snooker, inscrutable sport of champions

though i wanted to go to london for my semester abroad, i worried that this decision was a bit of an evasion of responsibility. after all, i didn't have to deal with a different language or vast cultural differences. friends went to india and russia and korea and zimbabwae. friends had to live with crazy families who didn't understand the concept of personal space and friends were joltingly asked to weigh themselves every morning. trials! travails! cultural immersion!

in contrast, i rented a flat with three grinnellians and worked in parliament, site of my most "foreign" experiences. i interned for a scottish member of parliament who, after a few years of americans filtering through his office, had learned to recognize when facial expressions slid from listening to utter incomprehension in the face of rapid words disintegrating into one long stream of scottish brogue. this certainly did not constitute the full-on disorientation i was supposed to feel amidst my exciting semester abroad, though. no forced, fearful engagement with the unknown for me.

but british culture contained a few unexpected deviations from the things i knew.

to whit - apparently, if you don't have a british accent in england, than you are automatically relegated to the category "australian on her gap year; possibly (probably) slutty." thus, about a dozen often sort of drunk men attempted to pick me up in bars, after informing me that they found an australian accent to be "very sexy." me too, buckoos.

another piece of newness was british television. i love british tv. it doesn't have the same polished feel as american tv, which makes it less uncomfortably shiny and consumption-oriented. even when americans aren't selling you something, they're selling you something.

not so with the british. when coupled with afar laxer approach to sexuality and obscenity, the homemade qualities of british tv produce a hodgepodge of brutally deadpan sitcoms, programs that seemed to be a series of jokes requiring physical humor a la monty python (but not as good), hilariously bad soap operas, the bbc news programs i watched religiously, what to american sensibilities would be very poorly made commercials, and hours upon hours of snooker.

now, almost all of these television offerings made sense to me. at least on some basic level i understood them, assisted as i was by my own horribly deadpan sense of humor, which is certainly not politically correct and can often verge on the offensive.

snooker table

snooker was another issue entirely. to those not acquainted with the game (deprived of even my nominal understanding), snooker looks and feels like pool. it is not pool. it is a game evilly designed to trick you into believing it is pool, before it becomes readily apparent that you have absolutely no idea what is going on. then, after having watched a solid four hours of it in an ill-fated attempt to "teach yourself," you realize that you have wasted the best part of the day sitting on your ass in front of the tv, while roommates bustle around you and people move to and fro in the streets. indeed, you are surrounded by a city with the tate modern and portabello market and the british museum, all stuffed full of people who are smarter than you and know that learning the ins and outs of snooker is not the point of a semester abroad. for most people, anyway. perhaps there is a fulbright in this.

but you do it again the next day, and the next. and then watching snooker becomes a personal quest to divine the rules of the game simply by watching hour after hour of coverage, little colored balls knocking around the table.

eventually, this careful deconstruction of play descends into bewilderment. after a few days, i looked a number of rules charts up on the internet, a project that revealed why the rules i had concocted were almost always disproved within a few cue strokes of their construction. a revealing example:



what?! i don't even completely understand how this causal flow chart works, much less the information it is attempting to convey. i spent the better part of a week figuring out what the difference between a foul and a miss was, leaving the repercussions of this distinction well alone. unfortunately, this was an inherently flawed method of determining rules - i was discovering rules through analysis of repercussions.

this approach might have worked better for me if i had realized that snooker is a game which continually offers your opponent control over the parameters of your actions. for instance, a person who commits a foul must reshoot if his or her opponent requests. additionally, there are levels of fouling. one can commit multiple fouls at once, compounding their penalties and thus increasing their opponent's control over the trajectory of play. when the highest level of foul is reached, maximum penalties are incurred. whatever those maximum penalties are. i didn't ever figure that out.

the ability to compound fouls is important, because the game divides naturally into two phases, one in which there are still red balls on the table and one in which they have all been potted and the other colors remain. this is important because you are required to alternate between potting red balls and colored balls. a foul is incurred if you fail to do this. a foul is also incurred if you hit more than one color on a single turn. i am confusing myself just relating the rules.

in the end, i did what any good (bad?) student does in the face of incomprehension - i narrowed my projected thesis. instead of mapping out a range of snooker rules through observation, i would define what in the hell snookering was. this took me a month of watching intermittent snooker tournament coverage. i wrote my definition down in my tiny red journal, alongside a recipe for cinnamon buns and a set of notes on the series of cy twombly paintings on special exhibit in the tate.

my definition:
you are snookered when you are unable to hit any ball on either side of the table - any ball that is legally in play.

the definition given by billiard world:
"The cue ball is snookered when a direct stroke in a straight line to any part of every ball on is obstructed by a ball or balls not on. If there is any one ball that is not so obstructed, the cue ball is not snookered. If in-hand within the Half Circle, the cue ball is snookered only if obstructed from all positions on or within the Half Circle. If the cue ball is obstructed by more than one ball, the one nearest to the cue ball is the effective snookering ball."


yes. i feel that way as well.

okay. so there is always a part of british culture that will remain incomprehensible to me, utterly inscrutable. so i did go to a foreign country for my semester abroad.

goddamn snooker.