At Dwyer's

Erwin Rudolph is a onetime Cleveland office boy who wasted so much time in billiard rooms from 1910 onwards that he became one of the world's great billiard players. Never sensational as an office boy, he is spectacular, Napoleonic with a cue. He takes daring chances and shoots so fast the balls hardly have time to stop rolling after one shot before he is set for the next. Last year he ran out a game in a world's championship in 32 minutes. Only one man in the world could hope to beat him and he was Ralph Greenleaf, impassive, shiny-haired defending champion. In Dwyer's Billiard Academy in Manhattan last week Greenleaf and Rudolph, with the crowd banked around them, bent over a green baize table in the finals of the national pocket billiards championship. They played the kind of pocket billiards that smalltown sports play in their dreams. Greenleaf won the bank with a perfect shot. His ball was flat against the rail. Then Rudolph broke cleanly, without leaving Greenleaf a shot, but as they kept on it looked more and more like Greenleaf's evening. By the seventeenth inning he had 118, 45 balls ahead of Rudolph. There were seven balls on the table -- exactly the number Greenleaf needed to win, but he missed a long one. Rudolph made a run of 14, another of 23, won the match, the championship.

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