Dear Ken4-Fun,
Yes, the cues on the wall were perfectly playable in the old days. I started playing pool in 1960, and rooms back then were particular about the cues they put out. Very few people had a two-piece cue, and, anyway, most of the one-piece cues which were available back then (obviously excluding things like Rambo’s) were not that much better, or even as good as, the cues on the wall. The only amateur players you would see with a two-piece cue were guys who for some reason played in more than one room, and there weren’t very many of those. Many regular players kept a personal one-piece cue—often one they had selected from the ones on the wall—in a locker at the pool room.
As for Bugs using a different cue every time as an analogy with using a new set of golf clubs, the weight and thickness of a cue seem to me not so important as the tip. If the tips on the different cues were similar, you might be able to acclimate yourself fairly fast. The tip seems to me analogous to the flex of a golf shaft. If the flex were the same in two golf clubs, you might not have so much trouble moving from one club to the other.
Yes, research shows that there is such a thing as a bump up in performance with a new set of golf clubs. But it lasts only about four or five rounds. The theory is that the new clubs make you go back to just thinking about hitting the ball and not about things like shifting your weight or having your left elbow straight and all the other stuff from the instruction books that can get in your head and interfere with what is the real task at hand, namely, hit a golf ball.
There is a musical pedagogue named Eloise Ristad who has a book on this subject. The book is titled A Soprano on Her Head. The title comes from a teacher’s trick which she plays on her students. Singers worry all the time about whether they have their shoulders in the right position and whether they are getting down deep enough in their diaphragm when they breathe and a host of other technicalities. When Ristad had a student who was having trouble, she would ask the student if she could do a headstand. If she said she could, Ristad would ask her to do one and hold it. Then, while the student was upside down, Ristad would shout at her, “Now, sing!” The student would often be shocked by how well she could sing even when it was not possible for her to observe any of the technical rules.
I have two personal examples of this phenomenon, one at second hand and one in my own experience. I have a friend who is a semi-pro drummer. He got involved performing with a vocal group in a contest in which there were some very peculiar rules. Somehow it came about that because of these rules he got separated from his drumsticks. His only recourse was to take two pieces of wood and whittle (!) them into something like drumsticks! He told me that he was astonished at how little his performance fell off. My own experience was this. It was January in the Midwest, and we had some warm weather. A Scots friend of mine and I went out to play some golf. The course was open, but the greens were so soggy that you were forbidden to walk on them. The manager had cut putting cups in the fairway, which was itself rather rough, for each hole in front of the green. My friend and I set out and agreed that we would just forget about scores around the cup because obviously we were going to do so badly. When you got close to the green, that is the hole bored in the ground in the fairway, you had to take a seven iron and chip the ball toward the cup. But then balls started flying into the cup from everywhere! On the sixth tee, I said to my friend, “Ian, can you believe this is happening?” He answered, “It’s impossible, but it is happening,” which was a shibboleth we used between the two of us on matters at work. The psychology was clearly that we had abandoned the possibility of “getting down in two” when we were on what ordinarily would have been the green and were concentrating just on holing the ball, not on our putting backstroke or keeping the blade of the putter flat to the target through the hitting area. Just hit the thing in the cup! At least on that one afternoon, it worked!
