Of Hustlers and Heroes

Earlier this month, Super Bowl XLII became the second-most-watched TV show of all time, according to Nielsen Media Research. In fact, apart from the 1983 series finale of M*A*S*H, all the other top 10 slots are filled by various Super Bowls going back to 1978, the year of the first prime time Super Bowl broadcast. But one of the other highest rated televised events of 1978 was not the World Series or any other game played with a single ball. It was a pool match between two men: Willie Mosconi, one of the game’s greatest champions, and the legendary pool hustler known as Minnesota Fats. Billed as “The Great Shoot Out” on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the battle across the baize between two 65-year-old rivals was watched on more than a third of the television sets in America.

What led a grudge match in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to become, if only momentarily, a focal event in American sports is a subject R.A. Dyer masterfully explores in The Hustler & the Champ. By presenting the biographies of two extraordinary—and yet diametrically different—champions, the book chronicles the cultural history of pool and the hidden ways in which the sport mirrored life in 20th century America. It may seem a tall order to structure a dual biography and the history of a sport around a single televised match, but Dyer, a longtime columnist for Billiards Digest and a former Pulitzer-nominated reporter for the Houston Chronicle, is above all a consummate storyteller. In the lives of the champion Willie Mosconi and the hustler Rudolf “Minnesota Fats” Wanderone, Dyer finds a wealth of storytelling material, meticulously researched and artfully presented.

Both men were born in 1913, the year Dyer calls “the highest pinnacle” of pool in America, as evidenced by the number of tables sold and the number of pages newspapers devoted to the sport. Both men came from working-class urban environments—Mosconi in Philadelphia and Wanderone in New York. And both earned their living early in life by gambling in the crowded Prohibition-era pool halls of those two cities. But their lives would take different courses, as Mosconi eschewed hustling and gravitated toward “legitimate” tournament play, becoming, by the age of 40, widely recognized as the sport’s greatest practitioner. Wanderone—originally known as New York Fats or Chicago Fats or sometimes Johnson City Fats—lived to hustle, fleecing marks around the country and beyond, relying on personality and psychology as much as shooting skill to line his pockets in game after game, and relying on shameless self-promotion to spread his reputation. “I won so much gelt,” Fats once bragged to a reporter, “that it looked like I was smuggling coconuts in my pockets.”

Various forms of billiards had been played by Europe’s ruling elite for centuries, but pool was always regarded as a vulgar form of gambling when played by commoners. It was routinely outlawed in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Broadway’s The Music Man, Professor Harold Hill finds pool in River City an easy target of mid-American public wrath. As pool table sales exploded across the country early in the 20th century, the leading manufacturer, Brunswick, sought to improve the sport’s low reputation by sponsoring sanctioned tournaments and donating tables to public recreation halls and youth centers. The company even changed the name of the American version of the sport from “pool” (as in “trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P”) to “pocket billiards,” a name suggesting genteel European roots.

Thus it was that Mosconi could emerge as the noble face of tournament pool while Fats became a trickster figure, associated with hustling and deception. But what launched these two faces into American living rooms was the 1961 film The Hustler, starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. Mosconi was a technical adviser to the movie; Wanderone claimed that Gleason’s character had been modeled after him, and forever after he called himself Minnesota Fats, though he had never set foot in Minnesota. The film made both men recurring guests on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and similar venues, where they demonstrated trick shots.

Mosconi was an incredibly proud and rigid man, easily rankled by Wanderone’s boasting, much of which could be disproved. “For Rudolf Wanderone, the truth—always—was a slippery thing,” Dyer writes. By slowly revealing their personalities through their life stories (including a period when Fats lived in Nashville), Dyer builds enough suspense to make the final televised match worthy of any sports film. In Dyer’s hands, these subjects become not only literary archetypes—the hero and the trickster—but symbols of the two prevailing attitudes toward sport in America, one rooted in the early part of the 20th century, the other in the latter half. Like Babe Ruth, Mosconi may have been a flawed man when away from his game, but he became a symbol of perfection within it. Wanderone, on the other hand, reminds the reader more of what sports have become: Roger Clemens, testifying before a congressional committee about who injected what.