Before pro sports was a multi-billion-dollar business and athletes needed to be gigantic and juiced, a pool cue and incredible hand-eye coordination was sufficient to make someone a national star, even if they possessed a paunch and appeared unable to outrun a cigarette machine. Such was the case of Willie Mosconi, a working-class Philadelphia boy who displayed prodigious facility for the game from a tender age. Considered dapper by the modest standards of the pool hall, Mosconi was, along with fellow billiards wizard Minnesota Fats, one of the most famous “athletes” in America during the ’60s and ’70s.

Winning Pocket Billiards is a handsomely covered 1965 instructional book by Mosconi. There are a generous number of photos that show how to make the trick shots that Mosconi had mastered (as if) and a foreword that explains how he came to be so great at the game even though his father, who owned a pool hall, initially dreamed his son would become a great vaudeville performer. An excerpt:

“At the age of seven, Willie was launched on a round of exhibitions leading to a widely advertised match with another billiard prodigy, ten-year-old Ruth McGinnis. He won easily with a high run of 40. With the praise of an amazed audience still ringing in his ears, Willie ‘retired.’

As he tells it now, ‘I was disenchanted and confused. Earlier my dad had tried to prevent me from learning the game, and then he pushed me into it too fast.’

At the age of seventeen, the illness of both parents necessitated his leaving high school before graduation. In the Depression year of 1929, Willie became an upholsterer’s apprentice, starting at $8 a week and dexterously progressing to a piecework job for $40 per week before he was fired. He and his boss exchanged punches in disagreement over Willie’s request for a day off to watch the Athletics start winning the World Series.

Jobless and broke, Willie mustered courage, and revived a neglected touch at pool to enter and win a local tournament with a $75 first prize. He went on to finish third in the city championship that year. That might be the year that Willie cast the pattern of his life.”

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Mosconi showing off on I’ve Got a Secret, 1962: