Don Willis

jay helfert said:
How about jumping the cue ball off the table and into a boot about twenty feet away? On the fly no less. Would you believe that?
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Sounds a lot more probable than some horsedung about "going out an upstairs window and bouncing down the street in the gutter to hit another ball".
I wouldn't bet against it.
(if it's been done, I'd love to see the video)...why does it have to be a boot? Why not a cigar box or an oil can with the lid cut off, or a hat, or a etc. etc. etc...??
Keep on truckin'
:thumbup:
 
Low500 said:
Sounds a lot more probable than some horsedung about "going out an upstairs window and bouncing down the street in the gutter to hit another ball".
I wouldn't bet against it.
(if it's been done, I'd love to see the video)...why does it have to be a boot? Why not a cigar box or an oil can with the lid cut off, or a hat, or a etc. etc. etc...??
Keep on truckin'
:thumbup:
Click to expand...

Not quite 20 feet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEvqJNusZ7Q
 
Low500 said:
Sounds a lot more probable than some horsedung about "going out an upstairs window and bouncing down the street in the gutter to hit another ball".
I wouldn't bet against it.
(if it's been done, I'd love to see the video)...why does it have to be a boot? Why not a cigar box or an oil can with the lid cut off, or a hat, or a etc. etc. etc...??
Keep on truckin'
:thumbup:
Click to expand...

I'm sure he would send you a video. Just send $500 for postage.
 
HawaiianEye said:
Not quite 20 feet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEvqJNusZ7Q
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Thank you for posting this.
Very nicely done by old "Tarzan".
Mike does a very good show and at one time, he could "shoot out the lights" in a matchup too. Those one handed pushups he could do when he was younger were something to behold.
Now this is the kind of thing that can be rehearsed at home until it can be pulled off pretty consistently.
That bull about "shooting out of an upstairs window" by Willis is absurd.
Some of these old timers have forgotten how to separate fantasy from reality. They probably mean well, but their emotions and tempers get the best of them at times.
:thumbup:
 
And just when I thought the dumbassness couldn't get any dumbassnessed.
Low500 said:
Thank you for posting this.
Very nicely done by old "Tarzan".
Mike does a very good show and at one time, he could "shoot out the lights" in a matchup too. Those one handed pushups he could do when he was younger were something to behold.
Now this is the kind of thing that can be rehearsed at home until it can be pulled off pretty consistently.
That bull about "shooting out of an upstairs window" by Willis is absurd.
Some of these old timers have forgotten how to separate fantasy from reality. They probably mean well, but their emotions and tempers get the best of them at times.
:thumbup:
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internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
 
smashmouth said:
internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
Click to expand...

Harold Worst (Worlds Champion Three cushion player, All-Around titles in both the 1965 Johnston City, IL and 1965 Stardust Open championships) in Sports Illustrated March 20, 1961 - "Don Willis in my opinion is the best nine-ball player in the World".


NATIONAL BILLIARD NEWS
APRIL, 1965

It is our opinion that Don Willis of Canton, Ohio has beaten more top notch players than any other player in the world. Dons list of "victims" reads like the "whose who" of Billiards.


NATIONAL BILLIARD NEWS
JUNE, 1965

J.B. of Detroit writes - "How do you rate "Don Willis" so high? I never heard of his winning any tournaments! Don never entered a tournament, so naturally, hasn't won any. We will try to answer your question - In talking to dozens of top players over the years, almost without exception they rate "Don" as either the best or as good as any nine-ball player in the country.

And from the files of the Canton, Ohio, Repository:

Erwin Rudolph 35
Don Willis 125
(high run - Willis) 88

Bobby Moore 33
Don Willis 125
(high run - Willis) 48

James Caras 97
Don Willis 100
(high run - Willis) 87 - unfinished

Ralph Greenleaf 40
Don Willis 125
(high run - Willis) 66 - unfinished

Willie Masconi 65
Don Willis 125
(high run - Willis 70 - unfinished


And a hand-out, a press release from a new billiard room, The Golden Cue, in Bloomington, Minnesota, owned in part by Dean Chance: ‘The likeable chubby Willis is famed throughout the world for his wing shots or as he says: My duck hunting trips. He’s an accomplished juggler using the table cushion for feats.’
I can shoot on the floor too. On the linoleum. I’m accurate even at 60 - 70 feet."


"Hell", Willis snorts at that, "don’t say I’m chubby. I’m not. I’m 240 pounds now and five feet eight and a half. That’s not chubby or shorty, as I’d been called."

