Willie's Game

Stanley Cohen, Willie Mosconi

Description

A “fascinating” memoir by America’s greatest professional billiards player, a child prodigy in the pool halls of the 1930s who became a world champion (Library Journal).

Willie Mosconi’s father never wanted him to play billiards. At night, the boy would lie awake listening to the clatter of balls downstairs in the family pool hall, and when his father wasn’t around, he would climb onto an apple crate to practice his shots. When his dad started locking up the balls and cue, young Willie improvised with potatoes and a broom handle. By the time he was 7 years old, he was good enough to play against Ralph Greenleaf in a match billed as “The Child Prodigy vs. The World Champion.”
 
It was the start of a magnificent career that would include an unprecedented 15 world championships and the record for most consecutive balls run without a miss: 526. Nicknamed “Mr. Pocket Billiards,” Mosconi was instrumental in popularizing pool in America, serving as a consultant for iconic films such as The Hustler and The Color of Money and facing off against the famed hustler Minnesota Fats in 2 celebrated matches.
 
Cowritten with journalist Stanley Cohen, Willie’s Game is the colorful, captivating autobiography of an illustrious champion who lifted his sport to new heights and played by one simple rule: If you don’t miss, you don’t have to worry about anything else.

Sujets

• Sport
• HIStory
• Pool
• Autobiography
• United States
• Cue sports

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781453295267
• Langue: English

