With the World Snooker Championships in full swing, I am reminded that, despite my valiant attempts to mis-spend my youth in a similar manner to the professional snooker players, I would never be as successful at the sport as they are.
Successful snooker isn’t just about potting balls; it’s about having total control of the cue ball.
When you are playing snooker in your dad’s CIU Working Man’s Club and throwing 50ps into the light meter overhanging the slightly warped solitary snooker table, you literally cannot afford to be practising topspin, backspin, stun, screw, swerve or shots with right or left-hand side.
With the light meter allowing for 30 minutes of play, you simply didn’t have the time to play strategically or tactically or harbour any thoughts of safety play. Snookers were achieved by luck rather than conscious effort.
The rules for everyone who played on that table was to try and pot the easiest red ball and hope for the best you hadn’t snookered yourself on all the colours. Breaks of double figures were a rarity.
My personal best being 22 – consisting of brown, blue, pink and black – and they had been left near the pockets.
If your opponent had potted a long shot, the rules were you had to say “shot” and if they had accidentally put you in a snooker, you had to tap the table in appreciation of their wizardry and walk around the table a few times and pretend you knew exactly where on the cushions to hit the cue ball to get out of it.
You knew that if you decided to bear down and bridge and attempt to swerve the cue ball, it would end in shameful, pathetic embarrassment for yourself and invariably result in a foul and leave a hard chalk mark and deep indentation on the badly worn, stained baize cloth.
Despite the club having a basic rest and spider tools available, most people were just happy to roll their beer-bellies onto the table instead and hope for the best they could still reach and have the physical strength to play a shot – and often fail.
Given the time restrictions of the light, players would roll their fags beforehand or face the deep scorn of their opponent.
If you were down to the colours and the light meter ran out, you would always try and continue to play on and finish regardless because having no light at all never really hindered your game.
You would, however, hope that the officious Club Steward hadn’t noticed because they would always insist you played with the light on as 50p was helping towards run the clubs’ finances – whilst simultaneously pouring 3 pints of “daily allowance” free bitter for themselves as part of the perks of being the Club Steward.
On one occasion, the petty Club Steward did notice we were finishing our game without the light on and this led to an altercation with my dad, who ended up grabbing the steward by his throat.
I was called before the Club Committee the next day and was asked to tell my dad he had been barred for a fortnight because they were too scared to tell him themselves.
So was I.
Knowing their decision would just escalate matters, I just decided not to tell him and feign illness instead so as we didn’t have to go to the club for two weeks.
There would always be people in the club who had their own shop bought cue in a case. It was never tailor-made by John Parris or Peradon but the amount of self-importance this gave them was unbelievable.
Such was its astronomical value – around £20 – they’d happily keep it behind the bar and ask for their cue whenever they wanted to play. And to differentiate it from everyone else’s cue behind the bar, they had a little white sticker on the butt with “Steve’s cue” written in biro on it.
They’d make a great show of screwing it together in front of you, whilst telling you it’s 21 ounces and ideal for them as the 18-ounce cues are too light for them as you feign interest and internally fall asleep.
Even worse is that they’d have brought their own chalk – green not blue – and explain why that is better too in the same manner delusional people extol the properties and benefits of bottled water.
In reality, having their own cue and chalk didn’t make them better snooker players, in the same way as donning a QPR shirt doesn’t make me Stan Bowles and I could take any one of the obligatory 4 unbroken cues in the club’s 6 cue rack and have a 50/50 win ratio against them.
And boy, did they get miffed if I did beat them. They’d put it down to luck, the bad table or ask for a “best of 3” or “best of 5” to prove they were better.
Sometimes, they’d see me miss a couple of pots and say “Here, borrow my cue,” believing it to have magical powers on my game. In reality, they’d be no tangible improvement in either of our games and we’d be passing the “super-cue” between us every 30 seconds when our one ball breaks had come to a sad end.
We’d move the pointers on the wall scoreboard so incrementally slowly, it would be arguable they couldn’t move any quicker even with the use of time-lapse photography. Even the dogs playing snooker in the pictures on the walls around the table seemed to be having quicker games.
We didn’t have a “foul and a miss” rule. We either fouled or missed and given the time constraints of the light meter, we never bothered to pick up the cue ball and try and accurately relocate it and other balls to where we thought they were before the shot was taken. We just played on from where the balls had landed. It was practicalities.
And it was because of those practicalities that I enjoyed it.
50p in the light meter for half an hour was usually just about enough time for me, my dad and equally inept friends to finish a game.
We didn’t spend 10 minutes of a game locked in meticulous safety play. It was pretty much, “there’s a ball, try and pot it.” No one cared if they were any good or even if we won because we didn’t take it seriously.
The idea was to sink some pints and sink some snooker balls and have fun.
And that’s why you won’t be seeing me at The Crucible anytime soon.
Russ Writes 
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