BOY CHAMPIONS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 45, 30 March 1914, Page 3

BOY CHAMPIONS.

OF THE GREEN CLOTH. Billiards, as played to-day, is an eternal monument of muscular skill, a perpetual and increasing miracle of solid trigonometry in the service of the human eye. That it should be so is the achievement of just a century, and the credit is due to that combination of keenness among players and correspond-' ing enterprise among manufacturers that has done so much for all our great, games (writes A. E. Crawley in- the "Daily Mail"). The man who watches Gray and Newman this week, or any of their confreres in a " noble profession'' is watching artists who interpret the game for him as actors interpret life. Billiards, too, is a section of life, the "scientific instrument section" of the great engineering emporium of the universe. What are these two boys of brilliance doing?; Their combined years do not total fortyfour. Like the specialised workers in "The First Men of the Moon," each has been "bent" (if not "bottled") to billiards from infancy. Fact and fiction here combine in a lesson for our educationists. Newman is twenty; at the age of nine he beat Mr Sydenham Dixon, who obligingly allowed the child the chance of winning his spurs. At the same age he had an exciting tussle with Mr Stephens, another fine player, who won by two or there points. The child's enthusiasm during this match took the hallucinatory form of believing he was playing Stevenson for the Championship! Of such stuff are made both champions and dreams. Newiftan has an old and a\big head; a long chin and humorous face. He caresses the balls with ,a wise and elderly smile on his lips, and the little finger of his cuehand is extended in old-fashioned respectfulness. Gray •is a grave . and serious boy; he feels the weight of the world, but a conscientious regard for duty stiffens his back like a moral poker. He is an embodiment of the importance of being earnest.

A SUPER-MACHINE. At the present stage of the match all the young "Australian's character, as well as skill, is being called upon. Newman 's start, a big one, is becoming more and more difficult to overhaul. To do this in the final stage of the game is not beyond Gray's possibilities, but it would be a miracle. Gray, I take it, has something al>out him of the fair Norman type; that should mean great fighting capacity. He has a fighter's mouth. In Newman's humorous face there is a touch of melancholy. In contrast to Gray, the young Londoner is surely Celtic, and it is the broad-headed, short-statured Celts who have waiting power and caim; they see life (and billiards) steadily and see it whole. The excitable Celt of popular literature is, of course, not the real thing. In history, by the way, it is the Celts who have swallowed up the Normans. Neither boy is physically large; they represent a refined, artistic type of man. But, withal, their business in this game is to be, if artists, as mechanical artists as possible; for it is only mechanical accuracy that can score sufficiently for great billiards. The word "mechanical" is to many as a red rag to a bull; I confess I like the word. Man is none the worse for being a machine; he is, of course, the super-machine. But to realise what these two young geniuses (they are that, as geniuses go) are doing one needs something more than the proposition that they are playing the most perfect of human games, the Absolute Ball Game. The execution and the implements of 1 billiards have been so finely developed that the game possesses a permanent paradox. The aim of the player in any game is to score. In billiards the royal road to scoring is by the repeated stroke; close or nursery cannons, spot or top-of-the-table game are cases which have been differentiated by the laws. The skill and patience of great players have been such that, given the right starting position, a certain stroke could be repeated ad libitum. In making one stroke the player makes sure of another by leaving the balls in position for it. Compare Gray and an ordinary player executing a middle-pocket loser. The ordinary player anxiously Witches his own ball as it travels to the pocket;-' Gray looks only at the object-ball, for its position is the key to the break. BREAK Of 1 . NEARLY 250,000.

The history of billiards is really one of great strokes. The first champion, Carr, 1825, and the second, Kentfield, played the "feather-stroke," a losing hazard which hardly moved the object ball. They also played the "spot."

When Peall made 10,000 and more by the latter stroke it "Was barred officially, as the feather-stroke had been officially. John Roberts developed a push-stroke for nursery cannons; this was barred, but he was equally good without it. Three ( barred strokes are curiosities: Taylor, from the two balls jammed in tie pocket, scored 1458. Ives's anchorstroke was the same, with the balls not quite tight. Lovejoy discovered a position from; which kiss-cknnons could be made indefinitely. From this Reece made an astounding break of nearly 250,000. So, when we ask what young Gray and Newman are doing, we should remember what they are not allowed to do. To execute ten deliberately conceived consecutive strokes at billiards is no mean feat for a man who has made no special study of the game, but relies on native capacity of hand and eyes. Gray startled the world by developing the staple repeating stroke of the man in the street, the middle pocket loser, to the nth power. Far more difficult than the spot—it is a losing hazard, and ,the . at longer range—the stroke fias . infinite varieties and has to be supplemented by '' long'' losers and regained by iriany a makeshift. It looks easy, but it is difficult; the ball, in order to gain a central position has to be struck more than half-ball. Gray's record with this is 2196 unfinished. The stro'ke is proverbially the "backbone" of the game. Should the length of a spine be limited?

Newman is a beautiful and finished all-round player—there seems to be no stroke and no department in which he is not an artist—but, like Stevenson and others, since the barring of the spot, his scoring chiefly depends on the top-of-the-table game. There is this irony about it—that it is practically the old spot-stroke "writ large"; for its essence is to make little cannons in the neighbourhood of the spot, then pocket the red, and repeat, the balls being left for another close cannon. Actually this is an easier method than Gray's, but it has not yet been developed into 30 prolific a scorer. Which is the better? Is either destined to be barred in any way? Is it not essential in billiards, as in other games, to have '' runs'' of similar movements," linked together by all-round play?