Billiards might easily be made into a good game. At present it is too easy. At least, it is too easy for the expert, and too difficult for me. Whenever you hear it said of any game that somebody plays it" with mathematical accuracy,"you may be sure that there is something radically wrong. Nobody ought to be able to bring mathematics into any game.
That is what is ruining golf. When I saw Mr. Abe Mitchell chalking the face of his brassie with green chalk the other day in a final, I felt that I had been present at the beginning of the decline and fall of golf. Even now I don't know what he did it for, but I didn't like the look of it; I am sure that arithmetic came in somehow.
After all, we ought to respect the intentions of the people who started these games, and billiards was never intended to be a scientific pursuit. The word cue is desired from an old French word meaning a stick with a curved end. You didn't know that. Nor did I till about ten minutes ago. But that is why some of these hotel cues have such a curious shape, and that is what makes it so ridiculous for people to complain about them. I take it they are simply historic survivals from the time when Louis XV., who, as you know, was an enthusiastic player, used to have 100-up on a Louis XIV. dining-table with the members of the Court.
As a matter of fact, though, I believe he used a flat-headed mace, and that, I suppose, was much the same as that jolly club which is kept in every billiard-room, but nobody dares to use. The cue, as we know it, didn't appear till the beginning of the nineteenth century, and even then it had no leathern tip. But it was the use of chalk, I read, making possible the side-stroke, which "caused a revolution in the science of billiards." That is why I am so worried about Abe Mitchell. I don't want the use of chalk to cause a revolution in the science of golf. I don't want any game to be a "science." So let us do away with the straight cues, and the leathern tips, and the chalk, and the slate beds, and the india-rubber cushions, and let us have a nice, varied game with flat-headed maces on sloping tables of flock and list (whatever they are), so that George Gray and I can start level. But I dare say he wouldn't play. That will show you what a state the game is in.—(Extract from a bright and humorous article on "Billiards," by A. P. Herbert, in The Sphere.)