He laughs again. "That juggling. A gimmick. Yeh, I can juggle three balls and a chalk at the same time."Sure, I’ve even won bets on the proposition that I can’t name in order the 130 largest cities of the U.S. There are 130 cities over 100,000 population. It’s easy."

"I used to do a lot of things like that. Once ran 126 in straight pool. Beat Jimmy McClure who was then the World’s Table Tennis champion. Beat him for money. I played him in Canton, Indianapolis, and Canton again. Also beat George May, who was then the world’s horseshoe champion."

"I used to play three cushion billiards too. I was the only billiards player who could figure a four horse parlay in his head. It’s a gimmick, just like memorizing the 130 cities."

Willis begins talking about the current players. Handsome Danny Jones? Sure, he’s a good friend of mine. He’s up and coming. I went with him to the New York Tournament in 1967.

Jimmy Moore? He was the best all-around player a few years back. Weenie Beenie Staton - yes, I like him very much. Eddie Kelly, Red Breit, like them too. Eddy Taylor, Wimpy Lassiter.

He thought of the time he was playing - playing who? - well, playing somebody and the guy said, I wish Don Willis was here, he could beat you as bad as you’re beating me now.

Willis said, "I wouldn’t play him."

There was another time I was playing and the guy said, ‘You must be Don Willis, nobody else could beat me this badly.’ That was good logic on his part, I just left.

Without telling him?

"Yes. Somebody once wrote that I won sums like telephone numbers, Willis laughs again at this, like telephone numbers. Then someone else added ‘with area codes’ - that really tops it!"

"Pool has to excite you. It used to really excite me. I never practiced just for the sake of practicing. I always wanted to play - to play someone. That was it. I lived well on the game. I still do. I’m not so interested in it anymore. One guy around here has always seen me just sitting around or having a drink or something - never working - and he finally said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ and I said, ‘Sit around.’ He believed it - that was all he had ever seen me do."

"Now and them my friends call me and tell me to come to Kansas City or some place and play a youngster who think’s he’s the best there is. I do it. Not very often anymore. Once every few months or so. Yeh, I know them all, the pros and the fun players."

"I guess if you had to sum it up, you could say that I’d rather play Joe Blow for $7, than the World’s Champion for nothing."

"That sounds pretty good. Yeh, that’s it. I’d rather play anyone for $7 than the World’s Champion for the fun of it."
 
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?

smashmouth said:
internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
Click to expand...

You got 2 b joking.
 
I lived for most of the 1970s in Canton, Ohio, and played almost daily at the College Bowl on 30th St. N.E..

Don Willis was a regular visitor when he was in town, and was very friendly to the young guys like me who were really working on their games. Of all the times we talked, played a little, etc. and messed with shots like the wing shots, my best recollections of him were for his magic tricks, his trick shots at pool, and his gaffe games. He was no longer in his prime at all, but still took dead aim.

As a player, he was not just memorable, but mesmerizing. Once in a while (not often), after he watched me a bit he would offer a small bit of advice. They were like pieces of heaven. Quick comments that could be skill raisers and game changers.

I count myself very fortunate to have known him, at the time Freddy Martin, Rocco, Copedesh, and the rest played every day.

Will Prout
 
smashmouth said:
internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
Click to expand...

also from the book

WONDERFUL WORLD OF POOL AND BILLIARDS

"MY FAVORITE STORIES"

by Robert Byrne

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!"
 
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also from the book

Billiards by John Grissom


I first saw Don Willis sitting along the wall in the practice room at Fred Whalen’s World Invitation Tourney in 1973He was a short paunchy rather nondescript man in his early sixties, wearing a brown suit over a surgical green polyester sport shirt. He had meaty hands, wore an old gold watch with a thick expansion wrist band, spoke with a Midwestern drawl and for all appearances looked like your friendly neighborhood butcher on vacation. Yet there wasn’t a contestant there who didn’t know him and have at least one outrageous story to tell about him. Don Willis is pooldom’s greatest unknown player.

Aw, I’m too old, fellas, he groaned. I can’t make a ball anymore. But one afternoon he stepped up to the table and made 11 wing shots in a row before he missed, then performed the trick that made him famous: He put the cue ball a few inches away from the three ball, then caromed the cue ball off the three and off the table where it bounced on the floor, rolled out of the practice room and into the middle of the hallway about 60 feet away where it hit the four ball. Johnny Ervolino swears he once saw Willis do that same shot in New York, only the cue ball went down two flights of stairs, rolled under a steam radiator and then kissed the four next to a hallway trash bin - for MONEY!

