Willie Mosconi

Billiards Player

• Born: June 27, 1913
• Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Died: September 16, 1993
• Place of death: Haddon Heights, New Jersey

Sport: Billiards

Early Life

William Joseph Mosconi was born in Philadelphia on June 27, 1913. He learned to play billiards in his father’s pool hall. However, his father, Joseph William Mosconi, wanted him to join the Dancing Mosconis on the vaudeville entertainment circuit. To discourage him from playing billiards, Willie’s father locked up the cues. Undaunted, Willie improvised by using a broomstick to shoot potatoes into the pockets.

By the age of six, the pocket-billiards prodigy was playing exhibition matches in were chosen and Philadelphia for money. Willie never took lessons to learn how to play billiards. Instead, he mastered billiards by watching other people play the game. The hustlers who came to Philadelphia sought Willie out just so they could brag they had beaten the child star, but, by Willie’s account, the hustlers often left town broke. When Willie was six, he scored a victory in which he sank forty consecutive balls. However, he became bored with billiards and retired at the age of seven.

The Road to Excellence

Willie believed most of the great billiards players—including himself—were born with the talent. They were also showmen who knew how to please spectators. From the time he was a teenager, billiards provided him with his livelihood. He never thought of the game as a pastime. He only played for the money, which he used to feed his family.

In 1933, at the age of twenty, Willie won a sectional tournament, finished third in the national championships, and earned a place, but no title, in the world championships. Despite the fact he finished fifth, Brunswick Corporation, a manufacturer of billiards equipment, hired him to demonstrate its products. While traveling the country giving exhibitions on behalf of Brunswick, he perfected his famous trick shots.

After several unsuccessful attempts at the world championships title, Willie sought employment outside the world of professional billiards. In 1941, when no job offer materialized, he returned to Philadelphia and competitive billiards.

The Emerging Champion

Willie won his first world championship in a marathon tournament of 224 games that lasted from November 26, 1940, to May 2, 1941. Between 1942 and 1953, Willie held the world title ten out of twelve possible times.

On many occasions, Willie said the best advice about billiards that anyone ever gave him was to hate the person he was playing. What Willie hated most was not the player, but rather the possibility of his own defeat. The killer instinct, the desire to beat an opponent by a score of 125-0, was critical to his success. Pocket billiards, he said, is a game of concentration played shot by shot. It is all about the control of the cue stick, the cue ball, the balls, the rails, and the pocket. A champion knows where all the balls will go from the first shot.

Willie rarely ever practiced more than an hour or two at a time. Billiards, he said, could only be mastered in competition against better players. The best lesson every player must learn is not to miss, because then he or she does not have to worry about anything else. Willie once beat thirteen-time world champion Ralph Greenleaf in a 1948 match that lasted only seventeen minutes because he did not want to miss a play at the Strand Theater in Times Square in New York City.

Continuing the Story

By 1950, Willie was a national celebrity. His rapid-fire play and trademark sports jacket and slacks only enhanced his image. His stardom won him a new role in the world of billiards. He was a technical adviser on the set of The Hustler (1961), which starred his friend Jackie Gleason as a character named Minnesota Fats. Willie again served as a technical adviser for the sequel, The Color of Money (1986). Looking back on his career as a professional billiards player, Willie often said there was nothing he could not do with a billiard ball. He told journalists he retired after winning his fifteenth world championship because he got bored beating the same players year in and year out.

On December 27, 1956, Willie suffered a stroke at the billiards room he owned in Philadelphia. Sixteen months later, he was back playing billiards, however. His family said his recovery was so rapid because he was a relentless competitor who could not tolerate the idea of losing. After retiring from competition at the age of forty-three, Willie frequently played in exhibitions. In 1978, he played and defeated Minnesota Fats, Rudolph Wanderone, Jr., in a series of lucrative televised matches. Willie died of a heart attack on September 16, 1993, in his home in Haddon Heights, New Jersey.

Summary

Willie Mosconi ranks as one of the greatest pocket billiards players in the history of the sport. He won 77 percent of his tournament competitions, compared with a 71 percent record for billiards champion Ralph Greenleaf. Between 1941 and 1957, Willie won the world championship in straight pool fifteen times. In 1954, he ran 526 consecutive balls without a miss in a straight-pool exhibition calling the ball and pocket before every shot. His other heralded records included his best game ever, in which he sank 150 balls in a row in 1 inning (a perfect game) in 1956.

Willie was a tough competitor in tournament-length contests of 125 or 150 points and a veritable conqueror in longer challenge matches. He won twelve of his thirteen challenge matches by a combined score of 42,625 to 28,108, finishing, on average, more than 1,000 points ahead of his opponents. For him, billiards was an honorable and reputable profession, not a game for hustlers and suckers. Both in legend and fact, he ranks as a true gentleman of the sport.

Bibliography

Dyer, R. A. The Hustler and the Champ: Willie Mosconi, Minnesota Fats, and the Rivalry That Defined Pool. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2007.

Mosconi, Willie. Willie Mosconi’s Winning Pocket Billiards: For Beginners and Advanced Players with a Section on Trick Shots. New York: Crown, 1995.

Mosconi, Willie, and Stanley Cohen. Willie’s Game: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

Stein, Victor. The Billiard Encyclopedia: An Illustrated History of the Sport. Minneapolis: Blue Book, 1996.