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Willie s Game
An Autobiography
Willie Mosconi and Stanley Cohen
For my wife, Flora
WJM
For my granddaughter, Jessica
SC
A UTHOR S N OTE
The autobiographical portion of this book is written in the first-person voice of Willie Mosconi. Other sections of the book, clearly indicated by space breaks, are written in my own voice or in those of other observers. The use of this technique allowed us to re-create the flavor of the times at each stage of Willie s life, sketching in the background and providing a context that gives his story added dimension. It also permitted those who knew Willie well to offer the reader a more balanced view of his nature and personality. Finally, since Willie s pride in his achievements is equaled by his modesty with respect to them, it enabled me to describe his manner and the quality of his performance without offending his sensibilities.
-Stanley Cohen
C HAPTER 1
One of my earliest memories is of lying in bed at night and being lulled to sleep by the sounds of the game. My room was on the second floor of a small three-story building and underneath was a small pool hall that was run by my father. It was strictly a neighborhood operation, four or five tables, in an old American Legion Hall in South Philadelphia. The clicking of the balls carried well at night, and I used to listen for the muffled thud as one of the balls hit the pocket and then the hum as it rolled down the return chute and clanked into the rack at the foot of the table. I was only a kid then, maybe four or five years old, but that s how it started. You might say I was born into the game of billiards, courtesy of my father. But it was through circumstance, not design, that he became involved.
My father was a professional prizefighter by trade, a bantamweight. His name was Joseph William Mosconi, but he fought under the name of Charlie Russell. He was pretty good, but not good enough. At one time he was ranked third in the world, but he was never able to get beyond that. He couldn t get a shot at the title, and that s where the money was, so he retired from the ring and began training boxers. He opened a gym at Eighth Street and Wharton and installed a couple of pool tables for the fighters. They liked to relax by shooting a game of pool now and then. The tables were in the front and the gym in the back. When the fighters weren t using the tables he opened them up to the public, renting time at a few cents an hour. After a while he closed down the gym, moved to a larger place, and added a few tables. That s how he got into the business. That s how I got into the business, too.
I used to hang around there a lot. I liked to watch the customers play. I didn t understand anything about the game, of course, but I was attracted to it. I think any kid would be; all those colored balls-red, yellow, blue, green-rolling around the table, knocking into each other, falling into a pocket, bouncing off the rails. I especially used to like watching the striped balls, the bands of color twisting this way and that as they spun across the table. At first I used to go down there, pull the balls out of the rack, and just roll them around the table, seeing how many times I could make a ball hit the cushions, how it would change directions when I put a spin on it. I guess this was my initiation into the workings of English, but I m sure I didn t know it at the time. [ English is the spin put on the cue ball that causes it to move in a particular direction upon striking another object.]
It wasn t long before I picked up a cue stick and tried to imitate what I saw the players doing. I started pushing the white ball into the colored balls and hoping they would fall into the holes. It was no easy matter. The cue stick was about a foot and a half bigger than I was, and I needed to stand on a box to reach over the table. But I began watching the games closely and picking up some of the techniques-how to hold the cue, how to make a bridge, how to stroke.
My father offered no encouragement. He didn t want me hanging around the place and he didn t want me playing. The fighters and people of that type were there a lot, and he was concerned that I might get mixed up in that sort of element. Pool halls had an unsavory reputation back then, in the late teens, and some of that feeling rubbed off on the game itself. There was also a practical side of the matter. He was worried that I might cut the cloth or spill something on it and he would have to buy a new one. So I was forbidden to play, but that didn t stop me. In fact, I think it made playing all the more attractive. One way or another, I found my way to the table.
My father was a big baseball fan, and he often went to Shibe Park in the afternoon to watch the Phillies and the Athletics play. While he was out at the ball park I used to go downstairs, eat the candy bars and the pies from the concession stand, and play pool. At night, I would sometimes climb down the rainpipe from my room and into the pool hall through the rear window. Finally he caught me and started locking up the balls and the cue sticks when he was out or went to bed. But that didn t stop me either. I went to the pantry, picked out the roundest small potatoes I could find, got a broom handle from the kitchen and an apple crate to stand on, and improvised. My mother was too busy to keep track of such things. We were a growing family at the time. I already had a younger sister and a set of twin brothers, and another set of twins, also boys, was not far behind. So my mother had more to do than count the potatoes. I knocked them all over the table, but of course they left their mark. One time, the skins started peeling and the juice smeared the cloth so bad I couldn t clean it, and boy, did I catch hell. But I still hung around there whenever I could, and I was watching the players more and more intently.
Some of my father s friends who would drop in from time to time would see me around the tables and say, Hey, Joe, you gonna make little Willie a pool player?
No way, he would say. He didn t want me to have any part of billiards or boxing. He wanted something better for me, something a little classier. Actually, what he wanted was for me to become a dancer.
Dancing ran in the family. My cousins Charlie and Louie were part of a vaudeville team known as the Dancing Mosconis. It was no small-time act. They toured with the Ziegfeld Follies and headlined the Palace Theater fifty-eight times. That was back in the teens and twenties, and they were often the featured act on bills that included Fred and Adele Astaire. They got to know one another pretty well, and Fred remained a good friend of the family s until he died a few years ago. I stayed at his house many times when I was out in California. He enjoyed playing pool. He had a table in his home, and when he was feeling particularly frisky he would take me on. He played a fairly good game-for a dancer.
At one time, there were four members of the Dancing Mosconis. Charlie and Louie brought their younger brother, Willie, into the act, along with their sister, Verna. They did all kinds of dancing-ballroom, tap dancing, stunts, anything. But they were known mostly as eccentric dancers, performing all sorts of leaps and acrobatic maneuvers. Louie did most of the spins and twists and Charlie was an accomplished tap dancer. Willie and Verna dropped out after a while, and my father somehow got the notion that I might one day join Charlie and Louie in the act, follow in their footsteps. I don t know what ever gave him the idea that I had a gift for dancing, but I suppose it was like any father s wish that his son might join what he looked on as the family business. I guess he thought dancing ran in the genes. It didn t. I found that out at a very early age.
My father sent me to dancing school when I was six years old. My uncle Charlie, the father of the dancers, owned the South Philadelphia Dance Academy, and I was enrolled there in the summer of 1919. I had no interest in dancing, and I don t think I was especially good at it. Certainly my dancing cousins, who were at the top of their form at that time, expressed no great interest in my potential as a dancer. It was my father; he thought it would be an easy way for me to get started in a career and keep me away from the pool hall. It didn t work out that way. As it happened, attending dance school was the critical factor that served to get my billiard playing off the ground. It was in dancing school that I really learned to shoot pool.
Uncle Charlie s studio consisted of a cigar store out front and a rehearsal hall in the back. In the rear corner of the rehearsal hall he had a pool table. He liked to play and he kept it there for his own amusement. When I was finished with my lesson I would play while waiting for my father to pick me up. Sometimes he was late and I got to play for an hour or more. I began practicing some of the techniques I had observed in my father s pool hall. I learned how to control the cue ball and play position, looking four or five shots ahead. I also picked up some pointers watching Uncle Charlie; he was a fairly good player. After about a month or so, I was able to run a rack. Then I learned to leave a break ball to break open the next rack. After that, it was just a question of practicing and refining my technique.
One day, Uncle Charlie saw me at the table while I was waiting for my father.
Let s see what you can do, he said.
So I broke open the balls and ran the table. My uncle couldn t believe it.
Let s see you do it again, he said, and I ran a second rack. U