What’s the Difference between "Pool" And "Billiards"? > 모바일_메인이미지

It is far better and more humane to abuse your opponent who has a right of reply, than your caddie who has none. Some men abuse their poor innocent beast of burden, the caddie, in a manner painful to hear. We all admire the gentlemanlike courtesy with which some accept their fate, and play with some opponent of about the same age, or in congenial foursomes; but how painful, and yet how humorous is the sight of a man who under similar circumstances becomes irritable, fussy, fidgety, a pitiful sight to men and angels. In the same way you may go round a hazard instead of trying to get over it. Drinking is apparently pleasant to many, judging by the Excise returns, but ingenuous youth is told by a wise father that he must not give way to it, and he does not. The hideous feeling of discomfort that comes over a player when he has topped his ball and made a deep hole in it, the terrible persistency with which ball after ball is sliced, the missing of one or two really short putts, the bad luck that attends him when putting really well, the way the hole is missed by a tenth of an inch, the frequent bad lies-all these combine to make life a burden.

Tennis, for instance, when you first fail to win a short chase, or your opponent keeps on serving nicks; billiards, when your ball is always under a cushion, or the balls dead safe time after time; cricket, when an umpire has given you out by a mistake of judgment-all these are trials, and they form part of the discipline of life. There is another reason why golf is a greater test of nerve than billiards, and that is the variety of weapons that you must have for different strokes. You play with the same cue at billiards, with the same bat at cricket, with the same mallet at croquet, with the same racquet at tennis, lawn-tennis, and racquets; golf is the only game in the world, as far as I know, where it is absolutely necessary to have a minimum number of five or six clubs to play a game with. There are some tempers which Satan must have had a hand in forming, and if others are fortunately not afflicted in the same way, they must remember that golf is a very irritating game.

In billiards you play for a whole evening or for a whole match on the same table; that is a very small object as compared with a putting-green, and if you have any pretensions to play at all, you ought to gauge the pace of a billiard-table after an hour's play. A man who foozles his drive and slices his approach, but who is nevertheless always down in two strokes after he has got on the putting-green, if not in one, what is billiards is very hard to beat except his opponent is a really good player. I do not pretend to say that an average player is always "off" with this or that club, but as every golfer knows there come times or spells of times when all skill with one class of club seems to vanish. Some holes are in a sort of pot, which, though small just where the hole is, nevertheless has widely expanding sides, and you probably will find your ball dead if you get it into it at all from any distance; but another is on a table-land, where the chief difficulty is not to get the ball on the table-land but to keep it there.

He has lost some of his length, he cannot force a ball out of its bunker as he did formerly, and his eye is not quick at judging the distance of about eighty yards which he has to carry to get over some danger. I have seen a player who was bad at lofting a ball over a bunker forty yards from the hole, play the previous stroke short in order, instead of having to play a forty-yards shot, to make one that took eighty yards to get over the bunker. Take a stroke of eighty yards and one of forty, the mashie or some sort of lofted iron would be used for both these shots; and yet a player knows that at one distance he has a good chance of making a good stroke, at the other distance his heart goes into his boots. Driving off the tee for the majority of players is, I should say, on the whole the stroke where less foozling or bad play takes place than in any other stroke, and yet here is the case of a great player failing at it for four years, when he was very near the prime of life.