It seldom happens that such billiards is to be witnessed during one and the same fortnight in London as that which came to a conclusion on April 29 at Caxton Hall and Leicester Square. To be sure the players were not assorted according to the style of game that they play and the ideal encounter would, perhaps, have been Roberts v. Stevenson and Diggle v. Inman. But as it was the matches were intensely interesting, and we append herewith a few impressions, gathered during two afternoon sessions—one at each locale—of the players concerned.
The day was April 18, the time afternoon, the place Leicester Square, and the players were Roberts and Diggle.
Could greater contrast be? Both highly efficient players, equally correct in methods, and yet how different. Diggle is not slow. The writer saw him make a 700 break at Soho Square in anything but slow time. Yet it seemed slow, and the higher the hundreds mounted the more unhappy Diggle looked. There was a sort of "Will this confounded break never end?" air about him.
With Roberts it is different. He is extremely fast, brilliant alike in manner and in effect, and his scoring not only is fast but looks fast. Everything is done in the grand manner, and with abandon. He troubles the rest rarely and the long ones hardly ever. His left hand is as fluent as his right, and if it be quicker to shift the right hand round behind the back he does that.
When Diggle is playing a good amateur spectator can forecast his nearly every stroke —which is saying a great deal for the chess-like accuracy and system of Diggle's work. But who would venture to forecast the same number of strokes by Roberts? It would never occur to Diggle that spectators might occasionally like to see the chess varied with some daring innovation.
What does the paying billiard public really want in exchange for its time and money spent at billiard exhibitions and matches? Does it want—after one or two initial demonstrations of possibility—an afternoon of winner-cannons, of rail cannons, of red losing hazards, or even a set mosaic of all three? We think not. It is in attendance partly to be instructed, partly to worship some particular billiard hero or heroes, but, more than each or both of these, to be entertained. And whilst John Roberts is at the table there is never a moment during which every person in the hall is not entertained.
He is even worth watching when he is not striking. For one thing he is so intensely human. He sits dignified and erect on the edge of a seat, waiting for his turn, and gives one the impression of the war-horse, held back with difficulty from impetuous and premature charging. He does not affect, as do his present-day younger rivals, to be unconcerned with what is happening at the table. There are no movements from place to place and out of and back to the hall with John Roberts. When his opponent breaks down and the balls come to rest, Roberts knows which is his without describing circles with his head around both the whites.
The match throughout consisted largely of brilliant bursts by Roberts and even and uneventful scoring by Diggle, whose play, to those who want to learn the game, is a very cheap lesson indeed at anything from 9d. to 2s. 6d. per hour. Talk of diagrams. A Diggle break is a whole series of accurately-mapped diagrams and when he breaks down— no matter how difficult the proposition—it is by the merest hair's breadth. He bends both knees; he makes no bridge to speak of; he brings the cue so slightly back that he seems to poke, although he doesn't; and he exhibits, in short, almost every known billiard heresy except that of failing to score.
His gospel is the gospel of maximum result with minimum effort, and in the fulfilment of this gospel he avoids even the unnecessary tightening of a muscle.
Here, again, the contest was between what may, without disrespect, be termed the racer and the roadster class, only in this instance the gospel of care, plod, and determination, rather than of mechanically-accurate striking and positioning, was the one that was daily illustrated by the more soberly-moving contestant.
Inman marks up a 200 to 300 break and spectators look at the scoring board and think how far he is getting ahead.
Then Stevenson pays a few dazzling visits to the table, within the course of merely a few minutes, and, presto!
Inman's carefully-compiled hundreds are seen to be neutralized.
And the ease and grace of it all! No shifting of the ball in baulk; no half-mind or cross-purpose; no nervous movement of the body or motion of the cue after the stroke.
Everything instant, decisive, crisp, and comely. Two firm little cue swings, the delivery, the musical impact, and the result.
Coming to the table after one of his adversary's turns, the champion finds what the weekly papers giving diagrams would term a "problem." "He is going out for it," whispers a spectator. Before the sentence is completed the stroke is made, but rarely on the conventional lines that had been anticipated for it. That all-round cannon has not only to be made but it has to leave something to go on with. For, as with the elder Roberts, and as with all really great players, Stevenson would rather leave the cannon alone altogether than get on the wrong side of it.
But it is made, and correctly made, and before the applause has subsided, all three balls are in the top-of-the-table area and the marker is a happy man if he has not the hundred card to change and the score peg to move at this particular juncture, so swiftly succeed the points that he has to call out And now also is the time when Stevenson's one weakness— the weakness that alone prevents him from reaching the thousand break and that so often lets in his opponent, makes itself manifest. He plays too close a game. That masse stroke, beautifully as he executes it, is far too frequent, and those cushion cannons at a hair's breadth, when the corner pocket is simply asking to be used for a loser, are time and again a pitfall.
To tell the truth, Stevenson does not like that journey down to baulk. Hear what he himself says in his book on top-of-the-table play:—"A break of this description is disjointed and a very different thing, in point of scientific manipulation, from the same number of points scored almost wholly around and about the billiard spot."
Inman, on the other hand, cares nothing about what some may term disjointed breaks or so-called unscientific manipulation. Provided that he is scoring all the time and that the break continues, the fact that he has to go to baulk twenty or thirty times in the course of 200 or 300 does not trouble him in the least.
Nor is he led away by the glamour of too close play, and it is rarely with him that the balls at the head of the table cover. A masse stroke is not one of his strong points and if he knows bow to keep the balls sufficiently apart to do without it he is the wiser player—at any rate in strenuous match competition with a great deal depending upon the result.