I used to watch snooker in the 70’s when Pot Black was on the telly, in all its black and white glory because my family didn’t have a colour telly until the 80’s from a friend at the time, Dominic Duffy. He lived down the road from me and I can remember me and him carrying it to mine and stopping often because it weighed a bloody ton!
I think it was 1983 when I brought this bulky wooden beast home.
It was during my mid-teens, at secondary school, that I fell in love with the sport properly, playing at a couple of friends at the time, Christopher Eaton and Mark Siletoe’s houses, with others, on their six-foot tables in their living rooms. There wasn’t a lot of room but we all had a laugh.
Finally, when I left school in 1982, I got my first six-foot snooker table from my sister Julie’s catalogue. It went into my bedroom and I had great times playing on it with my Brother-In-Law to be Ken although there wasn’t much room there either, ha ha. As time went on, when he and Julie got married, we used to play on a full-sized 12-foot table at The British Legion (now called The Crown but it will always be “The Legion” to me) in Shard End which was over the road from my house.
I used to enjoy playing snooker and pool with D. D. on his six-foot table in his back garden. It was even better on lovely, hot summer days. It was fun. Me and him used to go to The Local snooker club in Arran Way, Chelmsley Wood as well sometimes. I was never too great at playing on a full-sized snooker table but, like anything else, I always enjoy taking part. It should never be about you being better than anyone, or indeed if anyone is better than you in any sport (or anything in life for that matter). It should be about taking part and good sportsmanship (or mutual respect). Those are morals I had when I was growing up and still have to this day.
My happiest snooker memory was sitting up till the early hours of the morning watching the 1985 World Snooker Championship final with my dad and you can read about that thrilling classic below.
About Snooker
Snooker is a cue sport that was first played by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century. It is played on a rectangular table covered with a green cloth called baize, with six pockets: one at each corner and one in the middle of each long side. Using a cue stick, the individual players or teams take turns to strike the white cue ball to pot the other twenty-one snooker balls in the correct sequence, accumulating points for each pot. An individual frame of snooker is won by the player who has scored the most points. A snooker match ends with one of the players having won a predetermined number of frames.
Snooker gained its identity in 1875 when army officer Sir Neville Chamberlain, stationed in Ootacamund, Madras, and Jubbulpore, devised a set of rules that combined black pool and pyramids. The word snooker was a well-established derogatory term used to describe inexperienced or first-year military personnel. In the early 20th century, snooker was predominantly played in the United Kingdom where it was considered a “gentleman’s sport” until the early 1960s, before growing in popularity as a national pastime and eventually spreading overseas. The standard rules of the game were first established in 1919 when the Billiards Association and Control Club was formed. As a professional sport, snooker is now governed by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association.
Read more here.
The History Of Snooker
Snooker was given its first definite reference in England in an 1887 issue of the Sporting Life newspaper, which led to a growth in popularity. Chamberlain was revealed to be the game’s inventor, 63 years after the fact, in a letter to The Field magazine published on 19 March 1938. Snooker became increasingly popular across the Indian colonies of the British Raj, and in the United Kingdom, but it remained a game mainly for military officers and the gentry, and many gentlemen’s clubs that had a snooker table would not allow non-members inside to play. To cater for the growing interest, smaller and more open snooker-specific clubs were formed. The Billiards Association (formed 1885) and the Billiards Control Club (formed 1908) merged to form the Billiards Association and Control Club (BA&CC) and a new, standardised set of rules for snooker was first established in 1919. Before this, there were local rules, but these were codified and a drawn game was abolished by the use of a re-spotted black. These rules are similar to the ones used today, although rules for a minimal point penalty was imposed later.
Played in 1926 and 1927, the first World Snooker Championship—then known as the Professional Championship of Snooker—was won by Joe Davis. As a professional English billiards and snooker player himself, Davis raised the game from being simply a recreational pastime to becoming also a professional sporting activity. Entirely dominant, he won every tournament until 1946, when he retired from taking part in the championships. The 1952 World Snooker Championship was only contested by two players and was replaced by the World Professional Match-play Championship, but was also discontinued in 1957. Feeling that the popularity of the game was waning, Davis introduced a variation known as “snooker plus”, with the addition of two extra colours, but this failed to attract attention and was very short-lived. A Women’s Professional Snooker Championship (now the World Women’s Snooker Championship) was created in 1934 for top female players, whilst a world championship for top amateur players, now known as the IBSF World Snooker Championship was founded in 1963.
