Snooker. Myths and Realities
What, exactly, is meant by the ‘history of snooker’?
A list of tournament winners, arranged by year, and the number of century breaks they have made? The prize money earned by this or that champion in a given season? The endless replaying of scandalous statements—or even actions—by leading players?
Or is history, after all, something rather different: a documented, step-by-step account of how the game was created and how it evolved, supported by verifiable facts and primary sources?
In practice, what passes for ‘history’ today tends to resemble something else entirely—a collection of convenient myths, smoothed over just enough to avoid appearing too implausible, yet based not on evidence, but on invention; shaped less by facts than by the appeal of a good story and the force with which it is told.