The Stick Is an Unsung Hero of Human Evolution

In April 1997, at the snooker world championship held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, Ronnie O’Sullivan stepped up to the table to play a frame in what was expected to be a routine victory in his first-round match against Mick Price. What happened in the next 5 minutes and 20 seconds sent shock waves through the world of snooker and ripples of respect through the wider world of professional sport. To the uninitiated, there is a sequence of 36 balls that must be potted in order to achieve the highest score possible in a frame: 147—what aficionados call a “maximum break.” Up until 1997, this had been achieved in official competition snooker on a handful of occasions, in a sport that had effectively turned professional in the late 1960s. It was only a matter of time before the gifted O’Sullivan scored his first competition 147, but it was the manner in which he did it that created such a stir. As he glided around the table he played with a pace and confidence that belied his 21 years. A man at one with the stick in his hands and in a trancelike engagement with his art, he was demonstrably thinking four or five shots ahead and, in playing with such fluidity of movement, O’Sullivan had found a new zone within which the game could be played.

It may seem crude, but to put the achievement into context, it can be compared on pure financial terms with other sports. For a frame that lasted a mere 320 seconds, O’Sullivan was awarded bonus prize money of £165,000. Few can brag that they’ve ever earned £515.63 per second for the work they do—especially at such a tender age. At its most basic, he makes his money with a length of polished wood and a lump of chalk. For many people, earnings aside, O’Sullivan’s feat ranks among the very best sporting achievements in the world. But for me, it’s a celebration of mankind’s perfection at stick usage: a poetically beautiful combination of craft, genius, nerve, and swagger.

Sticks are probably where the story of craft begins—the point at which our very distant ancestors progressed from animalistic existences to lives materially enhanced by the objects around them. The transition when, in a moment of epiphany, an ape holds aloft the bone he has just used to pulverize to death the leader of a rival tribe before casting it up into the sky. It’s unfortunate that my example of humankind’s breakthrough moment in the evolution toward tool use occurred in such violent consequences. Kubrick’s objective was undoubtedly to comment on what drives technological change, and how using sticks to fight each other was instrumental in the development of human societies. But I suspect they played a more mundane role in our evolutionary journey before they were systematically used for brutalizing fellow members of the species. Even with the orchestral soundtrack provided by the climactic opening bars of Richard Strauss’s “” the sequence would have lacked a certain potency if Kubrick’s ape had used a stick to knock an apple off a tree. Whichever way you choose to depict this defining moment in the human story, the successful use of a stick in those primeval times would undoubtedly have brought fame and fortune.