I’ve seen Don run over 40 racks in nine ball, says Fred Whalen. I don’t mean pocketing something on the break every time but if the other fellow missed a shot, he’d run out every time. Now Don played for the cash and nobody ever beat him. He’s one of the great, great players of all time.

Don Willis is practically unknown to the public. He never entered a tournament, never got his picture in the paper, and in fact insists most of his career earnings have been from card games. He’s retired now and claims he spends a lot of time drinking whiskey and watching pool tournaments. Though he’s spent a rough and tumble life on the road he has a marriage that’s lasted, has raised six kids and sent them through school, paid his taxes, lived comfortably and enjoyed a solid reputation as a man of his word. Such a bizarre combination of Ozzie Nelson at home and Sun Dance Kid on the road is almost inconceivable. No less so is the fact that every top player during the past half century (including Minnesota Fats, bless him) appears willing to vouch for the validity of Willis' apochryphal tales. Don himself is not an arrogant person yet he knows some of his accomplishments stretch his credibility.
But let him tell it:

I was thirteen when I started playing pool at the YMCA in my home town of Canton, Ohio. That was in 1923. By the time the Depression hit I was pretty good. I was also married and had a set of twin daughters so I began playing pool for money out of necessity. There wasn’t much else to do. And with three mouths to feed I couldn’t afford to lose. You couldn’t tell the gas company you overcut the fourteen ball and you’d pay’ em next week. So what I did was I actually played for the groceries. I’d imagine I was shooting the milk in the corner, playing position on the potatoes, then I’d put the bread in the side and end up with a break shot on the hamburgers. That’s about the truth.

You might miss the seven ball but if you imagine it’s a pound of hamburger for twin daughters at the height of the Depression, you’re gonna make the shot. I had a set of twin girls, then two more girls - in 1935 and ‘38 - and a boy in ‘41. Five straight girls, finally a boy and I quit.

Actually it wasn’t too bad during the Depression because the pool halls were crowded and the players always had betting money. But pool was always a sideline to me. I was a card player most of the time, have been all my life. I’ve never had any kind of a job but I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, often traveling with top players, guys like Johnny Irish, Ray Dickerson, Cowboy Jimmy Moore, Luther Lassiter. See, you got to choose well. You have to trust the person you travel with. Coupla players, I never knew if I went to the toilet whether I’d be broke when I came back out.

I was at my best when I was 34 years old and had just got out of the Army. While in the service I did very well at cards and pool and I came out pretty well fixed. Maybe it was the combination of financial security and getting back in physical condition. I dunno, but my game jelled. For about a ten-year stretch there I beat everybody. I’m not trying to brag but it got so nobody ever came to Canton to play me. I had to go somewhere else.

I never showed my face in places like Hot Springs, Arkansas and Norfolk, Virginia when all the top players would get together but I did go to Louisville during the Kentucky Derby. It was like a ritual. Everybody went there to make money but I still stayed out of sight. I’d go to a colored pool room across the river and slip a twenty to the cop on the beat and let him know I wasn’t there to sell dope. Then friends around the Derby would steer guys over to me and I’d beat ‘em all.

My specialty was nine ball. Luther Lassiter and I went on the road for, oh, thirteen years straight from 1947 to 1960. I guess Wimpy and I were the best players the time we was on the road together. No doubt about it. We went everywhere in the country and never lost a match, either one of us. Oh, we might lose twenty or thirty dollars to some guy who quit on us, but I mean a regular match where you could win some money.

Wimpy’s exactly ten years younger than me. He got his nickname from eating a lot of hamburgers, like Wimpy in the funny papers. To tell you the truth he’s not the same fella he used to be. Used to be a high-priced boy. I’m not knockin’ him at all but I don’t get along with him any more at all. Personal reasons. But the boy’s a good player. He’s all right. There’s nuthin’ the matter with Lassiter.

Not to brag but I lived higher than any pool player I ever knew. No ‘probably’ about it. I had a couple of homes, cars, everything. I pay taxes as a professional pool player, about five to six thousand every year. See, that’s why these tournaments are a joke. Like in 1966 Lassiter won five major tournaments and finished second in a sixth and he earned something like $10,600. That wouldn’t even keep me in whiskey, that’s on the square. So the game as an occupation is not good yet.

