Mordecai Richler - On Snooker

On Snooker

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2001

On Snooker is essentially about people, including their times, manners, mores and quests, including Mordecais own.
N ATIONAL P OST

The book, a brief and delightful romp through the world of the game is both a laypersons introduction and an experts guide; one players look at a pursuit he knew and loved. it is the story of an enthusiasm, a personal glance-back at a game that captured Richlers youthful imagination and fired much of his fiction. It is a book Richler fans will savour, a bonus offering from a writer now sadly gone.
T HE L ONDON F REE P RESS

Its Richlers ever-present deft and, at times, snarky tone, coupled with an intimate look into the novelists personal passion for the sport that make On Snooker so delightful to read, ensuring that even non-sporting fans will keep turning the pages.
F LARE

The late Mordecai Richlers funny, cranky and humane journey into the world of pool halls and snooker makes for a great sports book.
C ALGARY H ERALD

On Snooker is essential reading for anyone interested in the cue sports or sports in general. [Richler] is a fan of the first magnitude, and a world-famous novelist as wella combination that has given us the most interesting and thought-provoking book on snooker ever written. A superb book with insights, opinions, history, behind-the-scenes stuff and more.
P OOL & B ILLIARD

On Snooker is pure joy, a romp through the past, present and future of the game. One last taste of [Richlers] unique style.
H ALIFAX C HRONICLE H ERALD

The passion, the humour and the caustic observations that are associated with Richler are all in this work.
V ICTORIA T IMES C OLONIST

ALSO BY MORDECAI RICHLER

NOVELS
The Acrobats
Son of a Smaller Hero
A Choice of Enemies
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
The Incomparable Atuk
Cocksure
St. Urbains Horseman
Joshua Then and Now
Solomon Gursky Was Here
Barneys Version

STORIES
The Street

ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers under Glass
Shovelling Trouble
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
Broadsides
Belling the Cat
Dispatches from the Sporting Life

CHILDRENS BOOKS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
Jacob Two-Twos First Spy Case

ANTHOLOGIES
The Best of Modern Humor
Writers on World War II

NONFICTION
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
This Year in Jerusalem

For Max, Poppy, and Simone

C LIVE EVERTON, snookerdoms Rashi, once pronounced on two of the games stalwarts, Cliff Thorburn and Kirk Stevens, both Canadian born and bred, declaring them long-standing chums. Stevens was a mere twelve-year-old, wrote the affable Everton in the monthly journal Snooker Scene, when he painstakingly accrued four dollars with which to challenge Thorburn, a superstar even then, in 1970, in the subculture from which Canadian snooker had not even begun to emerge. (Emphasis mine.)

A small-time hustler in that subculture back in the late forties, I took Evertons observation as an ad hominem snub of my heritage.

Games have always played an important role in my life, culminating in my becoming a novelist, a rogues game wherein I was at last empowered to make my own rules, rewarding and punishing as I ordained. Submitting to book tours enriched by probing TV interviews: Is this book of yours, Mordy based on fact, or is it just something you made up in your own head?

To begin with, I was captivated by the simplest of childhood games common to Canadian street kids in the early forties: bolo, yo-yo, flip-the-diddle, and such beginners card games as fish and casino. And at the age of ten I was already an impassioned fan of Montreals Club de Hockey Canadiens, nos glorieux, and our Triple A baseball Royals, as well as the weekly Gillette-sponsored fight broadcasts out of Madison Square Garden in New York, the big time.

I came to snooker at the age of thirteen, in 1944, my first year at Baron Byng High School in Montreal. Montreal has a confessional-school system and BBHS operated under the aegis of the citys Protestant School Board. But squatting as the school did on St. Urbain Street, in the heart of the working-class Jewish quarter, the brown brick building as charming as a Victorian workhouse, the student body was 99 percent Jewish. We were a rough-and-ready lot. The sons and daughters of pants pressers, sewing-machine operators, scrap metal dealers, taxi drivers, keepers of street-corner newsagent kiosks, plumbers, shoe-repair mavens, and grocery store proprietors. My mother didnt trust Klein, the corner grocer, who would pass off yesterdays kmmel bread as todays when it should have been reduced from ten to eight cents a loaf. He never stops bragging about his son the doctor. Some doctor. He has that stutter, you could die before he gets a word out. He married for money and he does abortions.

She took the jolly French Canadian coal-delivery man for a crook as well. He has to serve Jews it just about kills him. You go round the back and count the bags he dumps in the shed. I paid for twelve. Twelve full bags.

The ladies auxiliary of the Young Israel Synagogue was another problem. I would be president, if only I was married to a dentist like Gloria Hoffer, big deal, she doesnt know he plays around with his receptionist, would I say a word? But your father is a junk dealer, he comes home he sits down to supper in his Penmans underwear, what if somebody nice rang the doorbell, I ask you?

Before he sat down my exhausted father would wash his hands with Snap, but he never succeeded in getting out all the grit. It was embedded in his fingernails and the cuts in his calloused hands. He would read the New York Daily Mirror or News at the kitchen table with the linoleum cloth, beginning with Walter Winchell, wetting a thumb before turning a page. When he was finished, I was able to catch up on Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Maggie and Jiggs, Red Ryder, Lil Abner, and Ella Cinders. Sometimes Macys famous department store ran brassiere ads, and I would take the news-paper with me into the bathroom.

Round the corner from Baron Byng, on St. Laurence Boulevard (The Main, in Montreal parlance), lay the Rachel Pool Hall, my deliverance from classes in geometry and intermediate algebra, both of which confounded me. Beginning snooker players at the Rachel were obliged to apprentice on the last of four tables, lest we miscue and rip the baize cloth. The faded baize on the humiliating last table no longer mattered. It had already been mended here and there with black tape. There were sticky Coca-Cola stains and cigarette burns. Imitating the more seasoned players, I learned to select a number of cues from the wall rack, ostentatiously rolling them on the table until I settled on one that wasnt hopelessly warped. If my opponent managed a difficult pot, I would bang my cue butt three times on the floor, just like the other Rachel habitus. However, much to my chagrin, I never achieved star status, my very own cue locked into the wall rack like the one that belonged to the all but unbeatable Izzy Halprin, who also pitched for the YMHA Intermediates and would go on to serve on one of those rusty tubs sailing out of Naples, laden with concentration camp survivors, that ran the British blockade of Palestine. Another player, Mendy Perlman, a name to conjure with in those days, became a lawyer, sadly misunderstood, obliged to spend time in the slammer when it turned out that too many aged widows had left him money in the wills he had prepared for them. Before being sentenced, Mendy, once Baron Byngs knockout debater, gave the judge what for. Six million werent enough for you, he hollered. So today you got yourself another victim. Congratulations.