By George Fels
[Reprinted from January 2003]
For every great pool player who draws modest ink, chances are there’s another player, equally great, who draws virtually no attention at all. In Mosconi’s case, that competitor was probably Harlem’s James Evans, forever denied any opportunity for tournament or even exhibition play because of his color. (Nitwit promoters once offered him access to a tournament if he would claim to be a Native American!) Evans is long gone, of course, but those few knowledgable observers who saw his 14.1 game swore he would have given fits to the perennial top five — Mosconi, Crane, Greenleaf, Ponzi and Caras — had he ever had the chance. And at least two hustlers, Don Decoy and Joe Sebastian, challenged Mosconi at forms other than straight pool (although both lost).

And indeed, when it comes to pool’s short games, there have always been “undercover” specialists who even in their wildest fantasies would not entertain the thought of tournament play. Until 14.1 was phased out as the tournament staple, 9-ball and one-pocket tournaments were virtually unknown except for the hustlers’ jamboree events staged by the Jansco brothers. Today, with 9-ball tourneys at all levels dotting pool’s landscape, you can still find players who are very nearly the equal of the competitors confining themselves to the bleachers, waiting for action. At the top of the all-time list — and unlikely ever to be dethroned — would be the late Don Willis, often called “The Cincinnati Kid,” even though he hailed from nearby Canton, Ohio. While he claimed that pool was no better than his fourth endeavor (after cards, horseshoes, and table tennis, at which he was known to have defeated two national champions in succession), there was virtually no pool player in the world who wanted any piece of him. The late, brilliantly talented Harold Worst beat Willis in a 9-ball session once, and not even one witness can be found who ever saw Willis lose at any other form of pool at any time. He even was said to have beaten Greenleaf.

One-pocket players toil in even deeper obscurity; anyone achieving mythical top-10 status could just as easily exist on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. As the estimable historian Mike Shamos has pointed out, the game is known to have existed in the 17th century, yet there were not major one-hole tournaments until 1961. But there’s plenty of evidence the game was extremely popular among good players as far back as the 1930s, and the following decade produced the first practitioners with actual reputations for the game. Obviously, such reputations would escape any form of national attention, especially among the media. The first one-pocket artists to be accorded greatness achieved those laurels largely by back-alley rumor. But they include Eddie Taylor, Marcel Camp, John “Rags” Fitzpatrick, and the player who called himself Big Nose Roberts (his name was not Roberts, and you’ve probably seen bigger noses in your time). Rated just beneath them, back in the 1940s, was Rudolph “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone.

But those are just the four top players who were known. There can be no doubt that they had equals who were destined for the backgrounds all their lives. I can vouch for at least one case, because I encountered him in the most memorable way in my very first visit to Chicago’s famed Bensinger’s. Read Eddie Robin’s great one-pocket book, “Shots, Moves & Strategies” carefully enough, and you’ll find a single mention of an old-timer named Angus MacDonald. We can be absolutely certain that mention, plus mine here, are the only notice ever taken of the man.

I’m going back very nearly 50 years, and since I knew absolutely nothing of one-pocket at the time, it’s pretty tough for me to reconstruct his game now. What I remember with total clarity, though, was the man’s astonishing dignity. Like the Old West’s renowned Doc Holliday, MacDonald was largely a drunken tubercular bum. But he did not drink at the table; his clothes, while shabby, were still clean and pressed; and most of all, his manner of speech conveyed a man who had been reared and educated in true culture. MacDonald had little use for the bums around him, of whom there were many. One of them made the mistake of offering MacDonald a compliment for a noble, but failed, double-bridge effort to take an opponent’s ball away from the pocket. “Hell of a shot without foulin’,” raved the bum. “Yes,” sighed MacDonald with delicious irony, in what sounded like one hell of a Boris Karloff impression. “Wasn’t it a beauty?”

His hauteur extended to his actual play, too. MacDonald would assume a shooting stance so carefully, and fluidly, that he appeared to be doing an actual parody of himself. Each inning would be approached as if it were an art object of some sort. He didn’t just leave opponents tough, he left them totally perplexed, and if you showed him the edge of an open ball, he’d turn it into six or eight without fail. One old-timer swore that during the Depression, MacDonald had gone to New York, of all places, and, with players standing in line for him, beat the bejabbers out of everybody at any form of pool. As marvelous as MacDonald was in the early 1950s, this particular witness claimed that he was nowhere near his peak. Yet only a lack of cash kept the man from challenging the city’s elite; he was pretty much confined to playing for $3 or less.

Last time I saw him play, in the early 1960s, MacDonald seemed to have his hands full. The bet was a high-living $10, but that wasn’t what was holding him back. It was not hard to tell that MacDonald was literally dying on his feet. I think they broke even, but I don’t really know. I chose not to watch. I preferred to remember him great.