![]() On 11 February 1953 he married Gloria “Flora” Marchini. This period was not all billiards all the time for Mosconi. He constantly taunted Mosconi but continually declined Mosconi’s invitation to play. 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. Not even Willie Hoppe, an earlier legendary player, dominated the sport to such an extent. The couple divorced in 1945 and Willie gained custody of the children.ĭuring the fifteen years from 1941 to 1956 Mosconi won the world pocket-billiards championship thirteen times. Ann later took the two children and left Willie while he was serving (stateside) in World War II. 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, 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 would draw twelve hundred to Wrigley Field on Sunday.”Ĭontinuing 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. 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. Said to have “movie-star good looks,” Mosconi always dressed impeccably, keeping his suit coat on and his tie tightly knotted while he played. 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. ![]() At the same time, he was becoming very well known as a billiards player. Mosconi attended South Philadelphia High School, but before he graduated his father enrolled him at Banks Business College in Philadelphia. Pool is a more wide-open game with fewer constraints.) (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. (“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. Mosconi maintained that he never hustled. With unemployment high, desperate men would risk what little they had for a chance, albeit a slim one, at a larger payoff. 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. The Depression years of the 1930s saw the emergence of the pool hustler, a skilled shooter with a little con artist thrown in. The sport peaked in the 1920s, when it was estimated that 500,000 commercial pool tables were in use in the country. 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.Įventually 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.Īs Mosconi was growing up, so was the game of pool or billiards. 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. He wanted him to be a dancer, like the youngster’s uncles. Pop Mosconi was not in favor of his son learning the game, at least not at the tender age of six. Young Mosconi was introduced to the game of pool early on, but not in the way that would he seemed most likely. Mosconi was one of six children born to Joseph Mosconi, an ex-boxer and poolroom operator, and Helen O’Reilly, a homemaker. 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. 27 June 1913 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d.
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