Forty-five years ago in a back room of the Commercial Hotel of Cornwall, N. Y., seven-year-old William Frederick Hoppe stood on a soap box, lifted his arms high to get them over the edge of the table, and with a sidearm stroke sent the Zanzibar ivory balls rolling smoothly over the green baize. Eleven years later Hoppe, using the same queer sidearm stroke, defeated the long-haired, elegant French champion, Maurice Vignaux, in the bespangled ballroom of Paris' Grand Hotel to become at 18 the world's champion 18.1 balkline billiardist.
In the following 34 years...
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