Sport II
Potter's art
Benny Green
He did his work with the greatest ease; never took more pains than was necessary; while others were fagging themselves to death, was as cool and collected as if he had just entered the court. His style of play was as remarkable as his execution. He had no affectation, no trifling. He did not throw away the game to show off an attitude, or try an experiment, and as he never flung away the game through carelessness and conceit, he never gave it up through laziness or want of heart.
When Hazlitt composed those obsequies he was thinking of Cavanagh, the great Fives player, but he would have seen no incongruity in applying them also to Joe Davis, the only games player of this century who resigned from the sport he had so completely mastered because there was no longer any degree of uncertainty in the outcome of the matches in which he participated. When he relinquished his World Professional Snooker Championship in 1946, the competition, which had then been in existence for twenty years, had known no other winner. He was World Professional Billiards Champion from 1928 to 1933, and United Kingdom Champion from 1927 to 1947. at which point he stepped down in an
attempt to keep the competition alive. He made 687 century breaks at Snooker and in 1955 made a break of 147, the highest possible under the rules of the game. Davis, who was born in 1901, grew up in the backwash of Herbert Spencer's idiotic pronouncement that a proficiency at billiards is a sign of a misspent youth. Although the remark ranks as one of the great philosophic blunders of the nineteenth century, a great many young sparks like Davis found themselves obliged to live it down, and indeed carried the insult through life with them; in describing W.J. Peall, one of the lions of the 1890s, Davis writes that 'he ran a very profitable pub in Streatham, which he sold and then bought back again, and had a financial interest 1113 couple of cinemas. He lived for years in Brighton, where he died, having clearly not misspent his youth, at the age of ninetyseven'.
By the time Davis was moving into championship class, in the early 1920s, billiards had already won a degree of respectability, partly through the patronage of eitinent men like A.J. Balfour, who would call out at Thurston's to the great Willie Smith, 'How did you play that shot, Smith? Balfour's devotion to the game was part aa long tradition. 'Let it alone, let's to billiards', implored Cleopatra without specifying what it was she wished to let alone; Locke refers to the game in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding; so does Spenser in his poetry; Bernard Shaw describes a country house game in one of his novels; Mozart and George Gershwin were two musicians who found that the passage of the balls across the cloth expedited the process of composition. But the true patron saints of the game are neither Shakespeare nor Spenser nor Shaw, but Pythagoras and Euclid, who would have seen instantly that artists like Davis had dedicated their lives to the exclusion of almost everything else, to velocities, trajectories, angles and deccelerations.
The casual reader may question whether a prosaic professional like Joe Davis was half-aware of the philosophic overtones of the two games to which he devoted his energies. The answer is that Davis was not a prosaic professional but a subtle and tireless student of the green baize in all its aspects. In confirming the speculative theory that snooker evolved in the Officers' mess at Jubblepore in 1875, he refutes Lord Kitchener by quoting Compton Mackenzie and Field Marshal Lord Birdwood, and the same thorough research characterises his approach to the game past and present. AnY doubt that he perceived his own role in an enriching sporting melodrama is dispelled by his response to the ambience of Thur ston's Billiard Hall in Leicester Square, which had begun its career in the same year as Davis, the consummating creative act by a family which had been involved in the game since the eighteenth century. It was the Thurstons who had scrapped oak beds in favour of slate, the Thurstons who aban
doned felt cushions in favour of rubber ones, the Thurstons who drew up the first set of codified billiard rules. And, much to the point of Joe Davis's life, it was the Thurstons who in 1901 opened the billiard emporium which for the next forty years was to stand as a symbol of the game itself. J. P. W. Mallalieu has described Thurston's as 'a sunlit clearing in the jungle'; J. B. Priestley likened it to the Isle of Innisfree; Davis went much further: The match hall itself was like a miniature House of Commons debiting chamber or the smoking room of a venerable London Club — all oak panelling and plush seats. But unlike the Commons it was also remarkable for its ecclesiastical hush. During a game the lighting of a cigar or Pipe, though almost a continuous process among the spectators, could be achieved only by the smoker curling up in an agonised ball. Behind the thickly curtained windows players and spectators alike were cut off from the bustle and noise of the world in a silent oasis.
It is interesting to measure the warmth of this response against the prose of Davis's Most famous rival, the Australian billiards virtuoso Walter Lindrum. Davis's matches With Lindrum elevated a dying game to the headlines, especially when Lindrum took the championship home with him, the first time it had ever left Britain. It remains there to this day, deader even than Lindrum, who sat on it so heavily once he had acquired it that it has never shown any signs of life since.
Shortly before he won the title Lindrum Published one of those Howto-IvIake-a-Four-Figure-Break books. In it he defined the object of the exercise as 'reducing your opponent to a species of Oblivion'. Davis in contrast seemed to have developed an affection not just for billiards but also for the lore of snooker — 'the tomato game', as the eccentric Tom Reece dismissed it — which transcended even his Will to win. His autobiography echoes less With the kiss of the balls than with the laughter of those who despatched them. He revels particularly in the feud between Reece and Melbourne Inman, a feud so fundamental that Reece, who once took five weeks over one break of half a million, Persisted in carrying it out into the world at large. Once, after Inman had won the British Championship, Reece attended the presentation ceremony to watch Lord Alverston hand over the trophy. Earlier that week this lordship had sentenced Crippen to death, a conjunction of events which inspired Reece to spring up in midCeremony shouting, 'If you knew as much as I do about Inman, you would have given Crippen the cup and sentenced Inman to death'. One night in 1940 Thurston's was destroyed by a bomb, and on the morning after the raid Reece arrived, surveyed the rubble and said, 'It looks as if Inman was Playing here last night'.
What Davis was too modest to add was that men like Reece and Inman were never in his class as performers; of Davis more than any other contemporary player of games it could be said that he aspired to perfection and attained it. Whether it was worth attaining is a question for the individual conscience, but Hazlitt once addressed the question to himself and decided that have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer of the age'. And to those who still doubted, he made the following observation, one which is always worth keeping in mind when a great virtuoso like Joe Davis vanishes:
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