Why is pool table cloth usually green? Because grass is green. Billiards (taken to mean all cue games) is a form of a croquet-like game played on grass. It was brought indoors and put on tables in the fifteenth century in England and France, when the game begins to appear in works of art. The first recorded billiard table is ordered by Louis XI of France in 1470.
In 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, complains of being deprived of her billiard table while imprisoned at Fotheringay Castle. After her execution, her lady-in-waiting reports that Mary's headless body was wrapped in the cloth from the table.
In 1591, Edmund Spenser describes billiards as "a thriftless game."
One of the best-known early references to the game is in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, first performed in 1609. In Act II, Scene 5, the old joker has Cleopatra say: "Let's to billiards. Come, Charmian." There is no evidence that the game was played before the 1400s.
In 1616, Ben Jonson mentions the smoothness of a billiard ball in his play The Devil Is an Ass.
The game is very popular in the royal houses of England and the Continent, and commoners like it, too. In The Complete Gamester, published in 1674, the first book to contain instructions for billiards (as well as other games), author Charles Cotton states that the game "is much approved of and played by most nations in Europe, especially in England, there being few towns of note that hath not a publick Billiard Table." Gambling is already a problem. Cotton cautions: "Let not a covetous desire of winning another's money engage you to the losing of your own."
In the late 1600's, Louis IV, supporting a court of 3,000 people, installs an elaborate billiard room in his new palace at Versailles and plays in the light of 26 chandeliers and 16 floor candelabras. H.G. Wells later writes that Louis "guided his country towards bankruptcy" with "an elaborate dignity that still exhorts our admiration."
One of the earliest mentions of the game in America is in the secret diary of Colonial legislator, William Byrd II of Westover, Virginia. After making love to his wife, he writes: "It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table."
Pool hustlers go way back. In the 1689 memoirs of the Duke of St. Simon, a hustler is described who later becomes a Catholic Bishop. In 1789 in Paris, there is a player willing to bet that he can make thirty bank shots in a row, not bad considering that cues then didn't have leather tips and rails were made of tightly bundled cloth instead of rubber. At about the same time, a shark in Hamburg, Germany, makes shots by jumping the cueball from one table to another.
Billiards was Mozart's main form of relaxation.
"The AnitoKid loves billiards trivia!"
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Billiards friends, pool players, and fans, here are some billiards trivia I have found on the Internet computer network! The billiards facts are quite interesting! And I kid you not! They come from Byrne's Standard Website of Pool and Billiards, and have been compiled by Robert Byrne. Enjoy!
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