Winner by Decision

With titles in pool's four main disciplines, DiLiberto has become a highly respected instructor and commentator in recent years. (Photo by Mark Webster)

GENE CONLEY. Dave DeBusschere. Bo Jackson. Deion Sanders. The list of athletes who have played two sports professionally is not a long one. But it sure looks monstrous next to the list of athletes who have played four sports for pay. That's a list of one, Dan DiLiberto, who also happens to be the BCA's newest inductee into its Hall of Fame.

Most of the aspects of Dan's life come back to the letter B, starting with his hometown, Buffalo, N.Y. "The only things that counted in my neighborhood were boxing and baseball, so I took up both," he explains. Actually, he's being fairly modest when he describes his activity in each as "taking them up"; he reached the AA level of minor league baseball as an incredibly strong-armed outfielder and went undefeated in the ring. One of Dan's prouder baseball accomplishments was winning a proposition bet from both the late Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, wagering he could throw a golf ball across Miami Beach's Intercoastal Canal (a toss of about 110 yards) and they couldn't. Later the B-list took in both bowling and, of course, billiards (he once threw a 300 game and ran 200 balls on the same day - his birthday yet).

As a boxer, fighting under 140 pounds as Kid Torriani, Dan racked up 12 wins, two draws, and four broken hands. ("I should've won one of those draws," he recalls, "but I had been with a woman the night before.") In the fight game, that's called "glass hands"; what the doctors called it was a threat to his ever using them again if he continued to fight. So he was done in the ring, but not in the street, and estimates he is undefeated in over 150 brawls, many of them initiated over a pool game. "There wasn't an ounce of muscle on me," he recalls. "I didn't even have a real chest. But I could knock your head off." Indeed, he had to threaten Mantle and Maris, neither man feeling much pain at the time, to get paid off on the golf-ball bet.

Dan's entry into pool was more strict than most, with the laws laid down by his late older brother John, a bona fide street terror. "If my little brother is gonna play in here," John told the room owner, "first of all, I want him home by 10 o'clock every night to do his homework. And if I ever find out that he gambled so much as a dime in here, you won't have a poolroom." Dan's love for his brother ran deep, so he speaks of those terms today with little more than gentle irony. "I was surrounded left and right by guys I coulda robbed," he recalls, "like a kid in a candy store but with a straitjacket on."

When Dan finished high school, the terms were relaxed, and he began taking his Buffalo pool buddies apart; when he burned out all the local action, he started to take to the road. His first tournament title was achieved right there in Buffalo, though, with a city championship in 1961. Thirty-seven years later, he was the 9-ball champion of France; in between, he achieved the remarkable feat of winning world titles in all four of pool's major disciplines (8-ball, 9-ball, 14.1 and one-pocket) in parts of four different decades. No one else is even close to matching that accomplishment (although on the billiards side, the immortal Willie Hoppe won world championships 47 years apart, a record not likely to fall in any of our lifetimes or those of our great-great-grandchildren).

Dan's best single tournament win was probably at the fabled Johnston City (Ill.) meets, where in 1972 he won the straight-pool division, then defeated the one-pocket and 9-ball champions to take all-around honors too. (And he was not competing against gentleman tournament players who were there just to see how they'd do against the giants; the competition was the giants themselves. Johnston City's playing field was about 99.44% pure gamblers.) But he also finished second twice in the prestigious BCA 14.1 U. S. Open, once to his old pal the late Steve Mizerak, once to the late Joe Balsis (whom he once defeated 1,000-800 in a lengthy exhibition). And he's one of a very, very few pool players ever to be profiled in Sports Illustrated.

Life on the road meant that Dan would travel with some prestigious partners. In the Sports Illustrated piece, he related waiting outside in a car all night while his road buddy, today's fellow Hall of Fame player Mike Sigel, played one-pocket with "a sour, chain-smoking old man" who turned out to be the well-known Bill Amodeo. "Boxing was easier than this," sighed Dan, as the all-nighter turned out to be a standoff. He's also hit the road with the late Larry Lisciotti, Jim Rempe and Ed Kelly, among others. Once, in Texas with cuemaker/player Bobby Hunter, they encountered an individual who would not play one-pocket unless he was granted a handicap of 10-4 and the break. "Bobby," Dan whispered, "I think this guy may actually need 10-4 and the break. If I get up two games, cover all the side bets." He did, Hunter did, and they left that room $8,000 richer.

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