Is Red Ball Play a One-Stroke Game?
The photograph of the hand-marks was taken between the two ironings of the cloth, and it will be noted that the right-hand pocket was especially favoured.
Writing recently to The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, H. W. Stevenson said:—"I notice a letter from Riso Levi in which he agrees with your reviewer that composition balls are easier to play with than ivory. This I flatly deny, and I have had more experience with both balls than any player living. True, there is not much difference with the record breaks, which are both to my credit, viz., 1,016 with Bonzolines and 994 with ivories, but for the modern game of billiards ivory is the easier. I am not taking into consideration any particular one-stroke play such as G. Gray played."
There are two points here raised, both of them extremely interesting, but the object of the present short article is to deal more particularly with the phrase"one - stroke" play as applied to the attack upon the red ball and its retention as far as possible in the central area below the middle pocket. Since Stevenson's letter was published some of the leading competitors in the amateur championship— Mr. J. Graham Symes notably—have made free and successful use of red ball play, and to that extent, therefore, the subject is topical.
There are two classes of red ball play, both of them legitimate and neither ridiculously easy. The one may be called the modern professional method and the other the average amateur method. The best professionals keep the red ball going until they can safely link it up again with the white. If the white has been lost in a pocket they may continue on the red a longer or a shorter time according to the state of the marking-board. Perhaps the very foremost amateurs may do the same thing, but the bulk of the amateur class would keep the red ball going as long as they could, largely irrespective of the position of the white and at the risk, sometimes, of an unintended and undesired collision with it.
Nor is even this class of play to be despised, and we are by no means sure that it deserves to have applied to it the somewhat derogatory term"one-stroke."How can a series of cue deliveries, which require, if perfect results are to be achieved, no fewer than seventeen different ball aims and contacts, to say nothing of varying cue contacts and strengths, be justly termed"one stroke."To fortify ourselves on this point we call to our aid a silent testimony unconsciously left by George Gray himself, for we are able to reproduce on this page a photograph that was taken of the table bed on which Gray, playing against Inman at the National Sporting Club on June 15, 1911, kept the red ball going during an entire session, while making a break of 1,105, and which serve to show that in a long red ball break from hand practically every inch of the D has to be occupied in its turn by the cue ball, and that every class of contact, from full to fine, has to be made with the object ball.