Spin Doctors : Pool: Shooters converge on a Burbank hotel in hopes of racking up a billiards championship and $50,000. They say the game has become cleaner and greener.

Like sharks ready to slash across a velvet-soft ocean of green felt, the pool players converged upon the Burbank hotel lobby Thursday morning--zeroing in on their victims, in search of the color of money.

Across their shoulders, they carried the weapons of their trade--the elongated cues, the slippery white powder and tip chalk--toted in pouches that resembled an accountant’s briefcase, a doctor’s medicine case or a musician’s gig bag.

They smoked cigarettes, chewed on splintered toothpicks and stared off into space with that faraway smirk designed to rattle the concentration of any would-be opponent, turn his hot blood into cold ice, make him miss the sissiest of shots he once thought he could make in his sleep.

As though attracted by chum dumped into already-dangerous waters, these pool sharks have come to compete for $50,000 in prize money offered by the Western Open Billiards Championship, being played through Sunday at the Hilton Airport Hotel in Burbank.

In a room the size of a gymnasium, 10 pocket billiard tables are lined up side by side, the hot lights hanging low like in some police station interrogation room. The 52 men who have come to compete are a mixed bag--from Slim Jim lawyer look-alikes to beer-bellied truck-driver types with girlie tattoos on their forearms.

Some are uncomfortably quiet, calculated. Others are loudmouthed crowd pleasers lining up side-pocket shots with deadpan one-liners destined for belly laughs.

However diverse, this is a new breed of pool shooter in search of his sport’s Holy Grail, following the 20-event playing circuit that stretches each year from the Carolinas to California. No longer a cheap-steak hustler, he’s a hip shot maker, a guy who takes his game as seriously as any professional golfer, bowler or tennis player.

For these pro pool players, there’s no more dirty bills passed covertly back and forth, pilfered from unsuspecting pockets in dark, dingy, concrete-floored pool halls. Today, there’s lots of legitimate cash to be made in respectable hotels with thick shag carpets and marble ashtrays. Heck, there’s even a pro pool tour for women.

For these predators, the color of money has become greener. And cleaner.

In fact, these boys would someday like to see their sport racked up at an Olympic level. You know--billiards in Barcelona, pool playing in Pretoria.

So much for The Hustler.

“The image of the shady-character pool hustler no longer applies today,” says Kim Davenport, a 37-year-old pro from Modesto. “The guy is a dinosaur. At this level, I don’t think he even exists anymore. There’s too much legitimate money to be made. We don’t have to take it from each other anymore.”

Welcome to the days of Rock ‘n’ Roll Billiards. Gone is the era where slick shot-meisters like Willie Mosconi and Minnesota Fats ruled the 9-foot, slate and velvet tables in competitions nationwide.

If Fats was Tony Bennett, making his no-nonsense brand of swooning, crooning music on the table, then guys like Davenport are the new Axl Rose. They’re Deep Purple or Aerosmith--cockily wielding their cues like electric guitars.

Davenport likes to wear silk when he plays. His pants are white to match his shoes--his shirt as black as his calculating heart when he’s at the table, moving in for the kill. The look is pure Billiard Beverly Hills, because that’s where he shops for his clothes.

As a 10-year-old, he remembers that jittery, jumpy feeling when he walked into his first pool parlor, a place where men smoked cigars and kids skinny as pool cues were frowned upon. Within months, he was beating the best of them.

Now Davenport owns his own billiards hall back in Modesto and has relished in the recent resurgence that has seen pool playing lose its stigma as a game for gambling bad boys. Today, more than 40 million Americans regularly play pool.

“I like to see young guys with their hands around their girlfriends, showing them how to shoot,” he said. “Even if they miss, they laugh. I can’t do that. For me, pool playing is a job. It’s a way of life. In a way, I miss the simpler times.”

For Davenport, a former Professional Billiard Tour Assn. Player of the Year, pool can be a painful game to watch--especially when his opponent has the upper hand, controlling the table like a mean older brother, running shots in sulky succession while he must sit and silently wait his turn.

“It’s the worst feeling in the world,” he said. “You sit there helpless while he’s on a run--in total control. It makes you want to go jump off a cliff. You want to tell the guy ‘Stick a fork in me. I’m done.’

“You’re a piece of raw meat smoking in the oven. But then, when you’re the guy in control. You can look at them with that sidelong glance that says, ‘Ha-ha. I got you now.’ ”

Nearby, Steve Mizerak--a 48-year-old Floridian known as The Miz who has made a living promoting low-calorie beer--talks about the pressure of a big match. Like the time when playing Irving Crane in a televised nine-ball tournament, he missed a final shot and fainted in front of the cameras.

Two tables away, Buena Park resident Keith McCready practices for a series of one-on-one matches that last each day from noon to midnight--until a top player emerges on Sunday. In the movie “The Color of Money,” he’s the professional shark whipping the well-creased pants off a young Turk played by Tom Cruise, the one who turns to him in the middle of a competition and says: “It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?”

For many pros, the movie itself was a nightmare of sorts--one that perpetrated the dated image that a pool player’s first instinct is to hustle a sucker.

“All Hollywood wants to do is place pool players in a bad light,” he says. “I mean, I don’t spend my time in run-down bars. It’s million-dollar pool rooms and Marriotts with fresh-cut flowers.

“And as far as the money goes, there’s gambling in every walk of life. There’s football pools in the police stations. And they gamble at all those Hollywood casting parties, but that never makes the big screen.”

For most novice players, the 6-foot-long tables found in bars are a formidable challenge. But on the pro tour, the games are played on 9-by-4 1/2-foot monsters that make long shots seem like crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a calm day--there’s that much open space.

As he practices, Davenport wields his $1,200 maple cue like a surgeon. First he cuts the cue with so much english that the ball skirts across the table in a semicircle. Then he makes the cue jump over one ball to knock in a corner shot as observers ooh and aah.

But even if the money is better and the venues are considerably more posh, some younger players like Davenport miss the romance of the old days, when pros like Minnesota Fats played with a constant chatter of zinging one-liners.

Like the old-timer he once joined for a two-man billiards tournament, the guy who promised they’d win because he “knew a million shots.”

“We got whipped two games straight and I told him ‘I thought you said you knew a million shots.’ And he said ‘I do. But none of them came up.’ ”