Word: billiard
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...following 34 years Willie Hoppe walked 50,000 miles around billiard tables, played against Nicholas Longworth before President Taft, was the butt of quips by Humorist Samuel Clemens, saw Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, and other great sport figures pass their peak, fade out of competition...
Last week in a third-floor room of Bensinger's billiard parlor in Chicago's Loop, chunky, flat-voiced Willie Hoppe, now a balding man of 52, still using his famous sidearm stroke, added the three-cushion billiard championship to the two he already held (18.1 balkline and cushion caroms). He had to compete against ten of the best players in the game, two of whom, during the course of the double round-robin tournament, succeeded in equaling previous records: one for consecutive points, the other for best (shortest) game. Playing calmly and steadily, muttering occasionally, "Come...
More than half the total comes from bowling. Particularly profitable is steady replacement business in pins, balls, other accessories. Hence the alley promotion campaign was logical. Chief form of promotion known to the old regime was to subsidize nearly all top bowling and billiard* players. The new, having found these hirelings expensive and unproductive, retains only a few, makes them work for their pay. One of the few: Trick Billiardist Charley Peterson, who has lectured on billiards at Harvard, whose business card reads "show me a shot I can't make." Sample Peterson shot: standing a half-dollar...
...Bensingers are far from satisfied with their billiard business. Having cleaned up bowling, they think the great American poolroom, which has long had a bad name, can be reformed and popularized too. B-B-C is preparing new promotional schemes to do just that...
Founded 95 years ago by Swiss Immigrant John Brunswick, B-B-C began as a maker of billiard tables, branched and merged its way into bowling alleys, tires, toilet seats, phonographs, records, radios, became the world's largest maker of bar fixtures. But Prohibition cooled the bar business. The music division was sold to Warner Bros. Pictures in 1930. B-B-C lost $3,047,963 in 1929, lost again in five of the next six years. Steering it helplessly in this heavy weather was Benjamin Bensinger, old-fashioned autocrat, grandson of Founder Brunswick...