I started playing pool 73 years ago.
I started playing with clay balls and later Centeniels.
Object ball throw did not seem to be an issue until Arimath balls and Simonis cloth was introduced.
Do you have any opinion about that?
Bill S.
As others have mentioned, I would think (but haven't tested) that clay balls would not have been as smooth/polished, and because of that increased ball/ball friction they would have had more throw than modern balls.
Two factors occurred to me for why it may not have been noticed much at that time. We know for a fact that players subconsciously adjusted for it but they may not have even noticed throw much on a conscious level (or in many cases may not have even known it even existed) until it became "a thing" that became commonly known and talked about among players, which for some people may have roughly coincided with about the time frame that Aramith and Simonis were introduced or becoming popular.
Another possibly factor is that on the old equipment with slow cloth and clay balls people tended to shoot harder because they had to, and higher shot speeds minimize the effects of throw and so it may not have been as noticeable since the shot speeds reduced the effective throw.
It may also be that these same two factors (that it wasn't a fully known and understood commonly discussed thing yet, and also that shot speeds tended to be higher on the equipment of the time), may also account for why there may have been less (or less severe) skids and/or that whatever skids occurred just weren't noticed as much.
It was common back in the day for people to not be consciously aware of things like throw, or only vaguely aware of them without a full understanding, even though everybody was obviously subconsciously adjusting for such things. In fact many of us who have been playing long enough can probably remember a time when we didn't fully consciously know about and have a full understanding of throw prior to when it was brought to the public's mainstream attention through books and magazines and the internet. I remember that even as late as the early 90's no less that world champion Mike Sigel was arguing in print that cut induced throw did not exist and essentially that beliefs otherwise were silly. Such thought was common prior to that time and I think we tend to forget about that because of how conscious everybody is of those concepts today and how truly second nature they are to us now.
