Pool has more than its share of colorful characters, and I've
been hanging around the game long enough now to have known quite
a few of them. One I'm sorry I never met was Don Willis, not only
a player of legendary gifts but from all accounts a very
entertaining storyteller. All I know about him comes from old
magazines and newspapers.
Willis (1910 - 1984), sometimes called The Cincinnati Kid, was the world's best unknown player. His arena was the road, and he saw no advantage in entering tournaments or having his picture taken, and until he quit the hustle in the late 1960s, only insiders knew what he looked like. His skill was phenomenal, and not just in pool. He was also a world-class juggler and card player. At one time he could claim national titles in horseshoes, Ping-Pong, and pool, having beaten the reigning champions in all three games. As a teenager in Canton, Ohio, he even won the city championship in backward running, which was popular in the 1920s. He once won $500 by beating a man who claimed to be the champion backward runner of New England.
Pool players are unanimous in praising his cuemanship. Straight pool specialists who played exhibition matches against him in Canton almost always lost, including Ralph Greenleaf, Willie Masconi, Jimmy Caras, and Erwin Rudolph. In nine-ball he was perfection. West Coast tournament promoter Fred Whalen claimed he saw Willis play forty games of nine-ball without ever missing a shot he tried to make. From 1948 to 1961 he was the road partner of Wimpy Lassiter. What chance did anybody have against those two?
One of his exhibition specialties was throwing a ball down the table and cutting it in on the fly, the so-called wing shot. His record was forty-two in a row, many of them, according to those who watched him do it, at almost impossible angles. Danny McGoorty told me Willis used to practice wing shots using billiard balls on a snooker table.
A reporter once asked him how he happened to take up pool. "I was a wick braider in a lantern factory," Willis explained soberly, "when Edison put me out of work with his light bulb. I had to so something else for a living."
In describing an extremely fast player: "I've seen him run the eight and nine and hang the seven. Now that's fast ........"
One year he attended a tournament in Florida as a spectator. He was sitting with a group of top players when a promoter handed each of them a pen and a sheet of paper and asked them to list tournaments won and titles held. When the players were finished writing and the papers gathered, the promoter asked Willis why he had claimed only to be the best player on Fourth Street in Canton, Ohio. "I don't play in tournaments and I don't hold any titles." The promoter protested" "But everybody says you're one of the best players in the world! There must be something you can say about yourself." "Well, okay," Willis said, with a shrug. He snatched a sheet from the man's hand that was filled with the accomplishments of one of the other players. Across the bottom Willis wrote: "I beat him. Don Willis."
Somebody once asked Willis how good the Eufala kid was. "I never saw him play." "What do you mean, you never saw him play? I heard you just beat him out of a lot of money." " I did, but he never got to shoot."
The story is told that Willis once beat a good player using a bar of Ivory soap instead of a cue. Willis says it never happened. "He wasn't a good player, he was a rank amateur. I could have beat him with a half a bar."
Sitting around with players in a restaurant late at night, that's when a lot of good pool stories are told and a lot of good diagrams are drawn on tablecloths and napkins. Sometimes the dinnerware is used to illistrate positions on the table. Willis often told the story of how Johnny Irish, another great road player, lost a game of nine-ball. "He cut the coffee cup in the side and got perfect on the spoon. He cut the doughnut in and went up table for the eight-ball, which was the pepper. Guess what happened! He got straight in and couldn't get back to the other end for the ketchup! How do you like that for bad luck? Striaght in on the pepper!"