The Styles of Newman and Falkiner

Newman handles a close cannon.

Tom Newman and Claude Falkiner are typical representatives of the art that conceals art in billiards. Both regard the game as a science, and give practical demonstrations of it as such in a way that is at once baffling and attractive to the onlooker. By each is practised the most refined form of billiard art—close cannon play —which represents the perfection of touch and cue contact, and top-of-the-table play which is akin to the weaving of an attractive pattern, and full of traps and pitfalls for the unwary.

Yet each is dissimilar in style, cue action, stance, and methods. To the aesthetic, Newman may appear ungainly at the table and in his gait around it, but one forgets all that when noting what he can do with three balls clustered around the top spot. His spot-end play is of a type peculiarly his own, but he can "hold" the ivories there longer than any other billiard player, and away from that area he can set up a sequence of strokes in a nonchalant sort of way which suggests the happy schoolboy without a care in the world.

Falkiner down on the stroke.

Falkiner is the antithesis of this. He is much more serious, at least he appears to be so, and his strokes do not appear to carry the same punch as Newman's. Falkiner's cue striking is less showy and aggressive, but it is delightfully easy and accurate, and probably he hits a truer ball than any of his confreres.

From him one gets the quintessence of refinement in play, and if not always so consistently effective as some, he gets much nearer to real billiard poetry in the course of an innings than any other wielder of the cue.