There are players who talk of perfect balls, but a well-turned ball is the limit, and neither its truing-up nor its recoloring should ever be intrusted to other than an artisan of conceded skill and experience. Earth has never known an absolutely round sphere or a perfectly smooth plane. Under the glare of a chemical light, lens and screen will show hills and valleys in both.
Requiring much patience and much ivory, matching balls is an art in itself. The lower end of a tusk is too small for carom balls, and the upper and larger too hollow. Perhaps six balls, on an average, can be shaped out of the central section. The ball toward the smaller end is closer-grained than any of its companions, all of which, while of the one size, may differ in other respects from one another. Possibly out of twenty tusks not fifty balls will be found approximately equal, in sets of three, with respect to weight and centralized gravity. As sets, they may all differ from one another, notwithstanding that any one set is fit for ordinary use; and for an important match the whole twenty tusks are liable not to turn out three balls alike in size, weight and central gravity.
The best and dearest ivory is the rarest—the worst, of course, is cheapest. Some tusks, as they grow, acquire more moisture than others. The dentine in the millions of little cells is greater in one tusk than in another. When it comes to billiard-balls, what the animal fed upon up to from ten to twenty years of age, and also where it fed, are no inconsiderable factors, could we find them out. Some tusks partly season by sun-drying as they grow, their owners having to trot long distances for water. Other elephants rear themselves where water is abundant, but sunshine scarce. There would also seem to be more durability in the detached tusk than in balls made from it. The writer has a match-set he knows to be at least twenty-three years old, that have never been returned, and that have not had their cardboard box opened in nearly twenty years. What will happen to them if put on table? Within four hundred feet of where they rest, the set used in the Phelan-Seereiter match fell to pieces, in 1867, as soon as played with. As souvenirs they had lain idle eight years. In Paris, some years later, professors engaged in a series of games with a set from a tusk (that of a mammoth) presumably thousands of years old. Until told the players had no idea but that those balls were from a modern elephant, born and despoiled within their own lifetime.
In view of all this, is it any wonder either that manufacturers decline to guarantee ivory or that man to-day knows no more about it and its care than was known two hundred years ago?
Heat is a greater foe to balls than cold. The latter is not an abstract, positive quality or condition, being merely the absence of heat. Could excessive warmth be guarded against as to billiard-balls, there would be little reason to dread the chilly draught. At the outset, balls need to be much larger in hot climates than in cold. We in America murmur, and yet billiards, both social and spectacular, is played in countries where heat and moisture will change every new set from sphere to spheroid within a month.
Balls usually do their prettiest freaks across the grain, but sometimes do them with the grain. Those that swell under the influence of moisture will occasionally, if allowed to remain idle for months, resume their proper form automatically; but in a large majority of cases truing-up is the only cure. Balls that crack will be helped to heal, like human lips that chap, by touching them somewhat sparingly with tallow. Neither rubbing balls with oil nor storing them in sawdust saturated with it is recommended. There are countries having peculiarly evaporative traits in which oil has been proved a blessing, but in this climate tallow for cracks and sawdust without oil are about the limit of cure and prevention.
Balls should never be placed on or near a heater. Modern artificial warmth is ivory’s direst enemy. Roomkeepers meet with fewer mishaps as to balls when their places are heated by stoves. Those fresh from play, especially in hot rooms, should not be placed on metal or stone, nor even on wood near door or window. Metal and stone are no colder than the room itself, although feeling colder to the touch; but they have a wonderful capacity for stealing heat from other things and giving it away in space, to suck in more. Nor should balls be put at once into an iron safe. Their play has been work, and there can be no work without generating inside heat. The old way was to put them up on a shelf in the open room. The box might have a lid, but there would be holes in it the year round. The fire would go out slowly and early, and zero might come after midnight, but the balls would be there at 8 A.M. sharp. Nails in the floor worried the old-timers, with their self-ventilating balls, more than heat or cold.
It was their fashion, too, never to put new balls in play at once. No matter how well-seasoned ivory is in point of age, it is practically nowhere riper than in its greenest part. Consequently a ball pared in spots in returning is virtually a new ball throughout in proffering the atmosphere new access to its interior. Were new balls put upon the table every day for two or three weeks, after the chill is off the room, and merely toyed with, without ever being struck with anything like force, they would probably give better and longer service.
A private table should have two sets of balls, and public rooms not fewer than three sets to every two carom tables.
As soon as play is done, the balls should be wiped off with a moist cloth, and then dried and polished with one of wool or chamois, so fine as not to scratch.