I'm a championship handball player. I'm a championship softball and baseball player. I used to be an extremely talented center in high school in football. I also dabbled in lacrosse and soccer. I'm really good at billiards, darts, shuffleboard.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
I learned to approach racing like a game of billiards. If you bash the ball too hard, you get nowhere. As you handle the cue properly, you drive with more finesse.
Drama is played at the pace of chess... or billiards... or poker. Engrossing? Sure. But comedy is played at the jubilant, high-octane speed of sports like basketball or hockey.
A game is great, in my view, only if it can be played happily by a sane person of at least average intelligence for several hours a day for fifty years. Both pool and billiards qualify.
Once-dominant games like straight pool and three-cushion billiards have lost ground to eight-ball - the game of choice for millions of tavern league players - and nine-ball, the preeminent tournament game.
Miniature golf, like billiards, is a game of angles. And, like billiards, most of the fun is in pretending you know what the hell you're doing. The worse you do, the more you have to laugh.
I love various sports, including basketball, tennis and billiards.
