The first (and only) sport I have ever played and it felt natural to me. Highest break at my best was 86.
So many memories - sat on my Dad’s knee watching Pot Black. Playing on a kitchen table with marbles and then finding mates who had their own tables, one lad had a three-quarter sized table in his basement. Another lad had that ‘Pot Black’ one with the light green quasi-baize - https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/townsend-auction-galleries/catalogue-id-srtow10053/lot-365387e9-4dd5-4991-8e4b-a56400e6c529
Jeez I hung around with some ropey swots for a while, needing to get to their tables. Weekly trip to the Northern Snooker Centre in Leeds on a Sunday afternoon. Match table in a sunken area when you went through the door, didn’t the owner’s Son play to a high level? And wasn’t there a Yorkshire TV programme on during mid-week nights from that venue?
School books with their covers doused in names of snooker players, including David Taylor, both Davis’s, Perrie Mans, Jim Wych, Patsy Fagan and all the big hitters. Going to Eccleshill library and getting books, nay tomes, out by Eddie Charlton. learning about side, back-screw, top, massé shots and Master chalk.
I gravitated to Eccleshill Working Men as a female school friend’s brother was into snooker and his Dad was the steward. By the time I went in the same place with my Dad a couple of years later, I was hitting straight 20’s and watching his cockiness drain from his snooker shark demeanour.
I played doubles on the Yorkshire circuit with a lad called Lee Boocock and his stance, cue placement and cue arm was perfection. I was more twisted with a little bit of a wobble post strike. We played these two old lads, circuit stalwarts and they ’old man’d’ us from the get go, making us re-rack the reds time after time.
I haven’t played for years but would love to. I’d have to have some special glasses though.