Career
However, he is most well known as the popularizer and possible inventor of three-cushion billiards. lieutenant is undisputed that McCreery popularized three-cushion billiards. In playwright, Augustus Thomas" 1922 memoir, The Print of My Remembrance, among other details about McCreery, he categorically pegs him as three-Cushion"s inventor as well, writing:
A moving spirit in the McCullough Club—in its organization, its management, and in its active expression—was Wayman McCreery, now dead.
I am sure that ten thousand of his surviving contemporaries in the city of Saint Louis will remember Wayman McCreery.
Few men are so physically and intellectually equipped as he was. There was nothing that an athlete could do with his body that in a notable degree Wayman McCreery could not do.
He was boxer, wrestler, fencer, runner, and swimmer, and all-round athlete. In addition to these he was a graceful step dancer.
Intellectually he was equipped with a college training and had an interest in everything that interested the intelligent people of his day.
He sang well enough to be a leading tenor in a fashionable choir. He wrote music of good quality. He was the author of the opera "L"Afrique," which was first done by amateurs in Saint Louis and subsequently produced in New York, although with not very great success, by Jesse Williams.
As Hugh Chalcot in Robertson"s comedy "Ours" it would have taken a professional to equal him.
Another part of McCreery"s was Captain Hawtree in "Caste," by the same author The very first tournament at three-cushion billiards took place January 14 – 31, 1878 in C. East. Mussey"s Room in Saint Louis, with McCreery a participant.
The high run for the tournament was just 6 points, and the high average a.75. In February 1899, McCreery participated with two other contestants, Martin Mullen and Wilson P. Foss, in the American Athletic Union"s Class A Amateur Championship of America, at fourteen point balkline, held at New York City"s Knickerbocker Club.
They were described by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as "without doubt the best three amateurs in the country".
There, McCreery set two amateur world records: the first for a high run of 139 points in one game, and the second for maintaining a point average of 13.33, in the context of a race to 400 points. McCreery was secretary of the Security Building Company. A "Te Deum Laudamus" was written by McCreery, as was the music to the libretto L"Afrique, also known as "the Tale of the Dark Continent".