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Biography: |
Jackie Rea was one of snooker's great characters who believed,
like his contemporary, Fred Davis, that the game should be fun.
Unfortunately he was at his best when snooker was at its lowest
ebb in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
He started playing in his father's pub and when he won the Irish
amateur championship in 1947 he immediately turned professional
and, straight away won the Northern Ireland professional
championship which he held continuously, apart from 1951, until
Alex Higgins deposed him in 1972.
He fist entered the world championship in 1949 but lost in the
qualifiers and his next attempt was in 1952 when the
Professional Matchplay championship replaced the official world
championship for a few years following a dispute with the
governing body. Records for that event are incomplete but Jackie
won his first round match and lost in the semi-finals. He lost
in the first round in 1953 and 1954 but was a semi-finalist
again in 1955 and 1956 losing to Fred Davis and John Pulman
respectively. In 1957 he reached the final but John Pulman
proved too good for him. In the meantime he had won the News of
the World tournament in 1955, beating Joe Davis into second
place having been runner-up in that same event two years before.
After that 1957 world championship, the event ceased, due to
lack of support, until 1964 and Jackie did not enter again until
1969 when he reached the quarter-finals which he repeated the
following year. After that he never again got beyond the first
round and did not feature when the first ranking lists were
published. He continued to play on the circuit until the late
1980s but rarely got past the qualifying stages of any event.
His sense of fun was one of the main reasons for his lack of
success but it did ensure that he was one of the most
sought-after players for exhibitions. He always had a great
affinity with his audiences and Dennis Taylor admits that he
learned a lot of his exhibition routine from Jackie. A great
storyteller, he was one of the innovators of the 'Irish Joke'
and would often begin his act with a line like, "Don't call us
Irish stupid. We invented a very comfortable toilet seat until,
200 years later, some stupid Englishman went and put a hole in
it!!" That was typical Jackie.
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