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Show Willie Hoppe Continues To Be Enduring Champion By DREW MIDDLETON NEW YORK. Nov. 30 (AP) Unless you know about billiards, especially the French 71 2 balkline game that Willie Hoppe and Jake Schaefer are playing this week, it looks like the easiest game U' No WILLIE HOPPE in the world. When, out of a welter of technical techni-cal mumbo-jumbo, the significance of the various shots, the intricate interdependence of physical and geometrical laws Is grasped, the smooth fluency of the play becomes real. Here In the motions of these two men is the same coordinated rhythm of Babe Ruth's batting swing, of Dempsey's left hook; it Is the token, to-ken, the hallmark, of champions. New to America The game they are playing Is new to America. It differs from other balkline games In the dimensions of the markings. The players think It is more difficult than 18.1 because they must drive the ball farther to get it out of balk and because there is less opportunity for nursing. The lines. 71 millimeters from the side and end rails, are drawri exactly ex-actly through the spots, leaving six balk spares instead of nine. Schaefer had the upper hand all day yesterday. He won the afternoon match or block, 250 to 343. and the evening match. 250 to 173. Hoppe. one of the greatest and most enduring endur-ing of sport champions, is turning to a new game after 31 years in which he has held every billiard championship. Btartrtf When M Hoppe has been playing billiards since he was 10. He won his first world's championship In Paris in 1908 when he was 18. Smiling oldsters old-sters who "remember when you were a kid" come up to shake hands with him'after every match. At 49 he is gray, dapper and smiling. smil-ing. He takes defeat calmly: "We all have our off nights, and this is a new game." He keeps training: "I walk a lot and watch my diet; I have to. I've been around a long time." Willie learned billiards at Corn-wall-on-Hudson. N. Y. His father had a hotel and barber shop there, with a billiard table in the barber ahop. ' Salesmen who stopped at the hotel ho-tel kept returning to Jark Doyle's billiard parlor in New York with tales of a 10-year-old kid who had beaten them. Jack, after the heelings heel-ings had become too numerous to blame on country applejack, brought Willie and his father to New York. "We'll have to." said Jack, "or this kid will become another Hudson Hud-son rivsr legend." They brought him down and he's been a legend wherever billiards are played ever since. I |