8/14/2023 0 Comments Billiards room![]() I lost, we shook hands and they asked me where the parties were. While my fraternity brothers were doing what they do, I was locked in a heated game of nine-ball until midnight against a couple of students from Carnegie Mellon University. My freshman year, the UMTPC was the weekend of Halloween. In fact, U-M hosts the largest college pool tournament in the country, the University of Michigan Team Pool Championships. It wasn’t long before I was on the club pool team. This is my refuge, my paradise and my home. The green-felted nine-foot Brunswick tables put the ratty seven-footer my dad taught me to play on to shame. It is where I would unwind after a long day and where I would bring people to understand me a bit more. I spent hours every week –– probably every day –– in this room my freshman year. As this academic year ends, so too will the lingering life of the historic billiards hall. However, one room on the second floor remains virtually untouched, frozen in time and displaying the Union’s winding story. Over the century since, these amenities have slowly been replaced by a computer lab, Starbucks, Au Bon Pain, fast food chains and other facilities that fill today’s Union. The wooden table top was replaced first by marble, then by slate, which ensured stability and a perfect horizontality.Few people know that when the Michigan Union was erected in 1919, it boasted a bowling alley, bar, swimming pool, barber shop, hotel rooms and much more. But it was during the reign of Louis the Fifteenth that the game became widely popular. One also features in the 1514 inventory of Charlotte d’Albret, Duchesse de Valentinois. ![]() It's said that King Louis the Ninth ordered the first billiard table to be made. This word is found in the 13 th century poetic work, Le Roman de la Rose, designating a wooden stick with a bent head: a blueprint for the first billiard cues perhaps! As for the game itself, it evolved from an outdoor game played on lawns, rather like croquet, when the gentry took it indoors and reinvented it as a game to be played on a table in a special room. The English word "billiards" is derived from the French "billard". ![]() It was classified as a Historical Monument in 1954. ![]() In the de Broglie family’s days, this tapestry was on display in the Guard Room. ![]() The Siege of Saguntum was a provocation for the Eternal City when the Carthaginian Senate refused to disavow its General-in-Chief, Hannibal, Rome declared war on the Carthaginians and so began the Second Punic War. This is the scene that the tapestry depicts, where Hannibal is showing the city under siege to two emissaries who have come to make peace. In 219 BC, he seized the initiative by opening hostilities against Rome and laid siege to Saguntum, a city allied with Rome. Hannibal quickly became the sole commander of the Carthaginian army. The Carthaginian Senate tasked Hamilcar Barca with conquering the Iberian Peninsula, which he pulled off with success his son-in-law Hasdrubal continued his exploits and appointed as First Lieutenant a certain Hannibal, Hamilcar Barca’s son. The conquest of Spain would make it possible to keep a permanent army there, near Italy. After losing the First Punic War against Rome in the 3 rd century BC, the city of Carthage looked for another way to reach Italy by land. ![]()
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