Russell stirs billiards' ashes

PONTINS at Prestatyn, relentless watchword "Fun, fun, fun", is this week hosting the World Professional Billiards Championship, widely regarded as one of the most boring sports on earth.

If there's a certain irony about that, few are present to appreciate it.

When world champion Mike Russell, Teesside lad, played arch-rival Geet Sethi in a 1990s final, an estimated 220 million Indians watched, apparently spellbound, on television.

When they met again on Wednesday in the room above Captain Croc's Adventure Land, the total audience was three, or rather two and a half, since one chap had strategically placed himself to watch two games simultaneously.

A melting pot it may be, the Crucible it's not.

Even Mike Russell, still just 35 and cueing for a record ninth world title, now works full-time as a courier. Until a letter arrived about the championship, he hadn't played billiards for six months.

"I'm basically retired, I made a conscious decision to get away from it, " he says.

"I'd been a professional for 18 years and it was flogging a dead horse.

"To maintain the highest standard you have to play all the time, and to play all the time you can't have a job. It's a vicious circle, and with a family I just can't afford it.

"I thought about turning amateur just to keep my eye in, but the rules say you have to wait 15 years, and that's a long time for a game of billiards.

Professional billiards is finished, at least in England, and to be honest, I don't even miss it." He's also won seven UK titles, five world matchplay titles and at least two dozen other ranking tournaments.

Now the world championship is the year's only tournament, pro billiards a one-ring circus.

Even the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association now calls itself World Snooker, as if in a love affair that dare not speak its name, though snooker will also have problems when Embassy - smoked out - is obliged to end its long-running support next year.

"It's a fast food world and billiards definitely isn't fast food, " says Russell, who's moved to Peterborough but whose parents remain in Marske.

"I compare billiards and snooker to chess and draughts, most people prefer draughts because you can finish it in ten minutes." Though billiards endures among the amateurs, the pro game has gone to pot.

PRESTATYN is on the caravan park coast of North Wales, Pontins still stirring from its hi-dihibernation, chalets styled "Club" or "Popular".

Chasing a £5,000 top prize, Mike Russell insists it's no holiday. "We were guaranteed prize money just for turning up, so I thought I'd be foolish not to." Surf City, Savannah Land and Pirouette Park are being brushed up for Easter. In his office next to Captain Croc's, tournament director Alan Chamberlain accepts that promoting the game is difficult and that, even in India, professional billiards no longer has the rub of the green.

Snooker, he adds - with no discernible pun intended - is calling the shots now.

"I hugely admire the skills of these guys, but unfortunately they make it look too easy.

Really the bottom line is that, unless you're an aficionado of billiards, it is boring." That morning's broadsheets have small-printed news of the Irish open snooker championship in Dublin and of the Pontins Holidays Insurance League first division east; there's badminton, bowls and racing from Bangor-on-Dee, but of high pressure at Prestatyn not so much as an isobar.

Not even the Rhyl and Prestatyn Visitor mentions the world billiards championship being held on its sandy shore step, though there are 300 words on Rhyl hockey club third team's latest disastrous defeat.

Even the veteran Snooker Scene editor Clive Everton, who supposes Mike Russell to be the greatest billiards player of all time, is heading back to Birmingham.

There are fewer than 30 registered professionals, just 17 Prestatyn and correct. Two are Australian, one - Clive Everton - Welsh. The rest are English or Indian; it's a very small world.

MIKE Russell took to billiards as an 11-yearold, like many more Teesside kids a more innocent generation ago. Some still do; Paul Snowdon and Carl Cunningham are in the English amateur junior team. He insists he has no regrets about not choosing snooker, both more popular and more lucrative. "If you go along that road, I'd rather have played golf, that's the one talent I wish I'd had.

"Billiards has much more aesthetic appeal than snooker, a different way of hitting the ball.

I only enjoy watching the likes of Ronnie Sullivan playing snooker, one of the few who hits the ball the way it should be hit." He has been widely praised for his concentration, tactical skill and sportsmanship - table manners - though one or two of the cuttings suggest a lifestyle removed from billiards' cloistered calm.

In 2001 he told The Observer of an incident where an Indian promoter, reluctant to meet his obligations, had threatened to chop Teesside colleague Peter Gilchrist's hands off.

Alan Chamberlain, a professional snooker referee but tournament director for 14 years, admits there have been what he calls Jack the Lad episodes.

"I won't go into detail but there have been times when I have had to make representations to Mike about his behaviour off the table, but for the last four or five years I've had no problem whatsoever.

He's been as good as gold." An article in a snooker magazine suggested that whatever the opinion of Russell as a person, none could doubt his playing ability.

