Equality snookered: or, fear of female success

Press, 1 June 1981, Page 10

Equality snookered: or, fear of female success

By

CHRIS TIGHE,

“Sunday Times,” London

Vera Selby's idea of a good night out is an evening in a working men's club, fighting it out with the lads over the snooker table.

Although Vera, a 51-year-old lecturer in design and textiles, started playing only 13 years ago, her record is impressive: British Ladies’ Snooker Champion five times, British Ladies’ Billiard Champion eight times, and ex-World Ladies’ Champion. She’s now in the Isle of .Wight, fighting to regain the World Championship title, and in the last fey; weeks she has become the first woman ever to referee snooker tournaments among top professionals, including all the game's leading male players. Most people react well to her success and her friendly, outgoing manner, which is why she has just been awarded Newcastle . City Sports Council’s Personality of the Year title.

To those recently convertedto the game by its increasing television exposure, the idea of a woman playing or refereeing probably sounds inoffensive.

Yet the distinction of being the only female league player among hundreds of men in the North East brings its own problems. In many local clubs, her display of talent is not welcome.

As her success has grown, so has the number of clubs which bar her simply bcause she is female.

During this season, she has been banned from 19 of the 60 clubs in the Newcastle and Gateshead. League in which she plays regularly as a team member for the Gateshead British Rail Staff Association Club. At the start of each season. she is sent a list of clubs which will forbid her access to their snooker tables. It used to be 13 — the better she gets, the higher it rises. In theory, she is barred where snooker tables are in the men-only public bar, which women are strictly forbidden to enter. In prac-

tice, the refusal to admit her boils down to tradition and fear.

“The men feel they are going to be deprived of a room to which they have a privilege,” says Gordon Leslie, the secretary of Heaton Meadowfield Social Club in Newcastle, which is currently barring her from its snooker table, although it is not in the men-only bar but in an adjoining room. “What they are frightened of is that it might snowball and we would get members’ wives going into the room. It’s a very old-fashioned, traditional attitude.”

Vera, who is highly popular with her male fellow players, has pleaded to be allowed in just to play when her turn comes, to no avail. There is, of course, another reason why she is banned; she’s become so good she’s a threat.

“Some of them are prob-

ably afraid they could get ‘beat off’ a woman,"says Leslie. At least she knew what to expect when she began play-

ing. After just three weeks her coach, a well-respected veteran player, decided to try out her mettle among several hundred Northumberland miners in a village welfare hall; Nervous and embarrassed at the mocking reception she received she struggled on before a jeering crowd willing her to lose. “A load of rubbish, that one,” she heard one critic comment.

Out in the car park afterwards she burst into tears, then vowed to carry on.

The reason so few women play serious snooker is, she believes, lack of confidence.

“There’s this fear of going] in front of people. Girls and; women are more scared of] that than anything. It’s the idea of having to walk into a club with lots of men around and play a competitive game against them.” In an attempt to bringi more women into the game Vera has just become a national snooker coach, the first woman ever to do so.. She plans to run courses for' girls from the garage at; home in which she keeps her; practice table. i But vfhat are the compen-' sations for confronting the prejudice?

“After a hectic day you suddenly go into.an atmosphere almost like a church.' It’s quiet and there are lights on the green baize and the click of the balls.

"There’s a lovely space and the problem of "working out battles.”