Word: billiard
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...amphitheater at the University of Michigan, the eyes of 200 scientists were focused on a billiard table. The greatest billiard player of them all, Willie Hoppe, dressed in a dinner jacket and cool as a master surgeon about to operate, stood ready. But first there was a lecture from Engineering Professor Arthur Moore, a billiard player for 30 years, on his six years' experiments to make a science out of a sport. Willie Hoppe's English on the ball was not less understandable than Professor Moore's English on the theory...
With facts & figures, Professor Moore demonstrated that the technique most good players use is scientifically superior: the pendulum stroke, with forearm swinging vertically from the elbow. Unfortunately for Professor Moore's thesis, Willie uses a sidearm stroke. It was a habit he picked up lying belly-to-billiard-table as a boy of five. Said 59-year-old Willie Hoppe: "It's too complicated for me. I guess this analysis came too late to help my game...
Once in the Ziegfeld Follies he discovered Comedian Ed Wynn making faces at an audience from beneath the billiard table over which he was brandishing his famed bent cue. He conked Wynn with the cue, knocked him cold, beamed at the applause and went on without interruption...
...general: "The field of American life is as bare of the Church as a billiard-table of a centerpiece; a truth that the myriad little structures 'attended' on Sundays and on the 'off' evenings of their 'sociables' proclaim as with the audible sound of the roaring of a million mice...
Thirty grass courts, already billiard-table smooth, were being given a last expert roll. Out came the gaily striped awnings and umbrellas; up went the refreshment tent (favorite drinks: rum & Tom Collins). A fuzzy-cheeked crew of ball boys soaked up lectures on arm-folding and court behavior. All that was needed to bring in the crowd: the arrival of the 1946 crop of sun-browned, touring tennis stars...