Archive for November, 2009

In his 1976 autobiography, The Breaks Came My Way, Joe Davis explains something that even players of today can relate to, namely the power of your faithful old servant – the snooker cue.

This most important tool can’t be compared to a golf putter, a cricket bat or a tennis racquet. There seems to be an extreme precision required when it comes to cueing and every millimetre of the wood and the leather counts.

Davis gives several examples of players in his time who changed their cues and whose careers went downhill soon afterwards. Of course, things were very different back then when the sport hadn’t yet matured and hadn’t become a multimillion pound industry. There are stories about players who gave away their cues to girls, thereby sacrificing their entire career. Sometimes, sports bettors would steal or break the cue of the winning player, thus sealing their fate.

Davis goes on to discuss if the importance is psychological or some kind of physical phenomenon and reaches the conclusion that it’s possibly both. Then again, why would snooker players of all sportsmen be more superstitious than others? Regardless, the cue is a highly personal thing. It’s not so much about the quality as the habit of playing with that special piece of wood.

Davis tells the story of his own cues. His first was a gift from his mother. It served him well for many years until one day he put a damp cloth in its case which caused it to bend. He was forced to find a replacement, eventually running into a member of the Parish Church Institute – he ended up buying his cue. Davis and his cue then lived happily after until the 1927 Open Billiards Championship when it suddenly vanished.

After an entire session of miserable play on Davis’s part the cue was finally found. The police thought it might’ve been hidden by people in the betting world. On another occasion his cue was stolen but retrieved after a reward had been announced.

The cue problem is still a problem in modern times. Since the nine-eleven attacks new restrictions regarding storing of bulky items such as snooker cues on aeroplanes have been implemented. This has caused quite a few cues belonging to top professional players to be damaged during flights.

A player to suffer this fate was Mark Williams, whose cue was once bent so badly that it resembled an S. The most well-known accident involved Stephen Hendry’s cue, a £40 stick he had owned since he was 14 that was broken during a flight. Imagine the distress he must have felt seeing the cue he won seven world titles with get smashed.

One player that has been engaged in this problem is Peter Ebdon who, when being the director of the World Snooker Association, worked hard to get the Government to give dispensation to professional snooker players allowing them to bring their cues on the plane as a carry-on. It takes a pro to understand the true importance of an old, well-used snooker tool. It’s a good thing that snooker cues have their own spokesperson nowadays since they’re obviously undervalued by the rest of the world.