Willie Mosconi is yet another name that should be recognisable to most. It is a name that one might not understand at first, but once you read on you will probably go “oh yeah, that’s who that is!” Willie Mosconi is in one term a hustler. In another you can call him one of the greatest gamblers on pool table outcomes. Any time you have a pool player who bets to win money it means they are betting on themselves to be able to make money off their opponent. Often when it came to hustling at pool as a profession in the early 1900s it meant trying to find an easy mark. You would find a person that thought they were a great player, but were not really. They would take the bet thinking you could not win based on the play they were seeing.
Then the hustler would take the bet, maybe even lose a game or two before starting to clean up the win. Mosconi had his own concept of just what would be needed in order to hustle many. He was extremely successful at it. Mosconi was born in 1913. He may have been a native of Pennsylvania, but he spent much of his life in New Jersey.
Mosconi had quite the career as a hustler given the years between 1941 to 1957 were spent winning the World Straight Pool Championship 15 times in a row. It was something no one has done before or since. It might be why many started calling him Mr. Pocket Billiards. Mosconi was also the first ever to be put on the hall of fame for billiards.
If not for Mosconi we may not have some of the trick shots that exist today. He created several tricks to use at the tables, which is perhaps another reason he was so important to the world of pool. Without Willie Mosconi to popularise the art of pool we might not have professional championship pool games. We might not have pool players who are sponsored professionally and those who make thousands on competitions in a legal manner.
Mosconi may have begun as a person hustling around Grand Rapids, betting $20 a game, but he ended up as someone making thousands per game legally. One of the most interesting stories reported about Mosconi is when he met Worst. Worst says a man walked into the pool hall and wanted to play a game for $20. He was dressed in a Gulf Oil uniform. By the time the man had managed to get $200 of Worst’s money it was time to wonder who this oil uniform wearing person was.
Worst told media that the man just kept racking the balls, breaking them and pocketing them all before he could even get a turn. It turns out the man was Mosconi, and when he walked out of the pool hall he said anyone can buy a uniform. The point was that Mosconi used the uniform for the hustle.