mike Massey to fill the remaining time with trick shots. It is such a specific memory that it immediately brings back what sports television used to feel like: the broadcast had time to fill, so somebody grabbed a cue and entertained the room.
The Players Became Familiar Faces
Television gave pool something that is difficult to reproduce with clips scattered across the internet: repetition. You saw the same players again. You learned their mannerisms. You knew who played quickly, who took their time, who seemed fearless, and who could turn a routine rack into a little bit of theater.
The WPBA years were especially important in that respect. ESPN and ESPN2 carried enough women's events that players could become recognizable beyond hardcore pool circles. The relationship lasted a long time; an ESPN feature from 2012 noted that Mitch Laurance and Ewa Laurance had already worked together on WPBA broadcasts for 17 years, and ESPN was still televising the WPBA Masters that year.
That exposure mattered. A person who would never search for a professional pool match could stumble onto one, watch ten minutes, and start caring about the next rack. In an era before recommendation algorithms decided what everyone was likely to watch, simple channel surfing created accidental fans.
So What Happened?
Pool did not disappear. The way people watch it changed.
Recently, however, pool has begun finding its way back to ESPN. In August 2026, the full U.S. Open Pool Championship was streamed live on ESPN+, while the final aired live on ESPN2. The new agreement between ESPN, Matchroom and the World Nineball Tour will also bring the Mosconi Cup back to ESPN in November.
It is not quite a return to the old schedule, since much of the coverage now lives behind a streaming subscription. But putting the U.S. Open final on ESPN2 still mattered. For a few hours, someone moving through sports television channels could once again stumble across professional pool without deliberately searching for it. The broadcast was a small but meaningful return to the kind of visibility the sport once enjoyed.
Sports television became more concentrated around properties that could reliably deliver large audiences and advertising dollars. At the same time, pool found new homes online. Live streams, YouTube archives, dedicated event coverage and social media now make it possible to watch far more billiards than an ESPN viewer could have imagined twenty-five years ago.
In one sense, things are better. A fan can pull up a great match almost whenever he wants. Old tournaments that once vanished after their television window can live online for years.
But something was lost with that convenience. Finding a match because you were already looking for pool is not quite the same as finding pool because you happened to turn on the television.
That is probably why the old ESPN broadcasts still come up in billiards forums. People are not only remembering the matches. They are remembering a period when pool occupied a little more space in ordinary American sports culture, and when a professional match could catch somebody with the remote still in his hand.
Perhaps the recent ESPN agreement is a sign that pool can occupy some of that space again. One televised final will not recreate the cable era, but it gives the game another chance to reach people who were not already looking for it.
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