The best professional teachers of billiards are not necessarily the most outstanding professional match players, and the converse of this is equally true. I have made a 200 break without having claimed to be a great professional player, yet I have taught more than three thousand persons—both men and women—to become players. On the other hand there are few great players who have been successful teachers. In the first place they do not care very much for the vocation, and in the second place there are few of them who fully appreciate its requirements. They know how to play and they show students of the game, if such come under their training, how they themselves play, but this is quite a different thing from imparting to learners a knowledge of the actual principles of the game.
I am now 62 years of age and have been associated with billiards all my life, but at a very early stage I decided that the teaching of billiards rather than the public exposition of it was my vocation, and that I was likely to make more money in this way. In earlier years I gave lessons at 7s. per lesson, and taught continuously from morning until night to earn £500 a year. Now my charge is one guinea per lesson, and learners anxious to improve their game may think it rather high. That is where they make a mistake, and it is part of the purpose of this article that the editor of The Billiard Player has asked me to write to show that this is so. First I will put it in this way: "Which can a billiards aspirant better afford to do—pay a guinea per lesson to be put into the right way at the outset, or expend untold hours in practising and playing in the wrong way? "To me it is lamentable to see potentially good amateurs who have utterly spoiled themselves in the making. They began by holding their cues wrongly, by delivering them wrongly, and by tackling positional problems wrongly. It is true that they sometimes make breaks, with which they appear to be highly satisfied, but if they had commenced on proper lines they would make much bigger breaks and would make them oftener.
For, after all, billiards is, so far as the execution of the different strokes is concerned, a purely mechanical process, and positional play, in its turn, follows certain set principles.
Other things being equal the same stroke should always be played in the same way, and when it is once learnt it is learnt for always.
Yet have I seen amateurs—hundreds of them—varying identical strokes in the most extraordinary fashion—sometimes plain central striking, sometimes side, sometimes top, sometimes stun, and all to no purpose, and to worse than no purpose. "Rotten!" says the player as he misses an easy stroke, and it is impossible not to agree with him.
It may be thought by some that I have agreed to the suggestion that I should write this article merely for a personal purpose.
It is nothing of the kind. I want to see more billiards played and better billiards, and all that I ask is that players—men or women—who want to play what is termed "a useful game," should put themselves at the outset in competent hands—mine or anyone else's—and thus obtain what will be to them a source of constant satisfaction long after they have forgotten what their initiation on right lines cost them.
This brings me to the second part of this article, for I have just mentioned ladies as potential billiard players. Many such have been under my tuition and I do not suppose that any of them regret it. But I must say at once that the billiard education of ladies must, to be successful, be proceeded with on different lines from those pursued in the case of men.
In physical formation women are different, and ordinarily they do not bring the cue so close to the required line of aim as men do. Perhaps, also, they are a little impatient about the nice adjustments and minute calculations that are essential to good and successful play.
But these and other matters could be dealt with if due facilities for the tuition of, and practice by, lady players were systematically provided, and until this is done women will never enter largely into the game as they do into almost all other pastimes, and billiards will be exactly in that proportion the loser.