Another claimed that he was a "national treasure" and should receive the MBE (at least) for services to keeping billiards breathing.

"He may have been in the bad books in the past, but he's always been an exemplary sportsman, " says Chamberlain.

Russell also successfully coached the Thai national snooker team in 2002 and the following year in Saudi, a country he describes as "very biblical." Isn't he very biblical, then?

"I've had my moments like a lot more, but nothing unusual. All I've done is grown up."

MIKE'S nearing a 147 break - nowt special, different worlds - as we're hushered into his three-ball with Sethi. The world's number one is on table number one.

There's no purple haze nor influence of alcohol, no-one selling billiard balls nor Snooker Scene, no television, no press and no sponsor boards, because there simply aren't any sponsors.

Scoring appears to be in twos and threes, some of us at sixes and sevens.

The uninitiated can still detect moments of crisis, however, by the amount of sighs amid the silence.

There's more sighing, in truth, than the average Hollywood romance. For Mike Russell, read Jane.

Peter Gilchrist, twice world billiards champion and now coaching snooker in Singapore, is on another table - "you came to our house in 1994" he recalls, amiably - fellow Teessiders David Causier and Chris Shutt cannons fodder elsewhere.

Like so many Jack Horners, the players return dutifully to their corners, but with only a bottle of mineral water for sustenance.

Russell spends slightly less time in his.

"That's one of the big differences between billiards and snooker, " says Alan Chamberlain.

"You may be off table for 30 or 45 minutes and you have to have total concentration.

"Some snooker players would be totally mesmerised if they had to do that.

"It's one of the reasons that really good billiards players hardly ever become really good snooker players." Mike Russell, he forecasts, will duly win his record ninth world title. Russell says it doesn't mean that much to him, but would have done a few years ago.

He's leading 380-330 when we leave, the crowd having doubled to five.

Outside, there's a workman up a ladder and Spring in the step. The paint's drying nicely.

A POTTING HISTORY - 20 THINGS YOU MIGHT NEVER HAVE KNOWN ABOUT BILLIARDS

The game was known in 15th century France and mentioned by Shakespeare in Anthony and Cleopatra: "Let's to billiards, come Charmian."

Mary Queen of Scots' captors forbade her to use her billiard table. When she was executed, her body was covered with the cloth.

Actor Tom Cruise did his own trick billiard shots for the 1986 film The Colour of Money - until the last which would have taken two days to perfect. Director Martin Scorcese hired a professional.

Willie Smith, twice world champion in the 1920s, had been a linotype operator at The Northern Echo in Darlington.

Smith was another billiards player who thought little of snooker.

"All of them, " he replied, when asked which snooker rules he'd like to change.

England's first billiard room, opened in 1765, had a table with one pocket and four balls.

Ben Johnson coined the phrase "As smooth as a billiard ball" in 1637.

The game was originally played on grass, rather like croquet, the ball struck through hoops with a mace.

The church regarded billiards - and one or two other things - as a sin.

Billiard balls were made from ivory from the centre of the tusk, just three or four per tusk. But for the invention of plastics, there might have been no elephants left at all.

Continental billiards is played on pocketless tables, concentrating solely on cannons.

There's no such thing as a snooker table; it's a billiards table.

US president Thomas Jefferson had a billiard table beneath the dome of his house, though in his day the game was illegal in Virginia.

'Chalk' doesn't contain chalk at all.

US billiards champions have the highest average age of any sport, 35.6.

Billiards was the first sport to have a world championship, in 1873.

The first coin-operated billiard table was patented in 1903. It cost a penny a go.

Charles Goodyear, whose vulcanised rubber revolutionised billiard cushions and much else, died a virtual pauper.

W C Fields was an accomplished billiards player. (Sidetrack: which Football League ground is nicknamed W C Fields? )

Historians claim that in the English Civil War, news of billiards was sought more eagerly than news of battle.

And finally...

THE three Scunthorpe United players who've captained England (Backtrack, March 8) are Kevin Keegan, Ray Clemence and (of course) I T Botham.

Though Malcolm Foulston ("ex-Scunny, now Darlington supporter") was among those who knew, it was surprising how many got it wrong.

So to the promised stinker from Dave Kilvert in Darlington, who asks readers to name a Premiership XI, all drawn from the same first team pool in genuine 4-4-2 formation from their club's squad, all of whom have a double letter (like Bell, say) in their surname.

By way of a PS, he invites two subs as well.

There are a couple of new sports books on the shelves; one - at least - to the first reader who cracks it.

Published: 11/03/2005