The World Snooker Championship, and snooker tournaments in general, all follow a similar format. This format generally adheres to a bracketed structure in which players are expected to win a series of matches as they progress through an event, thereby eliminating the opponents they defeat from the competition. This can be otherwise known as a ‘knockout’ format. However, the World Championship wasn’t always this way, as we’ll now explore.
In fairness, for the most part since the WSC’s conception, the tournament has involved the knockout format. Although, between the years 1964-68, it followed a different structure. Due to struggling interest in the sport between the years 1958-63, there were no WSC’s held. In fact, very few (if any) official tournaments were actually held during these years. Cuetracker shows that no tournaments were sanctioned from 1959-63.
That is until Rex Williams intervened. Williams was able to schmooze the BA&CC chairman and convince him over lunch to revive the WSC. One can only speculate as to the choice of format used for these events but the following events would be held under a challenge basis; whereby the defending champion would play against a challenger. And this would be the only match of the championship.
This may have been chosen due to the declining interest, so by playing fewer matches which all involved the defending champion would perhaps spark and retain a little more interest in the sport. Whether this was a successful method or not, one thing is for certain: who knows how long it would have been before the WSC returned, if at all.
Now that the World Championship had returned, enter John Pulman. Pulman was the winner of the previously held WSC in 1957, which made him the defending champion for the challenge-based WSC to follow. This is where Pulman established his dominance as he was able to successfully defend the championship in all of his encounters from 1964-68. This involved multiple victories over Fred Davis, Williams (as above) and later on, Eddie Charlton in the final iteration of the challenge-based WSC.
The interesting thing that struck me with these tournaments is that they weren’t held annually. Kind of. Again, the reasons are unknown but I feel the WSC’s/challenge matches were only held when it was available to do so. This meant that there were two WSC’s in 1964, three in 1965 and none at all in 1967. This technically meant that Pulman won two world championships in 1964 and three in 1965. However, there are always going to be asterisks next to these stating how these were contested over challenge matches. Although, when Pulman won every single match, was it really a challenge?
Other fun facts about these series of challenge matches were that a couple of them were held in South Africa as part of a tour. Also, Williams was able to break the previous WSC record break of 136 as he made a 142 against Pulman in November 1965. This record stood for 16 years until it was finally beaten by Doug Mountjoy in 1981.
Nevertheless, the WSC format did eventually revert back to its original knockout format in 1969. This, of course, was the time many considered the start of the modern era as it then propelled snooker into stardom thanks to the likes of Pot Black and personalities of those such as Ray Reardon and Alex Higgins. It’s hard to tell whether this would have still occurred without the existence of the 1964-68 challenge matches, but they certainly have their place in snooker history and I’m glad that Williams’ intervention aided in reducing the gap between WSC’s during a difficult time period.
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