Mosconi, William Joseph (“Willie”)

(b. 27 June 1913 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; d. 16 September 1993 in Haddon Heights, New Jersey), arguably the best tournament billiards player of all time, who did much to polish the image of the sport.

Mosconi was one of six children born to Joseph Mosconi, an ex-boxer and poolroom operator, and Helen O’Reilly, a homemaker. Young Mosconi was introduced to the game of pool early on, but not in the way that would he seemed most likely. Pop Mosconi was not in favor of his son learning the game, at least not at the tender age of six. He wanted him to be a dancer, like the youngster’s uncles. Willie’s father kept the pool cues and balls locked up to prevent the boy from playing the game, but this could not keep the youngster from playing his own type of pool. The innovative Mosconi simply gathered the roundest potatoes he could find in his mother’s pantry, aligned them as billiard balls, and, using a broomstick for a cue, played on.

Eventually his father relented, and Mosconi learned the game so rapidly he was dubbed “the child prodigy of pool” at age seven, and later “the juvenile champion.” By the time he was in his teens, he was an accomplished player.

As Mosconi was growing up, so was the game of pool or billiards. The sport peaked in the 1920s, when it was estimated that 500,000 commercial pool tables were in use in the country. The Depression years of the 1930s saw the emergence of the pool hustler, a skilled shooter with a little con artist thrown in. The hustler would “lemonade” (pool room jargon for disguising one’s true ability) in order to sucker an unsuspecting opponent into a game for money. With unemployment high, desperate men would risk what little they had for a chance, albeit a slim one, at a larger payoff. Mosconi maintained that he never hustled. (“Hustlers shoot pool,” the old saying goes, but “gentlemen play billiards.”) Although his name was known to hustlers, there is no hard evidence that Mosconi was ever anything but a supremely competent gentleman billiards player. (Billiards, played with the same equipment as pool, is a more restrictive game that requires certain banks and caroms and is limited to certain pockets on the table; a true billiards table sometimes has no pockets. Pool is a more wide-open game with fewer constraints.)

Mosconi attended South Philadelphia High School, but before he graduated his father enrolled him at Banks Business College in Philadelphia. At the same time, he was becoming very well known as a billiards player. In 1933 Mosconi, age nineteen and considered one of the two best players in the country, signed on to do a nationwide tour with Ralph Greenleaf, considered the other top player at the time. Said to have “movie-star good looks,” Mosconi always dressed impeccably, keeping his suit coat on and his tie tightly knotted while he played. A sure sign of his arrival as a star was that, after defeating Greenleaf a considerable number of times on their first national tour, the older player refused future bookings against the youngster.

Mosconi, a modest man, once said without any braggadocio, “In the early Thirties in Chicago, I would attract a crowd of fifteen hundred for a Saturday-night exhibition, while George Halas’s Chicago Bears [of the National Football League] would draw twelve hundred to Wrigley Field on Sunday.”

Continuing to elevate his game, Mosconi also is credited with burnishing the image of billiards to the point of respectability by the 1940s, disassociating it from smoky basements and dingy pool halls crawling with drunks and hustlers. Up until this time, the neighborhood poolroom was considered a male refuge, so much so that vaudeville comics would get a sure laugh by reporting a bogus newspaper headline: “Pool Room Burns Down; 5,000 Men Homeless.”

Mosconi married Ann Harrison in 1940. They had two children. Ann later took the two children and left Willie while he was serving (stateside) in World War II. The couple divorced in 1945 and Willie gained custody of the children.

During the fifteen years from 1941 to 1956 Mosconi won the world pocket-billiards championship thirteen times. Not even Willie Hoppe, an earlier legendary player, dominated the sport to such an extent. About this time a running feud developed between Mosconi and Rudolph Wanderone, known then as “New York Fats,” “Brooklyn Fats,” or “Broadway Fats.” Wanderone was an unabashed hustler, and a loud one at that. He constantly taunted Mosconi but continually declined Mosconi’s invitation to play. This period was not all billiards all the time for Mosconi. On 11 February 1953 he married Gloria “Flora” Marchini. The couple had one child.

In 1961 Mosconi served as technical adviser for the acclaimed Paul Newman—Jackie Gleason film The Hustler. (He also made a cameo appearance.) Much to Mosconi’s chagrin, Wanderone began calling himself “Minnesota Fats,” claiming that the Gleason character (and the protagonist in Walter Tevis’s novel of the same name) was modeled after himself. Mosconi, upset by Fats’s bogus claims, asked Wanderone if he “had ever even been to Minnesota?”

In 1978 Wanderone at last accepted Mosconi’s invitation, and a head-to-head match was arranged for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, with Howard Cosell as the announcer. Mosconi won handily. The match was a study in contrasts, the nattily-dressed Mosconi versus the rumpled, disheveled Wanderone. For Mosconi it was more than just defeating Minnesota Fats. It was billiards (Mosconi never used “pool” to describe his game) defeating pool. Mosconi, as always, used a rapid-fire, extremely accurate approach to his game on this telecast. His wife, Flora, once likened his quick, graceful moves around the billiard table to that of a ballet dancer. Fats kept up a steady stream of chatter to distract and irritate Mosconi, but to no avail.

During the time he thoroughly dominated the game, Mosconi set a record by running 526 straight balls in a 1954 exhibition in Springfield, Ohio. In 1956, in Kinston, North Carolina, he shot a perfect game, sinking 150 balls without a miss. His opponent, Jimmy Moore, looked on in amazement.

At the age of eighty, on the afternoon of 16 September 1993, Mosconi died of a heart attack at his home in suburban Haddon Heights, New Jersey. He is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Bellmawr, New Jersey.

Mosconi used skill and a courtly manner to become accepted as a gentleman. During his long and storied career, his name was as synonymous with his sport as Babe Ruth’s was with baseball. Mosconi’s dominance of pocket billiards could rightfully be called Ruthian.

Mosconi’s life is discussed in his autobiography, written with Stanley Cohen, Willie’s Game (1993) and in his 1959 book Willie Mosconi on Pocket Billiards. See also George Fels, “Where the Boys Were,” Sports Heritage (March-April 1987) and Gene Brown, ed., The New York Times Encyclopedia of Sports, vol. 11 (1979). An obituary is in the New York Times (18 Sept. 1993). At the height of his career Mosconi was featured in a documentary film, The Willie Mosconi Story (1948).

Jim Campbell