After admiring the skilled manipulators of the cue for some time I lately decided to attempt myself some of the evolutions with the balls that come so easily to the gentlemen of professional renown. I found the easiest things very hard, and the hard ones quite impossible, except when the God of Chance was on my side and I did fine things by flukes. But I was not disheartened. Long ago, when class and college claimed me, I had acquired a little of the scientific spirit, and I knew that if the results achieved were surprising and erratic the mechanical laws of impact remained unchanged, and I should find my way to demonstrate them in the end.
Meanwhile the early experience was delightfully intriguing. There is nothing so exhilarating as an hour packed with surprises and all my early hours had this quality.
The cue had many awkward little ways of remaining an unmanageable length of wood when by even law of human expectation it ought to have become a magic wand. The balls had the very spirit of mischief in them the table rose up into unwonted self-assertion and refused to let my beautiful balls enter the pockets For a time I almost enjoyed the experience of never getting any nearer to success, but ultimately it became boring, and I sat me down to think.
After some cogitation I asked an ally of mine to play with the same implements upon the same table. He achieved success with the first shot, and I achieved enlightenment.
It was the human element that was causing the unscientific play. I was not trained to use the tools of the game I must get me a teacher.
The teacher being geographically out of reach, I turned to books and carried them off home with me. Jubilantly I settled myself down to read, prepared, if necessary, to give my days and my nights to the mastering of their lore, to the mastery of the physical details of position and action in billiards. Rut I was doomed to be bitterly disappointed, instead of being at the end I was but at the beginning of my troubles; the billiard authors were to plunge me from the brink into the depths of despair. For I found that they were totally unable to agree among themselves as to the way in which any single elementary thing ought to be done, that instead of union and a consensus of opinion there were chaos and contradiction, that they did not only differ in their estimates of the importance of things, but they flatly contradicted each other.
Thus, dealing with the position in making the stroke, one author save:—
"Be quite sure that at the moment of making the stroke no part of the body, arms or legs moves in the slightest degree except the right fore-arm, which swings at the elbow."
This command is Italicised to give it sufficient importance in the reader's mind, and I spent hours in observing it religiously until my second author told me that "For all ordinary winning and losing hazards the stroke should be made with a free forward sweep of the arm from the shoulder, and not merely from the elbow..."
and followed this up by —
"The stroke from the shoulder cannot be too much insisted on."
Putting aside this knotty point until I should have the opportunity of watching some first-class players, I turned to the holding of the cue, only to find that I had my choice between the following forms of action:—
"The cue should be taken in the hand with a gentle grasp The thumb and fingers should have a fair but firm and easy grasp."
and
"The cue must be hold loosely. The slightest tendency to gripping will be fatal."
I followed this up by consulting my guides as to the pose in which I ought to stand, and again found that my counsellors were not in agreement One says—
"The left leg is bent at the knee, but the right is kept perfectly straight and stiff"
And the other —
"The stoop should be made without awkwardness and without much bending of the knees,"
thus indicating that some slight bending of both knees is permissible.
In the matter of bending, one writer advises me to bring my chin as close as I can to the cue, another informs me that my head should be only slightly bent, and still another states that only when "strength" is required in the stroke should the body be lowered to a stooping position.
The making of the bridge is just as much a matter of dispute between those who seek to instruct me. One man tells me that the hand "Should be pressed and firmly fixed with the weight of the bridge arm thrown on the table and kept straight and rigid."
Another is just as confident in saying that:— "For all ordinary strokes the bridge should be easy and unforced; the hand not too hardly pressed on the table, and the fingers not too firmly set together."
In contradiction with the last clause of the above instruction I find four authors who tell me that the fingers of the bridge hand must lie apart with a space between each pair, and since they are all rigid-bridge men, I accept the spread fingers and the firm bridge upon the vote of the majority.
But in taking aim, such an easy method of solution is not possible. One professional tells me just to glance at the cue ball and then to fix my eye on the object ball and make my stroke. Another bids me strike with both balls in my eye; another to fix the object ball and then pay my last attention to the cue ball; and still another, to bring under my survey before striking as great a length of my cue as possible as well as the two balls. When I try to do all of these essential things at the same time I find that my ball is just as erratic as it was before I consulted any authors at all, and I am driven to wonder if there are as many right ways of playing billiards as there are players, or if, to test the worthiness of the aspirants to skill in this art, a special testing practice is in force, a practice of making the novice sift out for himself or herself the grains of wisdom from the bushels of chaff. In this latter event, of course, the fittest will survive, but if they are all like me in their experiences they will have a perilous pilgrimage.