Sport: Brighter Billiards

Nostalgic for the days when every gentleman’s home was likely to include a large room built specially to contain a billiard table, a rack of shiny cues, a flannel-lined oak box in which reposed three ivory balls, billiard table manufacturers have spent years and millions trying to bring them back. Long ago, for no good reason, the game of pool was renamed pocket billiards. Last year, the idea that billiards lacked social prestige gave rise to institutions like Manhattan’s Carom Club for socialite and celebrated billiardists.

Last summer Brunswick-Balke-Collender Co. sensibly decided that for the kind of people who might normally be expected to like billiards, its principal drawback was that its paraphernalia was too cumbersome. Hired to correct the defect, Architect William Lescaze rigged up a modern billiard table with adjustable chromium steel legs, side compartments for chalk & ash trays, a detachable top that turns it into a ping-pong table or a supper buffet. On the theory that traditional green might be the wrong color for billiard table felt, Brunswick hired a color expert named Faber Birren who promptly discovered that green produced eyestrain, substituted claret purple. Instead of the red ball, Expert Birren introduced a “scientific” yellow ball. To relieve eye-strain of pool players, pool balls henceforth will be made without stripes.

In the Bal Tabarin Room of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel last week, brighter billiards made its first appearance before the U. S. public with the beginning of the three-cushion world championship, scheduled to end next week, when each of ten entrants has played every other entrant once. Defending Champion Johnny Layton. whose eyes are weak anyway, promptly proved that a purple cloth and a yellow object ball were no handicap to him by winning his first match, 50-to-35, against tiny Kinrey Matsuyama. Next day, aging Willie Hoppe, boy wonder of billiards in 1907, beat dour Arthur Thurnblad of Chicago 50-to-41 in 44 innings. After five days of play, snub-nosed Welker Cochran of San Francisco, world champion in 1933, stood out as the only contender undefeated.