Read more here.
Pot Black
About Pot Black
Pot Black was a snooker tournament in the United Kingdom broadcast on the BBC. Each match was contested over a single frame, where other tournaments were significantly longer. The event carried no ranking points but played a large part in the popularisation of the modern game of snooker. The event was first held in 1969 with a field of eight players and ran annually until 1986. The event resurfaced for three years in both 1991 and 2005. The series was followed by events for other categories of players, with juniors and seniors events, and a celebrity version held in 2006.
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The History Of Pot Black
The BBC began broadcasting in colour in 1967 and was looking for programmes that could exploit the new technology. The idea of broadcasting snooker, then still a minor sport, was the brainchild of David Attenborough who was the controller of BBC2 at the time. The game of snooker is based on coloured balls, and was deemed a good way to sell the new technology. The first Pot Black event was held in 1969 at the BBC Studios in Birmingham, and the programme was aired on BBC2 on 23 July 1969. This first contest featured eight players: Gary Owen, Jackie Rea, John Pulman, Ray Reardon, Fred Davis, Rex Williams, Kingsley Kennerley and John Spencer, with Reardon the eventual winner. The event continued until 1986, by which time an increasing number of snooker events were being televised and the Pot Black format was becoming outdated. The programme returned in 1990, but was discontinued after the 1993 event.
A one-day Pot Black tournament, held on 29 October 2005, was broadcast on the BBC’s Grandstand. The event featured eight players: Ronnie O’Sullivan, Stephen Hendry, Stephen Maguire, Matthew Stevens, Paul Hunter, John Higgins, Jimmy White and Shaun Murphy, with Stevens beating Murphy in the final. The 2006 edition of the tournament took place at the Royal Automobile Club in Central London on 2 September 2006. Mark Williams defeated John Higgins in the final, achieving the highest break in the history of the tournament with a 119 clearance. The 2007 edition, the final Pot Black to date, was aired on Saturday 6 October 2007, with Ken Doherty beating Shaun Murphy 71–36 in the final.
There have been six century breaks at the event. Eddie Charlton compiled the first century in 1973, a break of 110, which stood as the event record for many years until overtaken by Shaun Murphy’s 111 against Jimmy White in 2005, and Williams’s 119 clearance in 2006.
Read more here.
The above articles were taken from Wikipedia and are subject to change.
The 1985 World Snooker Championship Final
About The 1985 World Snooker Championship Final
The 1985 World Snooker Championship final, also known as the black ball final, was played on the weekend of 27–28 April 1985 at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England. The final of the 1985 World Snooker Championship was between defending world champion Steve Davis and 1979 runner-up Dennis Taylor. It was Davis’s fourth appearance in a final, and Taylor’s second. The best-of-35-frame match was split into four sessions. Davis won every frame in the first session to lead 7–0, but only led 9–7 and 13–11 after the second and third sessions. Until the final frame, Taylor was never ahead in frames, but he tied the match three times at 11–11, 15–15 and 17–17. The deciding frame culminated over several shots on the final ball – the black. Taylor potted the ball to win his only world championship. Media outlets reported this as a major shock; Davis had been widely predicted to win the match, having won three of the previous four world championships.
The final took place during the eighth year of the BBC’s daily coverage of the championship and climaxed in the early hours of Monday 29 April. It was viewed by 18.5 million people in the United Kingdom, which as of 2021 remains a record viewing figure for BBC2, and as of 2020 is still the record for a post-midnight audience for any British television channel. The total match time of 14 hours and 50 minutes is the longest ever recorded for a best-of-35-frames match. It is the only final at this venue to contain no century breaks.
The final is one of the most famous matches in snooker history and part of the reason for the surge in the sport’s popularity in the 1980s and 1990s. Two hour-long BBC documentaries, When Snooker Ruled the World from 2002 and Davis v Taylor: The ’85 Black Ball Final made in 2010, commemorated the event. The final frame was released in full on home video as “The Greatest Snooker Final of All Time”. The post-match single-word responses to the press from Davis would later be used as a basis for a recurring caricature of him in the television show Spitting Image.
Read more here.
The above articles were taken from Wikipedia and are subject to change.
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