IN winning the 2001 Rockpool World Billiards Championship at Christchurch, Geet Sethi re-established the standards that made him such a potent force in the 1990s. From the standpoint of the game in India, Sethi's rediscovery of the hunger and pride of performance that were such a feature of his total persona could not have come at a better time. Cuesports in general, and billiards in particular, are of fundamental importance to India's overall showing in the 2002 Asian Games. While there is little doubt that we would have been the hot favourites to win the billiards medals, the fact that our buildup to Pusan will be with a reigning world champion in tow, so to speak, will have immeasurable value in terms of the inspiration it will provide to the other probables.
Sethi's victory was accomplished with the incredible focus and will to win that characterised his capture of the 1992 world professional title. In that championship, he had a personal best break of 1276, a world professional record under the rules then prevailing, and another of over 800. In Christchurch, his best was an 856, made in his first visit of the second session of the final against the hapless Ashok Shandilya. He also had a 636 in the same session and in the process, beat the world record session average of 246.3 held by yours truly since 1978 with an outstanding tally of 248.33. The high breaks might have been bigger in 1992, but I share Sethi's own opinion that his cuemanship was significantly better this time around. Being more involved in the game as coach nowadays, I had the opportunity of watching his action closely for 38 hours spread over nine matches, and the machine-like precision of his cue-arm even under stress, which admittedly was not often, was a purist's delight. It was lean and spare with all unnecessary flourish ruthlessly excised from it, and as a natural result, the delivery of his cue along the desired line was amazingly consistent.
It is not often that such a pure action is witnessed in billiards. In my mind's eye, I can see Mike Russell, the current world No. 1 and one of the best players of the modern era, hitting the ball, and I think that technically Sethi has the advantage. With his hunger now back in full measure, Sethi's technique combined with his disciplined life-style could well spell the difference when they next meet. It has always been Russell's boast that he would "murder" his Indian rival any time in any tournament in the U.K. and in fact he has been successful in that boast. But come November 2001, making Russell eat those words in the course of the UK and British Open championships is something that Sethi can plan for much more realistically than has been the case in the past.
The reason for the change is not far to seek. Sethi's approach to the game in recent years has been lukewarm. Whatever he has achieved since that fantastic performance in 1992 has more or less been on autopilot. The dedicated hours on the table, such a constant with all great players, dwindled in parallel with his flagging interest in the game. It is a measure of his quality as a player that he still managed to retain his number two ranking against the marauding attacks of the hugely-talented Chris Shutt, current world professional champion Peter Gilchrist and the rambunctious David Causier. But as a friend and colleague over the last 20-odd years, I was saddened by his loss of interest in the game and, in a sense, annoyed that he had managed to get away with it. Indian billiards needed him not only to be firing on all cylinders but also to be seen to be doing so. Instead, there he was, an open advocate of the minimal practice regimen, an attitude that risked inducing youngsters to question the merits of hard work. He knows as well as anyone that his success has been the result of unremitting toil and that, a couple of performances apart, the recent downward curve of his graph was the result of his reluctance to adhere to the punishing work ethic of his earlier years.
Sethi must have felt the humiliation of his recent setbacks, particularly his one-point defeat at the hands of Arun Agrawal in the quarterfinal of the 1998 World championship in Chennai. Fortunately, the feeling that he was not being fair to himself, and the news that there are two billiards gold medals up for grabs in the Asian Games, have galvanized Sethi into action. After receiving a kick in the butt, to put it crudely, he has grown hungry once again to start kicking butt big-time. And how well he succeeded in Christchurch!
Serious practice before the event brought him nicely to a boil during it. He had the added advantage of 20 hours of matchplay in the league matches, with the comfortable knowledge that they were all merely a warm-up for the sterner tests in the knockout phase. Sethi's statistics are interesting in that they clearly show how well he responds to a spell of continuous competition. It is common knowledge, certainly among his Indian colleagues, that if you have to get Sethi, it had better be in the early stages of a competition, otherwise a stick of dynamite would be an attractive ally.
In his first league match, he had 3 centuries and two doubles. This progressed to 2 x 100, 4 x 200, and 2 x 300 in his second, 4 x 100, 2 x 200 and 1 x 300 in his third, 4 x 100, 2 x 200, and 1 x 400 (a 475) in his fourth and 3 x 100, 3 x 200, 2 x 300 and 1 x 400 (a 495) in his last. He scored a total of 13,224 points in the league for a terrific average of 47.9 for the 20 hours of play. The figures of his closest opponents, (Ashok Shandilya, 10,456 points, 36.4 average and Devendra Joshi, 9,124 points, average 33.5) demonstrates just how far he was ahead of the opposition.
Sethi had only one less than extraordinary match and that was his pre-quarterfinal against Paul Stocker (NZ) whom he beat 1649-861. I believe that this was a natural reaction to his heavy scoring in his previous five matches, in most of which his opponents hardly allowed him a rest between visits. But he perked up in his quarterfinal against Alok Kumar whom he beat 1735-711 including a superb 515, the first time he crossed the 500 mark. The fact that Devendra Joshi had made a 540 in his match against Nalin Patel must, I am sure, have given him something to shoot for.
Sethi's semifinal against Joshi was without a shadow of a doubt, THE match of the tournament. Recovering from a poor league that saw him finish third in his group, Joshi was breathing fire in the knockout phase. In a great match against the 22-year-old Matthew Bolton, Joshi saw his first visit 505 break vanish into nothingness when the West Australian took a 50-point lead at the end of the session. But the Bharat Petroleum star gave evidence that he has moved into the top echelons of the game when he fired in three big doubles in the second session to set up a semifinal shootout against Sethi. With due respect to Shandilya, everyone believed that their match was in fact the final. And what a match it proved to be!
After a 300 break gave Sethi a 250-point lead, Joshi responded with a tremendous 236 unfinished to bounce right back into the match. Taking the break to 444, Joshi took a lead of 192 that was reduced to 108 with 50 minutes to go. And then followed what I believe is the best break under pressure I have ever seen. With one eye on the clock, Sethi carefully constructed, brick by brick, a magnificent effort of 551, initiated by a remarkable long slow pot against the nap, to snatch the match from Joshi's despairing grasp. The 45-minute break had four crises. The first was in the 200s, when a sensational ultra-thin in-off white off the top left side cushion into the opposite middle pocket saved the day. Three equally sensational pot reds within the next 100 points followed this extraordinary shot. The break was a monument to determination and intensity of purpose and spells trouble for all his opponents in the foreseeable future.
After that, the final was something of an anti-climax, the only interest being on whether Sethi could cross the magic 1,000-point barrier for the second time in his career. It almost happened, when an unfinished 236 in the first session reached a phenomenal 856 on the resumption. That meant that Sethi had scored a mind-boggling 620 points in his first visit to the table in the second session. He was playing so well, however, that with 80 minutes left in the session and a whole session to follow, reaching four figures always remained a possibility. He again raised everyone's hopes during his 636, but a screw cannon along the length of the side cushion brought that great effort to an end.
Carping critics might contend that Sethi's victory was a trifle hollow because players like Mike Russell and company were conspicuous by their absence. However, the man himself, not normally given to bombast, states that their presence would not have made a significant difference. That is a pointer to how good he felt. Similarly, there are some who state that the abundance of big breaks was due to the generous pockets and the absence of the baulkline rule. That criticism is fair comment and raises the possibility that ratification of the record average might be open to question. However, in no way does it diminish the magnitude of Sethi's achievements in Christchurch.
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