Home Final Edition
November 7

Apologies are due to the late Music Man creator Meredith Willson. But his song Ya Got Trouble comes to mind upon reading news that the game of billiards has been outlawed in Uzbekistan. Billiards -- or its working-class cousin, pool -- was the trouble that traveling flimflam man Harold Hill warned against in The Music Man , the beloved musical, recently revived on Broadway.

Unless the upright denizens of mythical River City, Iowa, did something about that trouble , he said -- that game of pool -- they'd be corrupting their sons, letting the boys' idle brains become the playground of the devil, letting them smoke cigarettes and listen to that dangerous new music called ragtime.

Hill, as theatergoers know, was selling the idea of a boys band. He was selling band instruments and uniforms, along with music lessons that he didn't plan to stick around to teach.

It's hard to tell what Uzbekistan's government was selling when it shut down the game of billiards, which has practically become the national pastime since the Uzbeks split from the Soviet Union in 1991. Uzbekistan has no free press, and rumormongers diagree about the reasons for the ban.

On the surface, the government seems to be selling the same message as Harold Hill: Ya got trouble, my friend -- trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with V, and that stands for vice.

It isn't a religious thing: Uzbekistan is a secular autocracy, certainly no hotbed of militant Islam. But as Dilshod Nazirov, spokesman for the capital city of Tashkent, told the Associated Press, billiard halls were a public nuisance, noisy places where people were doing drugs and drinking too much.

"When you go to a billiard club," he said, "there is thick cigarette smoke, the smell of alcohol -- is this a sport?"

Well, members of the country's now-banned Billiard Federation think it is. Uzbekistan is home to a number of world-class billiards players. But now the national billiards team no longer can practice or participate in upcoming tournaments in other countries.

"People drink alcohol in cafes and teahouses, too. Why not shut them down?" said Billiard Federation President Bakhrom Sadykov.

---