FL say:
Yes, I was not there, but I heard that from two reliable sources, at least once, maybe twice, a ball went in the pocket and came back out. 1st one around 200, 2nd one around 300, did it happen, I dunno? Would they lie just to discredit his run? I don't think so either. Something had to have happened there. They just said, bad pocket, shoved it back in and kept going. That seems fair to me, if the ball went in, but technically, the run ended right then, but this was a show, an exhibition, and not a tournament, so the rules were ignored. So if he ran 250, or 300 and they tossed a couple balls back in, so what, who cared if the run ended that way. Everybody got a nice show and saw a great high run. He rarely ran over 200, it was very rare to run 300; nobody dreamed he would make 500? And when he did, they were trapped into it?
The way it worked back then, Brunswick was huge, and it ruled and dominated the game, it wrote the rule book and owned the industry. Mosconi was their employee, on their payroll, he did, what they said, went where they sent him, did the shows for them. So they only wanted their stars, to hold the big records, which sold their tables? When Willie came in, the local dealer would set up a brand new Brunswick table, he was not allowed to play on anything else, new cloth and he only used his own set of Centennials.
The people signing the affidavit could have been all the Brunswick people there, the locals from the office, and all the dealer people, and their pals. Who knows? If Brunswick gave him the record, that was it, end of story, and the rest of you could stick it, God has spoken.
