SNOOKER

EXHIBITION MATCHES

Snooker Exhibiton Matches en español

I have had a few enquiries from readers about the meaning of the term ‘exhibition match’ which appears in some of our snooker articles.

These matches could have been called ‘friendly’ matches, as in football, but the word ‘exhibition’ came into use at a time when snooker was a fairly new invention and had to be demonstrated and explained to audiences who only knew billiards.

John Pulman (12-12-23 to 12-25-98) World Champion for most

of the sixties and a great favorite in exhibition matches

The term was common in billiards also, but I think it tended to denote that the star player – usually Walter Lindrum, Joe Davis or Willie Smith  - was playing another professional player who was not in the same class and would not produce serious opposition.

In the 1920s, as Britain recovered from the First World War, a prospective audience for snooker could only be found in the large billiard rooms or public halls where men went to watch billiards.

Women weren’t allowed into many billiard rooms until the 1970s and although they could enter a public hall for various events, it was very unlikely that any woman would make the effort to watch billiards.

The first roots of snooker’s growth came at the end of billiards matches when the two professional players would end the session with a frame of ‘the new game’, snooker.

The players would talk, give explanations, make jokes and banter in this environment and the game often seemed trivial: if golf is a complicated way of going for a walk, as the old saying goes, then snooker seemed like a complicated way of having a conversation.

In my embittered opinion these talkative roots bred a whole army of low level amateur players who can’t play the game without giving a running commentary on every shot.

According to my old friend the late Sydney Lee, who was a young professional billiards player in that era, billiards was played in respectful silence and was always considered to be the ‘proper’ game. In fact, some of the old billiards pros would not even play snooker as they considered it a vulgar upstart.

SYDNEY LEE

Snooker gradually became popular among men (no women players in those days) but it didn’t move out of the smoky billiard halls until, Joe Davis ‘the father of professional snooker’ who had started the world professional snooker championship in 1927, took it on to the stage of variety (vaudeville) theaters.

Joe Davis was never short of ideas to promote himself and the game; he was able to present his ‘act’ among the singers, comedians, hypnotists and dancing dogs by arranging a large mirror at an angle over the table on the stage so that the audience could see what he was doing.

This was a big step forward – presenting snooker to men and women who had never seen the inside of a billiard hall. It brought the game, and the great man, to national attention and, as Joe Davis was the best snooker player in the world, this gave the British something to be excited about in a gray and dreary era

JOE DAVIS, the founding father

However, the real home of the exhibition match was the local Working Men’s Club or Conservative Club. These were typically British institutions designed to provide low-cost leisure facilities for the ordinary man.

The British Legion, the Labour party, the miners, the armed services and the Liberal party all had similar clubs but the general division was on class lines: Conservatives and Liberals for the middle class, the rest for the working man.

All of these clubs were ‘members only’ and although the membership fee was modest, it was difficult to obtain membership if you didn’t have some connection with the club.

The typical workers’ club member did not have much in common with those who frequented Conservative clubs. What they did have in common was billiards – all of these clubs had a billiards table. Some had two or three tables, but this wasn’t usual.

Clubs that had enough interest, or members, had always booked professional players for an evening, usually two well-known professionals who played each other, splitting the fee 60% - 40%.

As amateur standards improved it became customary for the professionals to play a frame of snooker against the local champion.

This was easier to do in snooker as a frame might last only twenty minutes, which was hardly enough time for the local man to make any impact in billiards.

It wasn’t expensive for a successful club to present a snooker exhibition. These clubs were non-profit making bodies that thrived by having a bar selling drinks at very low subsidized prices. Besides which, a snooker exhibition was easier to arrange than a singer and band or comedian – and sometimes less contentious for the organizing committee.

The club sold tickets for the match at a modest price to cover the fees of the players and referee; a billiards and snooker exhibition provided an evening of educational, sporting fun. This fun was brought to an end by the outbreak of World War Two and snooker did not revive in any significant way for twenty years.

After the war, Joe Davis could still make a good living through exhibitions (he retired from championship play after winning the world title for the fifteenth time in 1946), but he was a household name by that time.

All the other professional players had to struggle and, as the World Championship was played on a challenge basis, opportunities were few and progress was slow.

A ‘challenge basis’ meant that an individual player had to become distinguished enough and successful enough – somehow – to issue a direct challenge to the reigning champion for a single match for the title, always played over several days.

The challenger had to fulfill conditions laid down by the champion, about where the match would be played, how long it would last, who would pay to promote it, and how the takings or prize money were to be shared.

For new young players like Rex Williams and John Pulman, who came from comparatively comfortable backgrounds, all this was difficult enough; for a working class amateur player of the first rank who didn’t even own a formal dress suit, like Dickie Laws of London, it was impossible.

Rex Williams once gave me a pretty good explanation of the near-death of snooker in the fifties and sixties:

“First, we had the war, say six years; then everyone had to work and recover from the war, so that was the fifties, another ten years. Then television arrived and everybody wanted to stay at home and watch television, so we had about twenty years and by the early sixties even the club exhibition match had virtually died.”

Clive Everton, editor of Snooker Scene and doyen of snooker journalists, gave a bleak picture of what life was like for a top professional in the sixties: Fred Davis was a former world champion and he was a famous player.  He was booked to play an exhibition match on the other side of England and after driving for hours through bad English weather he arrived at the club to find an audience of nine or ten people. After that experience Fred put his cue in storage for years.

In the 1960s we could see snooker on television – Joe Davis for 25 minutes at lunchtime on a Saturday, after the Joe Loss Orchestra from Hammersmith Palais, London and before the horse racing. This, of course, was in black and white, which is not a good way to watch snooker, the only sport that relies on color in its scoring system.

