The green rectangular hell

by Bert van Manen

Don't you just love the sound that two new, quality, well-polished billiard balls make when they hit? It’s a natural, acoustic sound, not one of those ubiquitous digital bleeps that have soul nor character. Billiard balls at their best produce a cheerful PING, like two crystal champagne glasses at a party. Playing with balls like those, is like dancing to Gershwin music. Somehow, everything seems to weigh less and move nimbly; the billiard is a graceful and festive place. What happens there is civilized, and light, and beautiful.

That's a lot of yin. Here's the inevitable yang.

I recently played a match on an ultra-short table with cloth that had seen better days. Yes, you have to adapt. With thirty seasons of league play under my belt, I know better than to complain about the table. That's what losers do. So I am going to complain about the balls.

On this particular evening, no champagne glasses ever PING-ed when one ball hit another. It was more like the low-frequency THUD of two sumo-wrestler's grotesque bellies violently colliding. On some hits, the first ball tried to climb on top of the other one, as if it was trying to hump it. And mysteriously - as old, bad billiard balls do - they never bounced that inch off the last rail, but always clung to it. Twenty minutes into the match, I would not have been surprised to see that the table brand name had changed from "Verhoeven" to "Sisyphus". Their top-of-the-line M.C. Escher designed model of course, on which balls roll slightly uphill, regardless of the direction of your hit. The billiard was not a dancefloor that day, it was a little rectangular stage in a theater called hell. What happened on it was brutal, dark, and ugly.

On the first few days of the World Championships for National teams in Viersen (Germany) last week, the tables were new. The balls were new. The cloth was new. Everything shone like a dog's dick in the moonlight, it PING-ed, bounced, slid and rolled like a dream. So were the players in heaven? What about the averages? Believe it or not, they were not that high. Later in the tournament there were a few highlights, there was a well deserved win for the best team in the field (Belgium A) but overall the standard of play was nowhere near that of "Antalya", the recent World Cup tournament, where the notoriously short Platin tables had enabled no less than six matches over 3 average.

When are we, billiard players, ever happy? Too short, too long. Too new, too old. We amateurs only like tables when they are nice and neutral, totally predictable. The professional players are better equipped: they handle table length like rallye drivers handle oversteer and understeer. Their ability to deal with that problem is what sets them apart from average drivers (or cueists), so in a way, the problem is their livelyhood.

But that analogy works well for tables only. Balls are a different subject. No top player will ever prefer older balls to newer, or feel more confident with greasy balls over polished ones. It is possible to have cloth, slates and rubbers that are so new they present you with problems. It is not possible to have billiard balls that are too new, too good. Too clean? No way, as long as you know what cleaner you are using. Most cleaning products are fine, but some silicone-based sprays that will make balls roll artificially long for a while, are like the make-up on a tall and dark chick with an Adams-apple. Only go there if you like surprises.

Room owners and clubs hold on to their sets of balls too long. "They look allright, don't they?" Yes, they do. But the life is out of them. They do not bounce, they do not PING. They must go. A Ferrari on bad tyres means the owner has been penny-wise and pound-foolish. Your precious Verhoeven, Gabriels or Chevillote will do no better than the Ferrari, with old aramith rolling on it. Do yourself a favor: spend a hundred dollars every two years or so, and turn a little green rectangular hell back into a dancefloor.