One important aspect of George Gray's feats in billiard scoring by means of a legitimate and foundation stroke in billiards has, so far as we have observed, been overlooked.
It is that Gray, differing in this respect from any previous player, has approached his study of the game primarily from the mathematical standpoint—a standpoint that is openly scoffed at by nine out of every ten proficients in the game to-day. These proficients, whether professional or amateur, ascribe their success to "practice, practice, practice," and are prone to foster the superstition that real proficiency in billiards in all its phases means the unceasing practice and attention of a lifetime.
Talk to these men about angles of so many degrees and ball contacts mathematically estimated by fractional gradations, and they will reply that they have learnt their billiards without paying attention to these scientific refinements and that if they can now get any stroke they want as the result of unremitting practice they can afford to ignore the purely theoretical part of the matter.
Granted that there are degrees of aptitude amongst billiard players, and which must always be taken into consideration, our main point is that, other things being equal, the beginner at billiards who realizes that certain fixed results are to be obtained on the table and that there are certain fixed causes that lead to these results is in the way of finding a much shorter cut to proficiency than the beginner who ignores these fixed conditions.
Without designing to be disrespectful on the one hand or unduly eulogistic on the other, we will call the practice system apart from theory the rule of thumb system, and the mathematical system allied with practice the Gray system.
What, then, is the rule of thumb system? It is the system of gradually finding things out by experience. A professional player, after dealing with millions upon millions of groupings of the balls finds such groupings coming up in the fulness of time as old friends. He remembers that he used to deal with these groupings wrongly, but he practised himself into the right method of treatment and he now does the right thing without hesitation and instinctively.
He is really employing theory every day of his life and in every minute of his play, only he does not know it. His less than full ball contacts are, to him, three-quarter ball, half-ball, quarter-ball and thin ball, and the intermediate contacts he may call a thick three-quarter, a thick half, a fine half, and a fine quarter. But instead of starting his billiards upon the certain and sure mathematical basis as regards contacts that the three-quarter ball contact takes place an eighth of an inch from the centre of the object ball, that the aim for this contact is a quarter of an inch from the centre, that the lesser contacts and aims are in precisely equal gradation and that every stroke (other than full) on the billiard table is to be made with one or other of these eight successive contacts and aims, he prefers to gradually find everything out—chiefly by noting and memorizing errors and successes—as he goes along.
Now turn we to the Gray way, which may also be termed the student way. The follower of this method need not even disdain the use of a piece of tailor's chalk any more than Gray himself does. And be it noted that, in his case the proficiency that is supposed to be a lifetime's work has came in less than five years, and on top of a broken cue arm.
In the making of a billiard break there are three components. There is the striker, there are the cue and balls, and there is the table. Two of these three components represent fixed conditions as regards any given table; the only uncertain factor is the striker.
It was, doubtless, recognition of this circumstance that impelled Gray's father to put his son first to cue practice without a ball and then, for a considerable time, to practice with one ball only. Realizing that two of the three essential components in billiards are mechanisms, the only thing remaining to be done was to make the third component, i.e., the striker, a mechanism also. The cue must be swung on a horizontal plane in a straight line and must represent in its driving force its own weight of one pound or thereabouts, no more and no less. "No gripping, no forcing," would, we may be sure, be Gray, senior's, incessant injunction in these initial stages. "Let the cue do its own work, in its own way, unaided and unhampered, evenly-actuated by the perpendicularly-swinging forearm, terminating in an open sling formed by the looped fingers and guided in its straight course, parallel alike with bed and side of table, over a firm bridge hand, aligned with chin, elbow, and middle of right foot."
All this is done before a ball is touched. It is done with monotonous uniformity throughout the opening weeks of what is destined to be, from the outset, a serious scientific and mechanical study, which will leave so little to ultimate chance that, within five short years, this youth of fourteen will be found playing with such hair's-breadth exactness that an object ball struck with his own ball will return from a fourteen-feet run hundreds of times in succession with scarcely the variation of an inch in direction or of a fractional part of an ounce in strength.
And if—the third partner in the mechanism becoming for one fleeting instant only a boy again—essential direction or strength be slightly lost, what then? The eye of the striker instantly lights upon the exact spot upon the top cushion where the object ball in its next run must strike and simultaneously the exact line that the cue must follow in its next projection and the precise strength with which it must be swung, are decided and known—known as certainly and as fixedly as are the alignment and swing for any simple stroke upon the table. For the man is once more a mechanism, and, neither underdoing nor overdoing, in any slightest particular, what the mechanical requirements of the case demand, produces results precisely akin to what would also be produced if, in lieu of the man element in the third of the essential components that have been referred to, had been substituted an actual mechanism, in the shape of an accurately-aligned and spring-actuated cue on the lines of a piston-rod.
Therefore we think we are justified in claiming that the real lesson of the Gray success is its vindication of fixed-law theory, worked out in practice on the billiard table, as distinguished from individual conclusions evolved through the medium of practice. In the one case all strokes brought off and effects produced upon the table are regarded as coming under a few easily-demonstrable scientific and theoretic groupings; in the other case the multitudinous different "shots" are regarded as things that have to be individually learned and memorized. Professionals have time to do this; amateurs have not. And what amateurs— and especially those just beginning the study of the game, are asked by us chiefly to remember is: (1) that any stroke on the billiard table is to be obtained with one of nine clearly-defined aims, (2) that these aims progress from the centre of the object ball outwards by (as nearly as possible) quarter-inch gradations; and (3) that each aim, after the central one, must be exactly twice as far from the centre as is the part of the object ball that needs to be struck.