Willie Mosconi; Champion Billiards Player : Sports: Unofficial ambassador for the sport was 80. He won 15 world titles between 1940 and 1957, and his genteel manner helped lend respectability to the game.

Willie Mosconi, the perennial world champion billiards player who was considered the best player ever to pick up a cue, has died in his home here. He was 80 and had lived in New Jersey for 40 years, emerging regularly to conduct billiard clinics around the country.

The unofficial ambassador of the sport died Thursday of a heart attack, a funeral director said. An inductee in the Billiard Congress of America Hall of Fame, he won the world title 15 times between 1940 and 1957.

In a game that featured its share of sharks and hustlers, Mosconi walked a genteel line.

“I was never a shark,” he told The Times in 1989. At the time he was appearing in West Covina, where two dozen amateur challengers paid $25 for the honor of having him sweep the table with them. (Proceeds went to a nearby hospital).

“I kind of think I was one of the ones who took the bad name away from this game.”

Among Mosconi’s career highlights was his 1941 world championship in the longest billiard tournament ever, according to Pool & Billiard Magazine.

That round-robin event featured the top eight players, each of whom would play every other player 32 times. Participants played five days a week over a six-month period in six cities. Mosconi set many records during the tournament, including the fastest game on record with 125 points in 30 minutes.

Mosconi still holds many other records.

One night in 1954, at an exhibition in Springfield, Ohio, he sank an extraordinary 526 consecutive balls without a miss.

The son of a Philadelphia pool hall owner, Mosconi as a child was forbidden to have anything to do with billiards. And his father locked up the balls and cues at night just to be sure.

But his determined son practiced in secret, using a broomstick and small, round potatoes while he stood on an old apple crate to reach the table.

When his amazed father discovered how good the boy had become, he entered him in a match at Philadelphia’s National Billiard Academy.

At the age of 6, Willie sank 40 straight balls.

He looked askance at trick or difficult shots, saying: “You have to set yourself up. The winner is the guy who can get through the table the easiest.”

He was a technical adviser for the 1961 movie “The Hustler,” loosely based on the life of his longtime pool rival Rudolph Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. Mosconi also helped Tom Cruise when he co-starred with Paul Newman in the 1986 sequel, “The Color of Money.”

“Willie’s Game,” an autobiography based on Mosconi’s life, was released in June. Earlier he wrote the best-selling “Winning Pocket Billiards.”

His survivors include his wife, Flora, a son and two daughters.