Judge — January 27, 1923 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Sport Page Green Baize Journeys By Heyrwoop Broun 8 FAR as official records go, we stand a little better in pool than in other form of athletic en- deavor. xteen years ago we reached the round before the semi-finals in a tour- nament to determine the championship of the north entry of Thayer Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. To be sure, we may have been aided a little by the house rules. Under our code of prac- tice it was not necessary to call the shots and we have always been adept in pocket- ing balls not in the scope of our plan. Then, too, we knew the table. E) crag and gully was familiar. We ha never played on any pool table to compare with it for natural beauty. From the hill in front of the lower right-hand corner pocket it was possible to see the ocean on days, me grew scientific it has a In the good old days there was no such thing as safety play. The best player in our group was the strongest man in college and his system was to let fly at the spot where the balls clustered thickest. If anything dropped it was his. The only bar put upon sheer power was the local rule that a scratch should be counted against a play drove any of the ivories through a win- dow. That is if the window broke. Naturally if no damage was done it was permissible to shoot again. * Tvories,” of course, is mere politeness. Actually the balls were manufactured out of a rare sort of semi-rigid mud. ch had its own contour and person- y. There was one called Mabel which did much to add a sporting element to the contests. Mabel was less adamant than her fellows. Her charm lay in her capacity for fluctuation. She was all things to all men. There were days when Mabel was irrepr ly a perfect sphere but on other afternoons the cheer- ing section stood about the table shouting “atta rhomboid” as she waddled uncer- tainly toward the pocket. Asa matter of fact, there was one par- ticular occasion when Mabel departed so shamelessly from normal that no player could tame her and it became necessary to rule” overruled. “The one foot on the floor call the game on account of darkness. She had at the time a capacity for the sharpest and most sudden curve which we hav ever seen, It was monstrously exciting to see the ball speed to the very edge of the pocket and then fall away into a wide outdrop. P HAPs the ultra-scientifie aspects of the game came into being when Con- gress (or whoever it was) passed the legislation requiring all patriotic citizens of the United States to refer to the sport “t billiards” instead of pool e that this action was taken on the ground that “poot room” had grown to have a sinister sound. But that was the very reason we liked it. One felt irile and adventurous when he said, ess T'M go out and drop into the Surely there is a self-con- “Tm pay a call at the pocket billiard going parlor.” And in the old days the game was only one factor in the entertainment offered. A very pleasant evening might be spent by merely loafing about and watching the players and offering them advice when they needed it. It is curious how un grateful people are about advice. We can remember having said upon hundreds of occasions, “I knew you were going to miss that. You had the angle all wrong.” And yet we have no recollection of ever having been thanked. ONG before Coué began his experi ments, pool phtyers learned the valu: of auto-suggestion. Physicists may say that the mental attitude of a player ts unimportant once the ball has sped away from the tip of his cue. We know better. ‘Theories are meager things when exposed to the light of experience. Ever so many times we have seen a ball curve into a pocket spurred on by nothing more than the violent rooting of the player. And if he had friends to help him so much the better. The device of body English is also worth cultivating. There is som inexplicable force which exerts an_ influ ence upon a moving body if the shooter will take pains to bend in the right comichooks.