It is very generally assumed that the billiard player must be caught young if he is to achieve any proficiency in the game. We are assured by the professionals that the future expert must be born in the billiard room and must begin to handle the cue before he is allowed to try his gums on solid nourishment. This view is emphatically endorsed by a study of the biographies of professional and billiard experts generally, a very large proportion of whom have been brought into close association with the game in their early teens, while there have been some who have handled a cue before they could count two figures to their age, or reach the table without a stool.
But before allowing the argument to be concluded on the side of youth we must remember the circumstances under which billiards is played. We have no statistics as to the age at which our leading amateurs took up the game and we cannot compare the actual periods of time spent by either class upon its mastery. But we do know in a general way that the amateur of position has probably not spent more than a twentieth part of the time spent by the professional upon his game and that quite a considerable number of good players have taken up the game in middle-life. Every day in club or private house or public room one can find the player of this type, enjoying his game, playing with skill and judgment, and breaking his record from time to time in a flutter of happy excitement. Such players give a good account of themselves among those who have played from youth in amateur circles. Indeed, there seems no reason why, when played for pleasure, the game should not be followed by all ages, from the school-boy and his sister to their grandparents.
Few of those who begin to play really late in life may reach the heights in either theory or practice, though there are some who do, but skill and pleasure, and the profitable employment of otherwise empty hours, are well within their reach. Pew games can offer so much to all ages, and most of us find this enough to entitle billiards to be named the king of indoor pastimes.
With the professional the circumstances differ materially. In his case it may be necessary that training should begin young, for at the present time the professional mastery of billiards is very much a matter of the number of years that can be spent in practice, and an early apprenticeship is a decided advantage to the player. His outlook is entirely different from that of the amateur. For him the game is a means of livelihood, play a purely business proposition. He must carve his way to mechanical exactness; he must perfect a break-making capacity which will equal or excel that of his competitors; he must play for results. Under these conditions an early beginning is desirable; a late beginning an undoubted handicap. But the facts carry with them no proof that the highest billiard skill can only be acquired by those who take up the practice of the game in childhood.
It is probable that this impression, like many others of the same class, grew up in the darker ages two or three generations ago. Some superstitions, which we are now engaged in disproving, then held firm hold on the average mind; one was that people were only teachable while they were young, being incapable of acquiring new knowledge or skill after they became adults; and another that it was unsuitable and improper for the elders to take any frivolous recreation. But now we have changed all this. The present age is the age of the ever-young. Like Peter Pan we are all refusing to grow old, we are refusing to have our energies caged, our minds dulled, our limbs denied healthful exercise.
We are claiming the right to be as young as we feel, and to do all those things of which we are capable and which contribute to our pleasure and profit.
And this rebellion has had its effects. It has proved that the mind is always open to new learning and to new knowledge and that the hand and eye can be trained to skill at any age while health remains. We need no longer regret that we did not learn this or that in youth, that we did not acquire accomplishments, or sports, or knowledge, for the royal road is open to us all the time. We may not wish to play football when we are sixty, or to ride in the Derby at three-score-and-ten, but we can choose our own sport and study from a world of wide variety, and at any age we may give ourselves to the fascination of the spinning spheres.
G.