Billiard Congress of America - History

History

The origins of the BCA began with the National Billiard Association of America (NBAA), founded July 25, 1921. The organization rapidly became the de facto governing body of the sport in the United States, with 35,000 members by 1928, and was closely tied to the Brunswick-Balke-Collender company, a major equipment manufacturer. After a decline in influence in the late 1930s, in part owing to a dispute with world carom champion Willie Hoppe, the NBAA reformed in 1941 as the Billiard Association of America (BAA or BA of A). Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and calling itself "the Governing Body of Billiards", the BAA produced a concise, portable, inexpensive rulebook of carom and pocket billiards games, that was to serve as the model for future BCA releases. The BAA in turn became the BCA, 1947–1948. The BCA formed with, and for several years shared offices with, the promotional trade association National Billiard Council (NBC), now defunct. Early BCA rulebooks were essentially identical to the 1946 BAA edition, including the cover art and the absence of the increasingly popular game nine-ball from the ruleset. (Nine-ball still did not appear in the 1963 rulebook, despite being one of the pool gambling games of choice by that era, but did appear in the 1967 and all subsequent editions.) The BCA rulebooks have remained in near-annual continuous publication to the present day.

During its first thirty-two years of existence as the BCA, the organization had various addresses, including in Toledo, Ohio and Chicago. In 1980, they opened their longest-term permanent office in Iowa City, Iowa, and moved it in 1997 to Coralville, Iowa for a brief period. In 2000, the BCA relocated to its current headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Also in 2000, the BCA made the major move of adopting the WPA's World Standardized Rules for eight-ball, nine-ball and other games subject to international professional competition. The BCA had by this time become the national affiliate of the WPA, the International Olympic Committee-recognized world governing body of billiards and pool. In the new edition of the rules, the organization expressed a commitment to seeing pool and carom billiards become Olympic sports (and in fact selected Colorado Springs for its new headquarters for proximity to the US Olympic Committee). The rules changes have not been without controversy, as some of them upset US player expectations; various leagues have ignored the new rules and continued with traditional US rules (e.g., in the game of eight-ball, legally pocketing the 8 ball on the break shot has commonly been treated as an instant win).