But it encouraged a little more action at the grass roots level. Many public billiard halls (places with 7 to 20 tables that never had any connection with professional exhibitions) were full of players like me.

Throughout the sixties my leisure hours were 3pm until 6pm and at that time of day I could always find a table available in a local hall in any part of the country. But if I went into any hall after 7pm the tables would usually be occupied and there would be a waiting list. So there had been some recovery, at least at the Joe Public level.

Players in public billiard halls were not usually members of Working Men’s or Conservative Clubs (the cultures were completely different) and I don’t know if they would have paid to see a professional player in action; perhaps not.

But as far as I was aware, the opportunity never arose: sometimes we could learn from the local paper that, for example, Fred Davis and John Pulman were in town to play at a certain club. But in the late 1960s it would be nearly impossible to get in to see the match – the typical club had only 80 – 150 seats for spectators and it would be ‘sold out’. At this modest and obscure level the exhibition match was a ‘hot ticket’ event.

So there were plenty of playing aficionados on one hand and substantial numbers of paying spectators on the other. Could they be combined to form a paying audience? Who knew?

But, as I’ve said somewhere before, there was a feeling that everything was bubbling below the surface; even the national newspapers were giving the world championship a few column inches as the 1960s ended.

Then, one day in 1970, BBC Television showed a short film of a player from Northern Ireland who would transform the exhibition circuit and propel the world of championship snooker into a new dimension. Alex Higgins had arrived.

There were two other BIG new fish in the pool by this time: Ray Reardon of Wales and John Spencer of England. When Alex won the world championship in 1972 these two had each won the world professional title, Reardon in 1970 and Spencer in 1969 and 1971.

After 1972 an exhibition match featuring any two of these three stars was too big for many clubs to handle and the modern age of the exhibition match in a library theatre, conference center or local arena was born.

As the Fred Davis experience (above) indicates, smaller clubs could book a single player and this became a big trend in the eighties and nineties because of economic circumstances.

This was often a different kind of show, involving more humor and trick shots. The great Irishman Jackie Rae was not a strong contender in a championship but he made a very good living for many years with his comedy act.  However, he was also a very skilful player, with a great range of trick shots, and he was highly appreciated in the clubs.

Jackie Rae set the pattern for other players like John Virgo, Dennis Taylor and Terry Griffiths. Ray Reardon was a great raconteur and although his solo exhibitions were quite serious, he could tell funny stories while he played, rather in the manner of Jack Benny – although Jack Benny couldn’t play snooker.

Ah, memories: I have just found this image on Patsy Fagan's website*: an example of a big invitation tournament in Wembley, London in 1977 presented by the famous boxing promoter Mike Barrett.

I wrote the program for it, but I didn't design this striking cover.

Patsy Fagan won the tournament.

John Spencer was the world Professional Champion at the time.

*www.patsyfagan.com

In the seventies the solo exhibition match by a professional player turned into a challenge match against six or seven club members, the pro giving these players 21 points start (handicap per frame). As the club usually had a few good amateurs this created an exciting evening and a chance for an ordinary player to beat a top professional.

However, in those days, apart from the national centers of excellence like Ron Gross in London, Potters in Manchester, Northern Snooker Centre, Leeds or Lucania, Romford, no club had six or seven excellent amateurs, so the professional player could nearly always demonstrate his superior skills and come out the winner.

The professional player was at the table all evening and nicely ‘warmed up’, while each local guy was coming on ‘cold’; this factor was usually enough to negate the 21 points advantage.

By the seventies a generation of top amateurs had appeared: Willie Thorne, John Virgo, Patsy Fagan, Ray Edmonds, Vic Harris, John Hargreaves, Tony Graham, and the clubs responded by booking a professional player to have a serious ‘challenge’ match against their local hero, giving 14 points start per frame.

The local rising star usually had backers who liked to bet and this type of deadly serious match gave them plenty of opportunities. The professional player appeared for an agreed fee and normally took no part in the gambling, but there could be quite a lot of action going on between the various supporters.

There is very little evidence of any gambling activity through the early days of billiards and snooker matches.  After 1977 the very formalized British style of legal gambling became part of professional championships, so these ‘challenge’ matches were the only signs of ‘hustler’ type action in the game.

And who could you hustle? Everything  in Britain and Ireland was in the open: if you had real talent, you were no secret. In each generation Jimmy White, Tony Meo, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Stephen Hendry, Judd Trump and others were marked on the snooker radar at the age of 12 (age 10 in Ronnie's case).

The clubs still exist and the exhibition circuit continues. But at the top level the matches have been converted into superbly organized big-money promotions. In Britain these events are staged in theaters and leisure centers, featuring four top players with audiences of 400 – 1200.

Stephen Hendry of Scotland at age 13: looking forward

to a record 7 World Championship titles and career

earnings of over 8 million pounds sterling to date.

It’s all a long way from Fred Davis’ lonely night out or Jackie Rae working for the equivalent of $100 a night when the stars were earning $300. But, as Jackie Rae loved to remind us, he worked every night.

I’m convinced that both Fred and Jackie, at their peak and in their different ways, would have made millions in the modern super shows of today.

The Working Men’s clubs have faded from what they once were – especially in their ‘cabaret’ activities – but they and their exhibition matches played a big part in nurturing two generations of snooker professionals through the seventies and eighties.

The clubs helped them to earn a living while they waited for their infrequent championship chances. So I raise a glass of subsidized beer to the local clubs and their exhibition matches, wherever they may be: they were the support system for the first great players of the golden age.

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DO YOU KNOW? The best snooker players practice

EVERY day. Do you practice (revise) your

English every day?

See:

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Comprehension Exercises

Photo: Tony Drago (Malta) winning a Pool title.

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