4 min read
I have been reading the most marvellous and unlikely book. It is called On Snooker, and it is the last book written by the great Jewish Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler (of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz/Saint Urbain’s Horsemen fame). The front cover shows the late Queen Mother, wearing a floral hat, pearls and a mink stole, leaning over a snooker table, elegantly attempting a pot.
It is a history of the game he loves, with anecdotes from his life as a young pool hustler and latterly as a sports journalist, stories of all the great cue wielders from Joe Davis, via Fred Davis to Steve Davis, and to the man he describes as the best snooker player ever, Stephen Hendry. Along the way he gives us a history of the sport, with its antecedent, pool, both of which in Canada were regarded, more like a bar-room hustle, than a legitimate sport like ice hockey or football.
My father loved the game, to watch or play. It seems impossible to believe that we watched it on a Bush 12in television in black and white. The commentator took us through the game as if we were visually impaired. “And he’s lined up that red to be in perfect position to sink the pink,” for all the world as if the red wasn’t grey and the pink a bit less grey. It shows how innocent those days were… a bit like our trusting acceptance of a ventriloquist on radio or an almost bovine game show such as What’s My Line, where the cut- glass voiced panellists guessed what the contestant’s job was after being shown a small mime of the work. It was unmissable.
In later life when my dad Moishe’s short-term memory was shot into a far pocket, he could calm himself by watching Dennis Taylor in those useful but enormous spectacles, making a famous 147 break at the Crucible, Sheffield. In the early days of their marriage, Moishe escorted my mother to see a film at the Regal cinema, but got restless after ten minutes, blaming her choice of film as a “woman’s picture”. Promising to pick her up outside after the film ended, he went off to play snooker at the club.
When the film ended, Zelma, my mother, waited in vain for her new husband and, when he failed to show up, finally went into one of Hull’s famous cream phone boxes and phoned his mother’s house, only to find that he had totally forgotten he was married and gone home to his mother’s for dinner. Since my grandmother regarded my mother as inferior because of some old Polak/Litvak broiges, she gave him meat and potato pie without question.
When Jack, my late husband, and I lived in a large-ish house in Muswell Hill, we splashed out on a full-size repro dining\snooker table, which kept many a guest from thinking about the lousy meal I had just served them. When my parents were staying, Dad would play his grandson. But Dad took the game seriously even though Adam’s head barely reached the top of the table. From the kitchen I could hear Moishe saying; “You call that a shot? What’s the matter with you? It’s gone in-off, you schlemiel.’’
Then I had to deal with cries of “it’s not fair. Grandpa’s being mean and he’s not even given me a start!”
And now it’s me who follows the game with alacrity. The great lyricist Don Black and I have been known to follow matches on the phone from different towns. Don recently won the doubles at the RAC and I reckon it was sweeter than his Oscar. Watching Ronnie O’Sullivan throwing his heart into every pocket is like watching George Best dribbling past ten men or John McEnroe peevishly shoot himself in both feet. Hendry never showed any emotion, which is why the crowd never took to him. It’s the gladiators all over again and the crowd wants bread and circuses – back stories of rising and falling reputations, stats, drug habits, rehab, marriages with blondes and bankruptcies. Bring it on.
What a weird species we are, gathering around car crashes and wanting to watch Liza Minnelli meander through her mother’s lyrics. Even as I write this, Rachel Zegler, the new Evita, is standing on the balcony outside the Palladium theatre singing the hell out of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina to a vast crowd who haven’t paid to see the show, while the ones who forked out 200 quid are sitting inside the theatre watching it on a stage. On a screen. They’re getting, communally, something for nothing, in the company of strangers – and that’s what director Jamie Lloyd has skilfully figured out we want.
Let’s face it, the Saturday Action for Palestine groupies and “groomies” are just there for the show too. I’m convinced 90 per cent have no idea of the history of Israel, the invention of the “Palestinians” in the late Fifties by Yasser Arafat and have as much idea of which river and which sea they are baying for as have I of quantum algorithms. It’s a cheap day out with your gang, your tutor, a megaphone and a hasty placard, just like the one I sprayed against the poll tax and Section 28, only with darkly, antisemitic, post-Glastonbury overtones.
And, importantly, no mention of the hostages. The trigger that triggers.
Back in Richler’s pool of snooker, he muses about why so many eminent writers are obsessed by one or other of the sports. Philip Roth with baseball, John Updike with golf, Norman Mailer with boxing – which did feature some fine Jewish fighters.
It is an urban myth, that Jews, unlike Italians and Irish, never suffer the kind of poverty that forces them into sport or showbusiness. He reminds us of the non-observant baseman for the Detroit Tigers, Hank Greenberg, who, in 1934, refused to play on Yom Kippur. Edgar A. Guest wrote this stanza to a poem celebrating this moral stance: Come Yom Kippur holy fast world-wide over the Jew.
And Hank Greenberg to his teaching and the old tradition true
Spent his day among his people and he didn’t come to play.
Said Murphy to Mulrooney, “We shall lose the game today!
We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat,
But he’s true to his religion – and I honour him for that!’’
My husband Jack was a sprinter at school. One sports day he won the 100 yards. When he went to check his times, the teachers hustled him away muttering and looking at figures.
Suddenly there was a conference and it was declared that Rosenthal, 15, had broken the world record for the 100 yards sprint.
The field went nuts. Young Jack was hoisted onto shoulders and his mother given smelling salts. It was only a matter of time of course before the sports master decided to measure the track – which was ten yards short.
As Tennessee Williams pointed out, “Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!”
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