Green shades
Benny Green
The Breaks Came My Way Joe Davis (W. H. Allen 0.95)
Everybody from Mozart to George Gershwin, from beautiful Cleopatra to Pretty Fanny Balfour succumbed to it, and a current television series called Pot Black devoted to it is perhaps artistically the most perfect of programmes. I am unsure whether any physician has ever been sensible enough to prescribe a course of billiards to knit the ravelled sleeve of care, but certainly one of the Bourbon kings used to play regularly with his physician, a gentleman who displayed the customary ethics of his profession by contriving to lose as frequently as possible. Billiards, and its bohemian relation, snooker, are moral games because the Pythagorean principles on which technique is founded are not to be unbalanced by a-kick on the shins or the
invasion of the playing area by mentally deficient enthusiasts Now the great peril of books like Davis's, which tell of the progress of a games player, is statistical surfeit. Unless the writer is careful, before long the text is dropsical with numbers and the reader finds himself snoring peacefully. Davis, of course. cannot, avoid the obligation to tell of breaks of a thousand, a century of centuries at snooker and so on, but he has contrived to redeem his book by grasping a very simple proposition, which cannot, I suppose, be all that siniple after all when you come to think how many champions-turned-authors overlook it. This truth is that no matter how important the outcome of a sporting contest may be, posterity is less interested in points and goals and averages, than in the quiddity of the men making the points and goals and averages. In this regard Davis's conduct is exemplary. Several times in his story he raises a laugh, which is very much more than can be said for a great many professional humorists; even better, Davis has a suspicion that there exists in the world such a thing as character, and having conceived his suspicion, hunts the evidence down with some success.
I suppose the golden age for gladiators like Joe Davis was the period between the wars, when the great challenge matches were reported in the evening papers as fulsomely as a cup final. As a schoolboy obsessed with sport of all kinds, including those I didn't understand, I became fascinated by the litany of green baize names, Davis, Newman, Lindrum, Inman, Smith, and tried to fit personalities to the names, and to the photographs which frequently appeared, of waistcoated, shirt-sleeved men wielding what looked like imitation pikes. It is this curiosity about the great players which Davis gratifies, and if there is a section of the text which deserves a place in the sporting anthologies, it is the one describing the rivalry between Melbourne Inman and Tom Reece. Reece was the rebel who once made a billiards break of half a million just to prove the legislators wrong.
The Reece-Inman feud which, so far from being a promoter's gimmick, was fed by a genuine mutual distaste, reached its apogee with the famous exchanges in the 1910 championship. Having beaten Reece in the semi-finals. Inman turned up for the final, only to discover Reece sitting in the audience. Inman won, and when he stepped up to receive the trophy from Lord Alverston, who, that very week had sentenced Crippen to death. Reece stood up and shouted, very loudly, 'Excuse me, my lord, but if you knew as much as I do about Inman, you would have given Crippen the cup and sentenced Inman to death'. Davis's reminiscences are scattered with anecdotes of this kind; it makes a change to read a book about professional sport which combines modesty with humour, to say nothing of an eye for quirks of character. But the publishers should be hanged, drawn and quartered for not providing an index.
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