Billiards

Pool has been popular in the Philippines since before World War
II, after the country had been sold by Spain to the US in 1898.
Its golden period wouldn't be until 1999, when Filipino Efren
Reyes beat Taiwan's Chang Hao-Ping at the World Pool
Association (WPA) Nine-Ball Championships in Cardiff, Wales.
It was the sport's first televised final and Reyes, nicknamed Bata
—"kid" in Tagalog—oozed laid-back charisma and came with a
backstory of having worked his way up from a youth spent
sleeping rough on pool tables. Soon, pool in the Philippines got
a cash infusion. Sponsors came onboard. Pool halls were
renovated. Even the government pumped money into the game,
backing players abroad and putting on tournaments at home. The
country hosted two of the next eight WPA Nine-Ball
Championships, and in 2008 the organization held its first-ever
World Ten-Ball Champs in Manila, as the Nine-Ball tournament
took a two-year hiatus due to the global economic crisis.
Dennis Orcollo's pool career began when he was eight and his
grandfather brought home a beat-up table. They lived in a
coastal village on the Philippine Island of Mindanao. Years
before, Orcollo's father, a fisherman, was lost at sea in a storm.
Soon the boy was spending entire nights on the table, and at age
16, he left home for a gold mining town called Campostela,
where he hustled pool. Within days no-one would play the
prodigious teen, and so he left for the capital, Manila, with a
handful of dollars and nowhere to sleep. It was the mid-1990s
and Orcollo had picked a good time: Pool had been a national
sport since the Second World War. It was about to become
lucrative too. Today, you can find pool halls in Manila's
restaurants, its schools, and even its slums, where some streets
are ankle-deep in excrement and industrial slime. Each table is a
refuge from horrible squalor—even in the worst neighborhoods,
where locals make cash reconstituting leftover food for pennies,
people shoot pool for three Filipino pesos (seven cents) a rack.