Just trolling - you guys are so touchy when someone mentions cricket and any potential similarity to baseball.

Due to the extremity of Bradmans batting achievements his name has some powerful resonances in the psyche of the non-american sports fan, but maybe in the context if this thread it's like mentioning Muhammad Ali when you're talking about martial arts.

I'll now leave you to your mysterious diamond-shaped american cricket.

Don Bradman? Jesus. Is Walter Lindrum next?

Ozzies. Fuck.

Peanuts Lowery.
Burt Hooten.

Pud Galvin.

"Gentle" Ben Gaper

Rusty Staub
Ralph Houk
Mayo Smith
Three-Finger Brown
Clyde Barfoot
Bobo Osbourne
'Wahoo' Sam Crawford

steve wrote:Don Bradman? Jesus. Is Walter Lindrum next?

Ozzies. Fuck.

"I want gyros!" bellowed Stavros, a swarthy, beady-eyed Greek (man from Greece) whose protuberant gut and lubricious hair attested to his love of rotated meat goods.
His slightly less hirsute wife protested:
"But Stavros honey, I have gone to all this trouble to make you a cheese pie. Pleeease eat my cheeeese pie."
"I want gyros! GYROS!" Stavros insisted phlegmatically, a great shower of saliva punctuating the sentence.
"Oh Stavros darling," pleaded his wife. "Why won''t you eat my cheese pie. I have gone to all this trouble to make it."
"By Zeus! I'm a fifty-eight year old man! I can eat goddam gyros if I want to!!" thundered Stavros before grabbing his billiards cue and storming out- leaving his wretched wife, tears dribbling onto her beloved cheese pies, making little yellow rivulets in the creamy pie discharge like the pitter patter of rain drops through the sulphourous exudate of Santorini's volcanic springs."

Stavros was already feeling happier for having left the oppresive culinary tyranny of his abode. He started to sing a song to further lift his spirits. Without thinking, the words spewed forth from his mouth, like a man coming second last in a 5-man vomiting competition.

"Like a slow motion pirouhette, the rotisserie turns.
Like a Dutchman in a pancake house, for gyros my body yearns.

The joy and fulfilment i feel when i chew,
Are like a mans love for his best billiards cue.

As surely as a beggar knows the joys of buggery,
Gyros is the only food that sates the hunger in me."


As these last words, like an estranged nose, left his mouth a great trembling of the earth occured, causing a similar trembling in Stavros' bowels (borborygmi). Then a crack appeared in the ground; a torrent of magma shooting out with similar ferocity to the Bristol 7 stooge spraying from Stavros' derriere. From the ground emerged an ungodly creature- half badger, half beggar, threequarter gypsy. It boomed in a bassy baritone:

"I am the Santorini genie.
Your song summoned me.
Ask but one question,
the answer is free."

Stavros ignored the warm defecate covering his inner thighs and instead thought of the question to which most desired the answer. Ever since Stavros was a small, oily child he had wanted nothing more than to be a professional billiards champion and gyros gourmet. "How can I become more than a mere billiards lover: a grand billiards master?"

"That billiards cue,
there in front of thee.
Break it to segments
So they number three.

Then put it together,
so it be one piece.
For glue and adhesion,
use gyros meat grease.

Exceptional stance
and great skill too,
will come to all
that use said cue."

Stavros was so excited, he promptly lost control of his bowels again, before trotting off to do as he had been told.

From that day forward, Stavros devoted himself to billiards as completely as a beggar devotes himself to filth and indencency. His magical billiards cue - held together with the grease of low quality pork, squirrel and other meats -endowed him with superhuman billiards abilities. He could defy laws of nature and physics, he could leap metres into the air and hang suspended above the billiards table to play his shots from extreme advance positions.

Over the next few months his fame grew exponentially. Word spread throughout the International Billiards Community about the wild-eyed Greek with the gyros-grease-&-Canadian-Ash cue, who adopted such gravity-defying billiards stances as the Floating Foxton, the Inverted Gypsy, and the Reverse Breech Badger-Legged Spearfisherman.
His infernal wife still tormented him each evening with her grating soprano pleas to eat her cheeeese pies. Ï want gyros!! GYROS!!" Stavros would continually exclaim, his obese body quivering with rage. But the whinings of the wench were out of his thoughts as soon as he stepped up to the table to string.

The day of the first Olympic Games arrived, and Stavros was chosen to represent Greece in billiards. He cut through his International opponents like a hot knife through gyros meat, and reached the grand final where he was pitted against Australian Champion Walter Albert Lindrum. This would surely be his toughest match yet. Lindrum started with a perfect string and an opening break of 4168. Stavros was unperturbed as he responded with an equally impressive run from the Contrary Egyptian Gardener position.
The two GrandMasters traded blow for blow all day and night, like two fiercely competitive Amsterdam whores. The game was tied, and the time had come for Stavros to prove his worth. He remembered the words his father had spoken to him when he was 7 years old..."Stavros, I looovve Cheeeeese Pie." How he hated his father for that. With buttocks clenched and teeth grated, Stavros leapt into the air wielding his cue like an almighty truncheon. He shrieked like a gypsy as he formed his body into the posture of the Hovering-Haring-Handler, and prepared to play his shot.

Lindrum silently winked at him and tenderly bit into a large, damp cheeeese pie. A fiery anger billowed inside the burly Greek. He paused in his shot... then took off on his billiards cue, precociously prancing and Souvlaki showboating around the table. In quick succession, he adopted posture after posture, like a Euroman with a frappe at the beach. Then he started doing some outrageous stunts- extremely dangerous manoeuvres! He was high above the table balanced on his billiards cue- so high high he could feel the warmth of the billiards table lamp tenderly licking his back like tepid grill to the meat on a gyros rotisserie. Suddenly, like an iceberg in the year 2010, the gyros grease holding the cue together melted. Stavros tumbled from his lofty position...twisting and turning...and landing square on a section of billiards cue- tearing his perianal mucosa as it penetrated him sideways, but more importantly performing a pseudo-Icarus widthways autobuggery forefeit manoeuvre. In effect handing the game to Lindrum by law 24b of the Royal Rules and Regulations of English Billiards.

Themes of this narrative:
Ambition, ambition thwarted, family conflict, pride, Lindrumism, gastronomy, power of song, the environment, billiards-loving, theosophy, the occult.

^ That's pretty much how I remember it too. Man, Walt Lindrum - whadda baseball player he was. I believe this took place before the great schism, back in the days when there were six bases (or "pockets") and the playing field was covered in green-dyed pressed wool....history shows us that the game never really took off in Canada until they cut it back to four bases on dirt. Still, that Walt - whadda ball player. Crazy name too...Lindrum...I bet his mum felt stink when Peter Gabriel ruled the 80's.