Low life
Going to pot
Jeffrey Bernard
I feel tremendously saddened by the disgusting and dangerous epidemic that is sweeping the country and which has struck no fewer than nine out of ten pubs in my own part of the world. I say disgusting since it doesn't even have to be compared to snooker for anyone to see what a silly and easy game it is, and I call it dangerous since it's turning pubs, the havens of the idle, thirsty, homeless and hopeless, into so many ghastly amusement arcades. No intelligent man was ever amused in an amusement arcade, but then I suppose no man ever quenched his thirst in a pub. However, pubs have taken another step down the drain with the introduction of pool and now every yob thinks he's a budding Joe Davis.What pool players should do is to tune in to Pot Black on BBC television and remind themselves just how awful they are.
The Benson and Hedges final between the South African champion, Perrie Mans, and our own Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, televised by ITV recently, reeked of class and was a wonderful glimpse of the two best-known schools of snooker brought together. (I mention this match in the cer tain knowledge that my colleague Richard Ingrams wouldn't have seen it and, anyway, must find Pot Black an absolute mystery, depending as he does on a black and white set.) The two schools as I call them are the lower middle-class pro who's made it something almost of a gentleman's game, in this instance represented by Perrie Mans; and the 'misspent youth' school personified by Higgins.
Higgins has a night-club complexion, chain-smokes and looks as though he lives out of a suitcase and suffers the occasional drink to be bought for him by his fans. As a match wears on he removes his bow tie, smokes even more and agitatedly sips whatever drink has been provided. He begins to look slightly dishevelled but still cocky and perhaps a bit like Byron gone wrong. If you remember the billiard halls of twenty years and more ago, you'll have seen his like. But you won't have seen any that play like him.
Perrie Mans is dead respectable. He is of the same mould as Fred Davis or John Spencer or Ray Reardon. There's a painstaking coiffure with a hint of brilliantine, the horrible Paisley waistcoat that hints at raciness and, at home, what must be a wardrobe-full of frilly dress shirts as worn by a man who spends his life eating Chicken Maryland at 'functions'. He is pure Rotarian down to his shooting cuffs. He overflows with decorum. He is also mustard and far too hot for most. He and Higgins played 12 frames in earnest silence, Mans winning 8-4, and Higgins went inexplicably to pieces at the death. I wish pool players in pubs would play in such silence and I suppose they would if, like those two, they were playing for £1,500.
It's sad that in the rich and Royal County of Berkshire I haven't been able to find anyone with a full-size table. I watch the likes of Higgins and then morosely play the odd game of pool in the pub to kill the conversation. Usually, we make it what we call 'interesting' by playing for a pound a game. It isn't particularly interesting, but last week, I had the game that was the exception. I was challenged by an Irish racing man who is what's called a character. He is known as a character since he was once attacked by three Hell's Angels outside a pub in Dublin. He knocked two of them out, picked up a motorbike and threw it at the other, and then drove over all three of them in his car. His heart and biceps are in the right places and he challenged me to a game for £100. Just as I was rejecting his offer on purely financial grounds, a racehorse trainer came to my rescue and said he'd put up £50 of it. That seemed fractionally less like madness and so we began to play. I must say I played in unusual silence and gave a very amateurish sigh of relief when I finally did manage to pot the black. I don't think I could have managed it if he hadn't been a little drunk but, like the Duke of Wellington, I honestly don't think I could have done it if I hadn't been there.
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