Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 309, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 December 1919 — CUE SKILL OF CHAMPION WILLIAM HOPPE DUE LARGELY TO INFLUENCE OF FATHER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CUE SKILL OF CHAMPION WILLIAM HOPPE DUE LARGELY TO INFLUENCE OF FATHER

Willie Hoppe has aghin won a billiard championship over the best exponents of the game in the world. There may be fellows who can play a more brilliant game .than Hoppe in practice. There is ho man, nor anyset of men, who can beat him ip a tournament. What is true of every other game is true of billiards. There are times, when some men can play ''brilliantly when there is nothing' at stake, but 4t is the fellow who can always play ■'brilliantly-who gets mdney and makes the championships. Hoppe is one of these. He always plays in championship form. \ Has Lived Right The reason he does that is that he' has always lived in a way to guarantee constant topnotch play. He has sacrificed more, probably, than any other living billiardist, and it shows in the result. There is no man on earth who, in the long run, can beat Hoppe at the billiard game, and he has. earned the right'to be the supreme billiardist of his tithe; be has worked for it. Whatever success Champion Hoppe has attained at billiards—and hy many he is conceded to be the greatest player of all time —is due largely to the influence of his father, now a billiard instructor. John Henry F/ank Hoppe was born in 1862 at Goshen, N. Y. A His sons are Frank, the pocket billiard player, now liVing 1 at Rockford; Willie, the balkline champion, and Albert, who is in business in St. Louis. Sons Start Game Young. Frank Hoppe was 7% and Willie 5% when they first started playing, Hoppe

Sr. had a combination table and the first efforts of the boys was at pocket billiards. Hoppe toured the country with the youngster, Willie then being 8. Willie took up billiards and at 10 .years of age could play 100 or no count. It sometimes has been stated that Willie stood on a box to play some shots, bus his father femes this. The boy climbed on the table when he had a long reach to make. Willie Hoppe won the shortstop championship of the world at Paris in January, 1904,* and then, returned home and toured with, the late Jake Schaefer, winning most of his games. His next goal was the 18-i championship and for six months he practiced under the eye of his father and then, going to France, electrified the billiard world by wresting the title from Maurice Vignaux, the great French master, on Jan. 15, 1906. Hoppe won, 500 to 323, "averaging 20. In fourteen years of. championship play Hoppe has been beaten only twice in matches, once by Sutton and once by Schaefer. Father Student of Game. .. There is no greater student of the game than the elder. For forty years he watched the leading players of the world and from this study evolved a system which is different from that of any other player. It .is this system which has given Willie his supremacy as a balkline player. It is based largely on the method in which the 1 object ball.is hit. “Time or timing,” says Mr. Hoppe, “is the greatest itenj in billiards,” and his ability in this line has "been a big factor in the work of Willie Hoppe.

Supreme Billiardist of His Time.