See back in the thirties I played just about everything for a living. In fact my best game was table tennis. I was the champ of the world in 1930. I beat several world champions. I don’t care if it does sound like bragging, it’s true. I beat Jimmy McClure and Sal Schiff. They were both world champions and I murdered both of ‘em for money. As for horseshoes ..... well, let me tell you a story.

I walked into a recreation room in the little town of Dennision, Ohio one time. The owner had a pool table, a billiard table, a card table, a ping pong table and a horseshoe court with regular clay in it. They were all in there because they were his favorite games and he figured he was pretty good at all of ‘em - which he was, it turned out. Well, at that time I was an outstanding horseshoe pitcher, one of the best in Ohio. I pitched close to seventy percent wingers for a whole season. And I was the best table tennis player in America at that time. No probably about it. You can check up on it. Plus I was also a very good three-cushion billiards player - not a champion but anyway too good for a local player any place.
 
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continued from previos post


Now I’d come to Dennison to play a five-hundred dollar table tennis match with a guy only they couldn’t find him for some reason. That turned out to be lucky cuz the guy later went on to win the world championship. So I began playing pool with the owner of this room and then we moved on to the other games one by one. It turned into a marathon. Well, by the time I was done with him, the poor guy didn’t know whether he was in Alaska or the Sahara Desert or downtown Detroit. I had him sending out for money for a week and when I was through, I’d won all the money in that town I could possibly win. One of the funniest things you ever saw.

Sometimes the best way to get up a game is to walk in from nowhere and make a preposterous claim about how good you are and aggravate people into challenging you for high stakes. That’s called hoorah. You hoorah somebody into playing.

Probably the best example of a hoorah that turned out just the way I wanted was in 1947 when I was driving from Georgia up to New York for the World Series. I stopped at a hotel in Petersurg, Virginia and while I was on my way to the men’s room in the basement I walked by a pool room. I noticed a bunch of smart looking guys - you could tell they were gamblers of some kind - standing around like something had just happened. Now I was flush at the time, had about ten thousand in cash on me, so I walked in and said I’d like to play a game of nine ball for two hundred dollars.’ Then I turned and walked out.

Five minutes later I returned from the men’s room, walked in, and a guy came over and asked ‘You said something about nine ball?’ I immediately said, ‘Aw, you don’t wanna play me, I’m the world’s champion nine-ball player.’ At that time there was no such thing of course. Then he said, C’mon, you wanna play?’ I said ‘Are you kiddin’? I just beat Willie Hoppe two days ago for the title, beat him ninety straight games at forty dollars a game. You can’t beat me.’ Now the guy starts to get hot and challenged me to a game for twenty-five dollars. ‘Twenty-five dollars?’ I said. ‘Hell, if I want a bowl of soup I’ll buy one.’ With that his buddies started laughing. It went on like that for about fifteen minutes. That’s what I’d do, see, get them all riled up and then make ‘em laugh to cool ‘em off so they’d play. In the end I got up a game for eighty dollars, I think. Four guys bet me twenty apiece.

As I reached for a house cue I shook my head and said, ‘Ho ho, you’ll be sorry. Don’t say afterwards I didn’t warn you.’ So we flipped for the break, the other guy won, he broke the balls, nothing dropped in and I’m left with a shot on the one. Now instead of shooting for it I go for the nine off the one and it kisses off three balls, banks twice and goes in. Just luck, see. I was riding the nine and I won. So I picked up the eight bucks and without saying anything I walked over to the wall, put up my cue and started to walk out. Any my opponent yelled ‘Hey, whata’ ya doin’? Quittin’? I turned around with a puzzled look and said ‘You mean to tell me after seeing a professional shot like that you still wanna play me? Well, hell, I’m not quitting! Give me back my cue!’

By this time two more guys stepped in to bet and the stake went up to a $120. Now really, this only happens once in a lifetime. Second game, same thing. I got a shot on the two ball and rode the nine in on two kisses. And all the time I was shaking my head and saying ‘See? See’ and telling them how dumb they are to be betting me. Now I did that four straight times, rode the nine in on small balls. You couldn’t believe it. It just happened. ‘Course, I know how to ride the balls pretty good. But now I’m $600 ahead and I decided I wasn’t gonna depend on this any more. So on the fifth game I get a shot on the three and run out. That was the first time they saw I could really shoot and right away two guys quit. One of them said, ‘Hass, he probably is the greatest nine-ball player in the world.’ By that time I’m $750 or $800 winners and I don’t care if they quit.

