By George Fels
[Reprinted from July 2004]
The instant I heard Allen Hopkins explain to his 9-ball television viewers, “If you lose on the 9, you do not scratch,” I knew we were in for trouble. The occasion was a series of telecasts from the late ’70s and early ’80s, retitled by ESPN as “Classic Billiards,” featuring Willie Mosconi, Irving Crane, Joe Balsis, Luther Lassiter and others. The series was created by CBS-TV in a transparent attempt to capitalize on the wondrous notoriety captured by Mosconi and Rudolph Wanderone on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” a few years before. While it failed wretchedly in that endeavor, at least it succeeded in creating a format where Wanderone would, finally, beat Mosconi doing something.

Hopkins’ nonsensical clarification notwithstanding, these are largely execrable telecasts. Except for Wanderone and U.J. Puckett, all the contestants came from straight pool backgrounds. Here they were made to play 8-ball, 9-ball, and that most desperate of pool idiocies, 7-ball. While the age-old theory holds that if two 8-ball players of equal ability play long enough, the better straight pool player will win, that’s not quite accurate. It’s the better 8-ball player who will win, and Balsis and Crane, among others, can be seen making some highly amateurish mistakes at the game.

Mosconi won the overall competition quite easily; in the lion’s share of games he took, he had only to wait for an opponent’s mistake, of which there were many. The great champion took home $10,000 for a few hours of laughably easy work. But he played with all the joy of a man enduring a colonoscopy; no real pain, but there were clearly places he would rather be and things he would rather be doing. “Ya musta laid awake nights thinkin’ this one up, Charlie,” Mosconi theorized quite audibly to his longtime pal and match referee Charlie Ursitti, referring to the sub-moronic 7-ball. In his post-match interviews, Mosconi offered absolutely no insights into the matches we had just suffered through with him and stated that all three games were mostly a matter of luck.

It’s well documented, of course, that pool to Mosconi was nothing more than a way to make a living. He once unabashedly stated, “I would no more play pool in my spare time than a headwaiter would wait tables on his day off.” Not once in his career did he speak of the game’s greatness. He was also skinflint-tight with praise for his opponents, rarely even creating a complete sentence in any one player’s behalf. And Ursitti, who knows more about the man than anyone, swears by all that’s holy that one day in the late ’70s, preparing for yet another of those lame telecasts, Mosconi ran 42 letter-perfect racks plus the break shot on the 43rd — that’s 589, with the balls open on the table — and quit because he was hungry. “Let’s go get dinner,” Ursitti quotes Mosconi. “See, it’s no big deal to run 600 balls.” (The reference was to Ohio’s Tom Parker, New York’s Mike Eufemia, and Cranfield, all of whom claimed to have bested Mosconi’s heralded long run of 526.

Can someone explain to me how a man can be that good at anything and simultaneously hold that kind of disdain for it? Did anyone ever hear Michael Jordan put down hoops, or Cal Ripken decry baseball, or Tiger Woods blast golf? Of course not; the joy in observing any of those athletes correctly lay not in their otherworldly results alone, but their passion for what they did. Mosconi was far more dominant in his field than any of those champions; while we can be absolutely certain that he hated to lose, we cannot be nearly as sure that he loved to win. If he did, it was unreadable.

Needless to say, Mosconi was not alone in his dispassion. Of his eight peers in the “Classic Billiards” series, only Lassiter every articulated any real love for the game. Balsis’ fervor is probably beyond reproach, too; the man came back to the game after a 17-year hiatus, giving up his lucrative career in the meat business, and actually used a wall calendar to chart his long-run progress. But the players of that era were men who lived through the Great Depression when young; except for Crane and Cranfield, most had known brutal poverty and came to pool simply to escape from it.

To play pool in the absence of passion for it must be like a marriage without love. I wouldn’t know; my marriage was, thankfully, truly love-laden, and anyone who thinks I don’t love pool too hasn’t been reading this column very long or very well. And the cue games are so easy to love! They’re so intimate, so infinite, so beautiful, and the vast majority of their participants cannot even remotely conceal their ardor, not that they’d want to. It reads as clearly as a sandwich board on Jeff Williams, a 53-year-old Chicago lawyer who burbled to me, “You can write a column about me now; I just won the monthly rapid-fire tournament!” Williams has been playing billiards for about eight years and has improved to roughly a .500 average and won $180 for his efforts; you’d think he had conquered the universe.

Mosconi was an idol for me, at least for his ability. I’ll never know what it’s like to play anywhere near that well. But to all outward appearances, he never knew what it was like to love what you do. Not the way I do, anyway. And I’m not sure I didn’t get the better deal.