Maurice Vignaux

Maurice Vignaux
Personal details
birthday	1846
place of birth	Frégouville, France
date of death	February 17, 1916
Place of death	Monte Carlo, Monaco
Nickname (s)	The invincible
Active time	approx. 1870 / 80s – 1910s
Achievements Unless otherwise stated, the information relates to the “three cushion” discipline.
World Championships:
1 × (1880 - Free game) • 2 × (1904 - Cadre 47/1)
Continental Championships:
several times in the cadre

Maurice Vignaux or Vigneaux (* 1846 in Frégouville , † February 17, 1916 in Monte Carlo ) was a French carom world champion and specialist book author.

Game slip from the Free Game World Cup in New York in 1874

Life

Early years

Vignaux was born in 1846 in Frégouville, a small town in the south of France, but was raised in Toulouse , where he became a clerk in a commercial building as a teenager. As he occasionally played billiards, his talent for this sport quickly became apparent. Francois Ubassy realized this and became his mentor. Under his guidance he quickly got better, better even than his teacher. However, until 1874 it only had a local reputation. However, this changed suddenly in the same year when he took first place in the National Championships in the free game in New York , but his teacher only took sixth place (see scoreboard).

Professional years

When Ubassy visited the United States in 1873, he found that he should catch up with his student, who had now become a better player than himself. The following year he took Vignaux to New York. Both took part in the Free Game World Cup and Vignaux won in the first attempt with seven wins and only one defeat (see game slip). In a subsequent tournament he defeated Joseph Dion , in February he won the "Challenge Cup", awarded by the pool table manufacturer HW Collender.

In 1874, still in New York, he opened in the “14. Straße ”and the“ University Place ”have their own billiard salons. A year later he was defeated by the runner-up of the 1873 World Cup, Garnier, and then left the USA for home, but took the World Cup with him to Paris (at that time it was customary to hold the following World Cup in the country / city of the winner) . The American then traveled to France to bring the World Cup back to the States, but lost to Vignaux. After that, George Slosson tried but lost twice before succeeding in 1882.

Cyril Dion

On April 10, 1880, the World Cup in the free game between him and Slosson was held in the Grand Hotel in Paris in the presence of the President of France . Vignaux was a big favorite and was clearly ahead on the third day. The tide seemed to turn in Slosson's favor on the fourth day when, after a few difficult pushes, he suddenly started to bring the balls together on the short board. He led the balls in short, careful nudges along the board, around the corner and along the long board. He made sure that the balls were never more than a finger's breadth apart. The audience was amazed and believed they were dizzy. Some even claimed that the balls were linked. The President tried to hide his astonishment and assumed an uninvolved attitude. Vignaux had got up to take a closer look. In reality, he found out, this wasn't a secret, just a novel series game. The Canadian brothers Joseph and Cyrill Dion developed it in the USA and called it the " American Series ". Slosson had just introduced this style of play in Europe and achieved an incredible streak of 1103 points for the time. Vignaux was so impressed that he did not go to sleep in the evening, but practiced the American series . The next day he came to the table and immediately played a series of 1531 points, a new world record, and won his match over the distance of 4,000 points.

In 1883 Vignaux went to New York again and took part in his first Cadre tournament there. He made his last trip to the United States in 1885 when he played a number of games against Jacob Schaefer senior and Slossom. After two final defeats against Schaefer, he drove back to Paris. In 1884 he founded the world's first classic billiards school in Café Mangin in Paris .

In 1903 and 1904 Vignaux was world champion in cadre 47/1 and 47/2 and until 1910 continual European champion. Cadre 47/2 became his favorite game.

The only eighteen-year-old American Willie Hoppe defeated Vignaux, who was almost 50 years older than him, in Paris in Cadre 47/1 in 1906 and thus became world champion.

At that time, Vignaux was nicknamed the Invincible , because until the invention of the "American series" no other player had managed to defeat him in a major tournament.

He died in Monte Carlo in 1916 at the age of 70.

Fonts

• Le Billard , foreword by H. Desnar. Delarue, Paris 1889 and 1893. ISBN 1-1679-3038-X

literature

• Bogdan Pejcic, Rolf Meyer: Pool billiards - basics for training and play. Falken, Niedernhausen 1994, ISBN 3-8068-2318-9 .

Web links

Commons : Maurice Vignaux  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• History: Billiards on the Landing News from Cornwall and Cornwall-on-Hudson , Warren Mumford, January 9, 2007
• Match report Maurice Vignaux vs. Joseph Dion (PDF; 50 kB), New York Times, December 31, 1874

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} player profile on carombil.wordpress.com. Retrieved June 27, 2012
2. ↑ Sporting Life (PDF; 665 kB), February 26, 1916
3. ^ Scoreboard Billiards Magazine 1916. Retrieved June 27, 2012
4. ^ ^{A b c d e} Obituary , New York Times, February 20, 1916. Retrieved June 27, 2012.
5. ↑ Karlheinz Krienen: Billard Sport . 65 years of the German Billiards Association 1911–1976. Ed .: DBB. 54th year. Cologne November 1976, Die "Amerika" and Vignaux, p. 16 .
6. ↑ The history of billiards ( Memento of the original from April 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Billardcafe.at. Retrieved April 11, 2014. 
7. ↑ A short billiard story on BillardPalace.net. Retrieved April 11, 2014.