The session lasted altogether about two hours. For awhile there I was betting one-sixty a game but near the end the bet was down to sixty. I finally beat the guy for about $1,200. As he was getting ready to leave he said, ‘You’re the luckiest guy I’ve ever seen in my life.

I said ‘Why’s that, son?’

He said, ‘Two minutes before you came in that door, I’d just won $300 and was on my way out.’

Several years ago during the Florida State Open Tournament, Willis was invited by the promoter to a players’ meeting. Among those on hand were Junior Goff, Bill Weenie Beanie Staton, Eddie Taylor (a great one-and nine-ball money player) and Willis’ old roadmate Johnny Irish. The purpose of the meeting, the promoter explained, was to explore the possibilities of incorporating the players into some kind of professional organization. As a preliminary step he handed out sheets of paper and requested the players to list their various accomplishments. For several minutes the room was silent while pencils scribbled.

At length the promoter collected the papers, all of which were full of championship honors and titles - except for the one from Don Willis. That sheet read only Undisputed Champion of Fourth Street, Canton, Ohio.

When asked about it, Willis replied he’d never in his life entered a tournament of any kind anywhere, adding, outside of being the champion of my family I don’t hold any titles in anything. But when the other players present insisted that, for all the top names he’d bested, he ought to write down somehing, Willis relented.

OK, OK, I’ll give you something. He reached for the stack of papers, selected one belonging to one of the game’s top players containing a lengthy list of titles, wins and championships, then wrote on the bottom of this great player’s paper, I beat him, signed Don Willis.
 
Thanks for this post, really enjoyed the read. Mr Willis was one of the few I didn't get to meet back in the day, and from hearing about the stories he told, was one of the reasons to have had the luck of knowing him. I had heard once, someone accused him of lying, he said, that he came from a family that always told the truth, for 17 generations no one had told a lie in his family, and they could go and ask every one of them and then dared them to do it.
 
smashmouth said:
internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
Click to expand...

Why would you attempt your own revision of history then?

A quick search yields many accounts of the man's prowess, and NONE that state he was actually a hack who some other player woulda loved to play every day?

Written and spoken/ documented accounts were the day's standard. YouTube wasn't around yet.
 
All I can add is that I never saw Don Willis at his peak but I was around him enough to see the respect the top players all had for him. Many of them derided Fats and made fun of him, but there was never anything like that toward Willis. Being who I was I inquired about this man with the old timers who I knew and was told that he was the best hustler in the country, with a variety of skills, among them Table Tennis (he often beat good players using a coke bottle for a paddle), Horseshoes, unbeatable at running backwards strange as it sounds, and of course Pool. He was also a winning card player who may have been a card mechanic. I don't know this for sure though.

One other skill he was known for was handicapping sports and on the one occasion I had to converse with him (I was sitting next to him sweating a game), I asked him what he was studying in the sports section of the newspaper and he told me he was checking the lines on tomorrow's basketball games. Naturally being the degenerate gambler that I was back then I wanted to know more about this. He was very friendly and told me that his specialty was college basketball and in particular the small colleges that the bookies knew less about. He said that he usually spent the entire basketball season in Las Vegas where he could bet all the games. It goes without saying that he was making good money doing this, as his pool days were pretty much over (he was in his 60's then). He added that college basketball and baseball were both beatable and he pretty much left football alone.

Don Willis was no pretender of any kind. He was the real deal and a highly skilled man. The fact that he was kind of short and paunchy probably went a long way to assisting his hustle. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was when he stopped in The Cue and Bridge in Dayton, and shortly after George Rood walked in and gave him a warm greeting. I had never before seen George greet anyone in such a friendly manner. He was usually quiet and reserved, even stern at times. After that Willis made appearances at Johnston City in the mid 60's but I never saw him pick up a cue, although I think he was side betting matches. Those are my recollections of the man. Plus the one time I saw him beat the ring game at the little poolroom on Main St. in Dayton (around 1964).
 
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smashmouth said:
internet forums and revisionist history, lmfao

of the little online information available on this guy he seemed like a complete dick and con artist

also outside hearsay not much to suggest he was a world class player
Click to expand...

I imagine Brunswick hired many non playing hacks to represent them at a point when they were probably the biggest sporting company in the world.:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Jason
 
I only have one Don Willis story and it is not about his Pool Accomplishments. During his years in the Army in WW 2 he was the Ping Pong Champion. After he was discharged he hustled Ping Pong as well as Pool and Horseshoes. After he beat you at Ping Pong he would get the last money playing even up with a PENCIL. That's how superior his hand eye coordination skills were.
 
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