Snooker: is it a sport? Is it a game? It doesn’t matter
Talking to people who don’t watch snooker makes it clear that it has a reputation of being “boring” and “an old man’s game.”
There are a few separate groups of people with this view:
- Those who remember the previous eras, where it was played by older men at a slow pace
- Those, like my wife, who see it on TV in the background but don’t watch the intricacies of the game
- Those who deem it inferior because it doesn’t require the physicality and athleticism of sports like football (American football or soccer), rugby, basketball, running etc.
Often accompanying this view is the refusal to acknowledge snooker as a sport at all — insisting that sports are for athletes. Admittedly, spending most of your time in a dark club hunched over a table hardly compares to sprinting around a field or court, and it wasn’t that long ago when snooker players would enjoy cigarettes and pints of beer while competing in a televised tournament.
Nor does official attire help: a waistcoat and bow-tie looks more at home in a stately home, incomparable with the dirt- and sweat-stained shorts and jerseys of most other sports.
But whether they’re sportspeople or not is a sideshow, and ultimately doesn’t matter. So let’s get it out of the way here, with a definition of sport.
According to Oxford Languages, sport as a noun is “an activity involving physical exertion and…
