Masako Katsura
On March 7, 1952, Masako Katsura made history as the first woman to compete for the international billiards title.
To celebrate the achievement of Japanese shooters, Google Sunday dedicated an animated slogan for Katsura, widely known as "First Lady of Billiards.
Born in Tokyo in 1913, Katsura began playing billiards after her father's death when she was 12 and went to live with her older sister and son-in-law who owned a pool hall. By the age of 14, she was working in the salon as a stewardess and was working out hard.
At the age of fifteen, she won the Japan Women's Railroad Championship and quickly became the country's only professional female athlete. She ranked second three times in the Japan Three-Cushion Billiards Championships. In one of the straight railroad show games, you collected 10,000 points in the straight rail game, in which points are scored by contacting the other two balls on the table during the same shot.
After Katsura moved to the United States in 1951, eight-time world champion Welker Cochran walked out of retirement with her in a series of three matches. Sunday's doodles depict how to score a point in the game - the main ball must hit three railroad pads before calling the second object ball.
Cochran was so impressed with her talent that he sponsored the World Billiards Championship in 1952 in his pool room in San Francisco. And although it annoyed some of the sport's best players, it finished seventh, but was ahead of three notable players.
After losing the title match in 1961, Katsura kept out of the limelight for many years before making a surprise appearance at Palace Billiards in San Francisco in 1976. Using a borrowed billiard stick, the 63-year-old scored 100 points in a row with ease. It bowed to the popular applause and disappeared from the American pool scene.
Katsura was one of the first entries into the Women's Professional Billiard Association Hall of Fame in 1976. She returned to Japan in the 1990s and died in 1995.
Source:
cnet
