![]() Not everything that Griffin did in the industry was even seen by most fans of the game. In 2016, a year after his double lung transplant, Mark opened Griff’s Bar & Billiards in Las Vegas, which has remained one of the premier pool rooms in the sport today. ![]() Mark helped to financially support the business’s creation. The decades worth of data that had been accumulated by CTS on Demand amounted to nearly a million matches and became the starting ground for the FargoRate system. With the large number of events that were being run by CSI all over the country, a system was needed to display brackets online and CTS on Demand was created. “I think the USAPL will eventually be the best league system in the game.” Griffin predicts. The USAPL continues to grow today, and boasts over 10,000 players in its system. He was named the “Man of the Year” by Billiards Digest magazine and he also created the USAPL League System. TAR helped create modern billiards streaming and we know it today.Ģ009 was a big year for Griffin. Mark got involved in the project, and provided the dedicated studio where they would record many of their matches. That challenge match would be the first match for the newly formed The Action Report (TAR) and Mark would be a part of it, along with Justin Collett, until the end. In 2007, Mark made a small contribution to help bring in commentators for a challenge match between Shane Van Boening and Corey Deuel. He would later add the US Bar Table Championships to the list of events that were ran by CSI. Three years later, Griffin started the US Open 10-Ball, 14.1 and 8-Ball events. Griffin brought back the US Open Banks and One Pocket events in 2004, and ran them under the CSI umbrella, along with the BCA Pool League World Championship. “I was working twelve hour days, living in the offices, working on getting CSI going” said Griffin. The purchase of the BCA Leagues was the catalyst for creating Cue Sports International. In 2004, Griffin purchased the BCA Pool League from the Billiard Congress of America. In 2001, Griffin became a major partner in Diamond Billiards Products, and provided the building that Diamond occupies to this day. In 1996, Griffin acquired College Billiards in San Diego and went on to purchase three other rooms in the San Diego area. He opened the Anchorage Billiard Palace in 1988, a room recognized by Billiards Digest as one of the best rooms in the game back then. Griffin got back into pool in the late 80’s and hasn’t left the game since. He actually opened a Bingo Hall at the former location of one of the larger pool halls in Anchorage. Griffin finally found himself involved in the bingo scene in Alaska and became one of the biggest sellers of bingo supplies in the state. They always told me I was overqualified”. “I worked for Thrifty Rental Cars, washing cars for a year” Griffin remembered. Griffin discovered that a love for the game sometimes isn’t enough to make a living and found himself taking odd jobs to make ends meet. A year later, he expanded to a second pool room, Lazy Cue Billiards Academy in Mountain View, Alaska. Griffin fondly remembered that the room was known as “The Den of Iniquity” back then. In early 1969, Griffin opened his first pool room, the Q & 8 Billiards. “I used to keep track in a book of every table that I did, but I stopped doing that when I reached 1000 tables in the book” said Griffin. Griffin started recovering more and more tables in the Alaska area, and he started becoming known for his speed and precision at the task. The table got so much use in the Griffin residence, that it needed to be recovered and Mark was the man for the job. Griffin first got involved in the pool world during the 7th grade when his father purchased a table for their home. This situation has quickly gotten worse and Mark has recently been informed that he doesn’t have much longer to live. Griffin went to the doctor in October of this year, suffering with problems with his foot, and was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. From what Griffin’s doctors tell him, he may have finally run into the obstacle that he can’t outrun. A year later, Griffin started having issues with his retina and lost the use of his right eye. He underwent a double lung transplant in 2015. Over his sixty plus years in the Billiards Industry, Mark Griffin has outran a lot of things.
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