I wanted to comment on or expand three topics raised by members above.
On MEASUREMAN. Yeah, with MosconI you kinda had to be there. There was a French philosopher named Henri Bergson who made some attempts at defining what makes people laugh and why. One of the things he identified was when either a machine acts like a human or a human acts like a machine. Towards the middle of a Mosconi exhibition there would be smiles among people as they would recognize familiar patterns and see this agent, who was apparently human, create those familiar patterns out of nothing and then complete them with the dependability of a machine. There was, however, nothing mechanical about it. It was balletic.
On LOW RIGHT’S observation about the changes in equipment. Go to
your local Goodwill and find the used golf clubs. Pick up a driver from before the big head period and grip it. Now imagine to yourself that pros used to hit balls 260 with that instrument.
ON Stu’s comment about winning tournaments versus high runs. Mosconi’s real greatness lay in neither. Where he really excelled was being able to find two pool rooms a day in two different small towns and cities without GPS and then get there with no or only an incomplete interstate system, and then jump out of his car and run 100.
And is no one going to mention his reliability and sprezzetura in setting up and dispatching trick shots?