Origins

The Golden 8 Ball History Project began in 2024, while Alan T Miller was building a new website for Metro Sportz Bar & Billiards. During that work, he asked David Lee whether any memorabilia from the Golden 8 Ball days still existed — photographs, tournament brackets, newspaper clippings, anything from that era.

David told him it was all gone. Over the years he had lent out the best of his collection — photos, press, ephemera from two decades of running the most storied pool hall in Phoenix — and none of it ever came back. The physical record of what he built had simply disappeared.

The Golden 8 Ball operated entirely in the pre-Internet era. There are no archived websites. No social media posts from the 1980s. No digital anything. For a room that was the largest pool hall in the United States — where BCA Hall of Famers played, where road players got stuck because the action was too good to leave — the public record was almost nothing. A few forum posts. A handful of scattered mentions. That's it.

This matters beyond nostalgia. The stories that exist only in living memory are the most vulnerable to being lost. When institutions like the Golden 8 Ball predate the digital era, their history depends entirely on someone doing the work to recover it, verify it, and put it into the record before the people who lived it are no longer here to tell it.

Without that work, the historical record simply has a hole where the Golden 8 Ball should be. Phoenix has a habit of moving on. Buildings come down, neighborhoods turn over, and the stories that made a place worth remembering fade with the generation that lived them. This project exists to make sure that doesn't happen here.