Billiards

A few years ago no gentleman built a country house without putting in a billiard room. Now those billiard rooms have been turned into breakfast rooms, gun rooms, dens. Billiards, no longer smart, is played and watched now only by people who really like it. In no sport except championship golf is there the same concentration of spectators on a delicate feat of skill, the success of which depends entirely on nervous control--as when, in a room filled with smoke, and banked on four sides by retreating slopes of intense watching faces, a billiard player in a stiff shirt and evening waistcoat, bending in a pour of white light over a green table, begins a run, clicking the cue ball against the two balls he is trying to keep against the cushion. When will he miss? Last week in San Francisco Edouard Horemans of Belgium shot 248 times, then stood aside for Jacob Schacfer to shoot.

For a long time U. S. players have held most of the world's billiard championships.

But Horemans' run was formidable to the audience and it seemed likely now that a foreigner would beat the great Schaefer. The day before, Horemans had run off 345; Schaefer was already behind; to beat Horemans now would be hard, almost impossible.

Schaefer, who had been chalking his cue nervously while Horemans shot, bent over the table. With a few beautiful billiards he brought the balls, scattered when Horemans broke his run, into a position in the corner. He began a run, playing as smoothly as if he were unconscious of the concentration of hundreds of eyes and minds on the green table and on that spot in the table where his fingers rested holding the cue. He made fifty, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five--and then, when it seemed as if he could have gone on making shots like a machine for the rest of the night, the gather broke; after three more shots he missed a draw, turned to congratulate Horemans, now the world's champion.