http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/31/sports/othersports/01mizerak.html?pagewanted=print
May 31, 2006
Steve Mizerak, National Pool Champion, Is Dead at 61
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Steve Mizerak, who sank his first pocket billiards shot at age 4, became a national champion while a full-time schoolteacher, then emerged as a pop-culture celebrity doing TV beer commercials, died Monday in Boca Raton, Fla. He was 61.
The cause was a heart ailment that followed recent gall-bladder surgery, his wife, Karen, said.
Mizerak won the United States Open in pocket billiards * the formal name for pool * four straight times, from 1970 to 1973. He captured the Professional Pool Players Association World Open three consecutive years, from 1982 to 1984.
In 1980, Mizerak became the youngest player inducted into the Billiard Congress of America’s Hall of Fame. Billiards Digest ranked him No. 6 among 20th-century pros. He was among the few players, including Willie Hoppe, Willie Mosconi, Ralph Greenleaf, Irving Crane, Luther Lassiter and Jimmy Caras, who were known beyond the small circle of pro billiards.
But Mizerak was perhaps best recognized as a showman, linked with other names, among them Bubba Smith, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Rodney Dangerfield, all appearing in long-running TV commercials for Miller Lite beer.
He parlayed his celebrity status into a Hollywood role, his character losing a tournament match to the Paul Newman character Fast Eddie Felson in the 1986 movie “The Color of Money.”
Stephen Mizerak Jr., was born in Perth Amboy, N.J., and was soon a fixture at the pool hall that his father, Stephen Sr., opened in Metuchen, N.J., after playing minor league baseball.
“When I was 4, my father placed me in the middle of a pool table, handed me a cue stick, and I sank the eight ball in the side pocket,” Mizerak once recalled.
Many years later, the pool-world figure Cue-Ball Kelly, still officiating at matches at the age of 90, remembered that when Mizerak was 5 he would practice one shot for hours at a time and that “he was playin’ exhibitions when he was 6.”
Mizerak turned pro at 13, and by time he was attending St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa * a pudgy young man with a blond crew cut, going about 6 feet 1 inch and 225 pounds * he had beaten some of the country’s most prominent pros.
He transferred to Athens College in Alabama for his senior year, then became a teacher because the prize money in professional billiards was hardly spectacular.
In the mid-1970’s, he was teaching spelling and geography to seventh-graders at the William C. McGinnis middle school in Perth Amboy. But his fortunes changed a few years later when he did a Miller Lite commercial, pulling off a trick shot that startled an entire tavern, then remarking how it’s easy to work up a thirst “even when you’re just showin’ off.”
But it took a full day’s work for the stunt to come off. “The shots would go but the film wasn’t in focus,” Mizerak once told AZBilliards.com. “Someone in the background would sneeze. We actually did it 181 times in eight and a half hours.”
After 13 years as a teacher, Mizerak quit in order to promote Miller Lite in billiards demonstrations at trade shows while continuing on the tournament circuit. He did another dozen or so Miller Lite ads over the next decade.
“Those 29 seconds changed my whole life,” he once said of his first TV commercial.
Mizerak founded a senior tour for professional billiards players in 1996. He owned a Florida-based company that sold billiards equipment, ran a billiards parlor in Lake Park, Fla., and wrote instructional books, one of them titled “Just Showin’ Off.”
In addition to his wife, of Singer Island, Fla., he is survived by his sons, Stephen, of Bethlehem, Pa., and Peter, of Hamilton Township, N.J.; a stepson, Matthew Fox, of West Palm Beach, Fla.; a sister, Joyce Clark, of Milford, Pa.; and two grandchildren.
Mizerak once recalled how some old-time billiards pros, presumably remembering the days before tournaments moved from pool halls to hotel ballrooms, resented his good fortune.
“Pool players don’t get any respect,” he told The New York Times in 1985. “I feel sorry that guys I’ve been playing with can’t enjoy the fruits of a tough, tough sport. Golfers have fresh air. With pool, it’s smoke and guts.”
