From DILIBERTO: “You Bet Your Life” The Tales of a Gambler
By: Jerry Forsyth & Danny Diliberto
The Janscos arranged for Tom Cosmo to open the evening matches with his show. Cosmo was from New York and I had first seen him in the late 50’s in Miami Beach where he was a nightclub performer. He was a great dancer and he sang as well but his name would prove to be his legacy. As part of his act he would put nine balls out on the table. The way he did it, so casual and all, it looked like he was just randomly putting the balls out on the table, but actually each ball was placed in exactly the same place every night.
Then he could be singing and dancing and telling jokes and all the while he would be running this rack of Nine Ball. His clowning and singing distracted the crowds so many people didn’t realize that he was just hitting one easy stop shot after another. Your blind grandmother could have run those balls, but it looked good and became the touchstone for easy runs in Nine Ball. Today, whenever someone has a really easy table to run we say he has a Cosmo and that’s where the term originated, from Tom Cosmo in Johnston City. Cosmo actually was a pretty good Straight Pool player. He beat Jimmy Moore once that I know about. Jimmy had Cosmo down 124-17 in a race to 125 and Cosmo wound up beating him 125-124, so he could shoot the game pretty well.
Cosmo was a clever guy. Before he would start his ‘run’ he would grab a twenty from someone in the audience and put Jackson’s face under the nine ball. Then when he pocketed the nine at the end of his ‘run’ he would pick up the twenty, grin, and put it in his pocket. The chump in the audience would never ask for it back because Cosmo acted like he had ‘won’ it by running the rack.
To begin his act Cosmo would come out wearing a hat, a big fur coat, thick eyeglasses and gloves. He started with one-liners, pulling the gloves off of his hands as he spoke and the gloves just kept peeling off and piling up on the floor at his feet. The whole while those old vaudeville gloves were coming off the jokes just poured forth and he had the whole place roaring. It was a great show and the audience loved him. Cosmo was like Mel Tillis. When he talked he would stammer but he could sing like a bird.
