21/12/01

The Late Richler’s Latest

On Snooker by Mordecai Richler. The Lyons Press. 194 pages. $22.95

Mordecai Richler has just come out with a new book about his obsession with hockey, baseball and other sports. With my love for hockey and baseball, and Richler, this is one book I relish reviewing.
    However, what they gave me to write about is On Snooker, about which I couldn't care less.
    Both books have come out in the past four months - startling output, considering that Richler usually takes years to write a book, and especially considering that he died four months ago.
    I was in Canada a few days after his death, and before I concluded my short trip, On Snooker was already in the stores. Hot off the press, before the corpse was cold. (No disrespect intended, on the contrary: Richler himself would have gleefully noted that.)
    His brother Avrum offered me the opinion that 'I have the feeling it was published in a hurry and may not have been properly edited.' Cousin Mordy would have been mortified, for he was a stickler for details and perfection. Not that it is obvious that the publisher rushed the book out to capitalize on Richler's premature death at the age of 70 (premature, that is, for a member of our family, but not for a heavy drinker and smoker); it's not sloppy, except for a rare error that the writer would have caught. And there are long passages that I suspect were not finely Richlerized, plus two or three instances of abrupt disconnection.
If you're a snooker fanatic, it doesn't matter.
    My only previous exposure to this game, which evolved from billiards, occurred a dozen years ago while visiting the in-laws in London. I was trapped, the TV on, the family rapt with wide-eyed exuberance at the ball-bashing on baize, which went on for most of the day. It was baseball season, far, far away.
    These gents, dashingly haberdashed in the kind of couture worn at the Academy Awards, are required to uphold the elegant image of the snooker tournament circuit. That's begging for a bit of Richler needle-work. He reminds us of the dress code - players must wear bowties, white shirts, dapper waistcoats, black trousers, black shoes; referees wear tuxedoes and white cotton gloves - yet much of the book regales us with the tawdry life stories and antisocial behavior, the violence and drug scandals.
    Not to mention that the game's following is largely working-class, which collectively does not own one bowtie.
    The marquee pros, not so princely themselves, include some rather colorful characters, such as Ronnie O'Sullivan - one British tabloid detailed his family life and then asked readers to call the newspaper if anyone knew of a worse father in Britain.
    Moving on to the upper classes, 'Mary Queen of Scots was allowed to play billiards during her incarceration... Such was Mary's devotion to the game that when she was beheaded her doctor... removed the green baize from the billiards table and wrapped her body in it.' Enthusiasts included Marie Antoinette, Louis XIV, Mozart, Pope Pius IX, and Bill Werbeniuk.
    Werbeniuk, a Canadian mountain weighing in at 280 pounds, rose to number eight in the snooker rankings, and is most appreciated for convincing Britain's Inland Revenue that his beer tab should be tax-deductible as a work expense. Big Bill 'suffered from a hereditary nervous disorder that made his cue arm tremble - a disability that could only be suppressed by a measured intake of lager, sometimes running to 40 pints a day.'
    It's inevitable that much of the book should be on snooker, considering its title, but there are rambling descriptives of tournaments and matches that Richler fails to imbue with much interest. This is where I suspect a (pardon the expression) ghost-writer or editor took over, because they're short on the Richler touch.
    The exhilarating exception is his account of the world championships in 1985, 'easily the most thrilling contest ever,' in which Dennis Taylor, 'snookerdom's real-life Rocky' and a 300-1 longshot, staged an impossible comeback from an 0-8 deficit to win 18-17 against the game's dominant player and reigning champ. The finals were watched by 18.5 million TV viewers, the highest figure ever for a sports program in Britain.
    Snooker's great popularity in Britain is tied in with TV history. 'What happened,' Richler writes, 'is that in 1969 the BBC-2 channel, the first to convert to color, required inexpensive programs in which color was an intrinsic component, and which was sufficiently seductive to tempt viewers to rush out to buy the required sets. Snooker, with its 15 red and six colored balls on a green baize surface, obviously filled the bill.'
    The best part of the book is the history of the billiard ball. No, really! They used to be made from ivory, which cost the lives of an estimated 12,000 elephants. Ceylon tusks were best, in that they were more solid than African ivory and less friable than Asian. Only one in 50 tusks was sufficiently clear-grained, and it took two years of soaking and seasoning to pronounce the ivory good enough for whacking about on a table.
    In the 1860s inventors began to work on creating a cheaper ball, lured by rewards of as much as $10,000 in gold. One patented invention failed because the ball didn't click as satisfyingly as real ivory.
    Then, a laboratory accident succeeded in creating a spectacular failure - and unwittingly launched the Plastic Age.
    John Wesley Hyatt, a journeyman printer from Albany, New York, who already had the abovementioned failure to his credit, accidently discovered celluloid when he knocked over a bottle of printer's cuticle.
    Richler quotes Stephen Fenichell in Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century: 'Gazing down at this sturdy slice of hardened film, it occurred to Hyatt that a billiard ball coated with such a compound might display the elusive properties he was looking for.'
    Well, yes and no.
    Richler: 'Being a responsible fellow, he did warn his field-testers that the highly nitrated collodion coating was a chemical kin to guncotton, and therefore careful as you go, gents, as 'a lighted cigar if applied to the ball would at once result in a serious flame.' Not only that but 'any violent contact between the balls' would invariable 'set off a mild explosion.' '
    In other words, the balls were bombs.
    'One of Hyatt's volunteers, a saloonkeeper in Colorado, wrote the inventor that he didn't mind, but every time the balls collided, 'every man in the room pulled a gun.' '
    Richler quotes The New York Times: 'No man can play billiards with any real satisfaction if he knows that his billiard balls may explode in a series of closely connected explosions, thereby spoiling a promising run and burying players under the wreck of tables and cues.'
    Anyway, another New Yorker, Leo Baekeland, promptly invented Bakelite, which led to another refinement, Crystalate, which was fine, except that the main ingredient, crushed cow shinbones - which were passed on to billard-ball makers by button makers - became unavailable after button makers switched to a synthetic.
    Woven throughout all this snooker stuff - its history, lore, competitions and characters - is plenty of Richler's ribald yiddishkeit, Montreal nostalgia, ascerbic observations, and the shkotzim, epikorusim and anti-Semites that pervaded his work.
It all needs an editor's wrench to tighten the nuts and bolts, but it's still a good rollick through Jewish Montreal and London, drifting off into hockey, baseball, boxing, the Roman Empire, literature, and Richler's own childhood. It was at Rachel's Pool Hall and the Laurier poolroom where the young hustler first broke with his faith, where as an aspiring bum skipping school, he found deliverance from his ultra-Orthodox upbringing.
    There's enough Richler if you don't like snooker, and enough snooker if you don't like Richler.
    It can't often be said of a dead writer, but I'm looking forward to his next book.

Available from The Lyon's Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 06437. See www.lyonspress.com