Minnesota Fats; Flamboyant Pool Player

Minnesota Fats, the flamboyant, self-proclaimed “world’s greatest pool player,” who became a popular icon after Jackie Gleason portrayed him in the 1961 film “The Hustler,” died Wednesday of congestive heart failure in Nashville.

Fats, who never let facts get in the way of a good story, was elusive about his age. Some friends said he was born Jan. 19, 1900, but the 1966 biography “The Bank Shot and Other Great Robberies” listed his date of birth as Jan. 19, 1913.

“Now he’s finally in heaven shooting it out again with Mosconi,” Fats’ wife, Theresa Bell Wanderone, said Thursday.

Willie Mosconi, who died at 80 in 1991, was a legendary player whose name was synonymous with pool. But Fats dismissed Mosconi as “Mouseconi.”

“He couldn’t beat a drum,” Fats once said. “I’ve played him 100 times, and I’ve beat him 100 times.”

Fats, whose real name was Rudolf Walter Wanderone Jr., did not claim that he never lost a pool game. He always said he never lost one with money on the table.

Although he had once ballooned past 300 pounds and kept going, by the 1980s, he was no longer fat. He was never more in his element than when he was regaling admirers with outrageous tales of his exploits at pool.

“I outdrew the pope in Rome by 200,000 people--and that ain’t even good pool country,” he once quipped in his New York accent.

When a youngster in New York once asked him how he got the name Minnesota Fats, he didn’t miss a beat, answering: “Sonny, I got that name because when I was 12 years old I went up to Minnesota and cleaned out the whole state.”

As with many of his stories, the truth was a bit different.

Before the release of “The Hustler,” which also starred Paul Newman and George C. Scott, Fats was known as New York Fats. He grew up in the Washington Heights section of New York City, near 167th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

The movie was a hit and has become a classic. And New York Fats, never one to pass up a free ride, figured that if they were going to use his story, he might as well use their name.

“I was shootin’ pool when I was 2,” he told The Times in a 1976 interview. “I’d hang around a saloon to get a free lunch, you know, pretzels or bologna or somethin’ and they’d lift me onta a table and let me shoot.”

At a time when most youngsters were in grade school, Fats was playing pool against hustlers such as Nick the Greek, Titanic Thompson, Terrible Turk, Happy the Chinaman and Cornbread Red.

“School, to me, was the biggest joke the world has ever known,” he said. “I learned everything I ever needed to know from lawyers and doctors and legislatures [sic], all the people who was brilliant.”

With typical elan, he described how he was “a grown man when I was 8--up in the middle of the night playing cards or shooting pool or chasing broads.”

By his reckoning, he was either 8--or maybe he was 13--when he made an around-the-world cruise on a tramp steamer, playing cards and shooting pool to entertain the captain.

How could a truant officer ever catch up with him, he would ask defiantly. “I might be in Havana,” he said. “I might be in Hong Kong. Who knew where I might be? Besides, I’m not human. Never was.”

When Fats would reminisce, years drifted in an elusive mist. He might have been 4 or 5 when he started gambling--or maybe 7 or 8. And maybe the time he drew 300,000 in Baton Rouge (pop. 170,000 at the time) was 1971. Or could it have been 1972?

He once showed up for a meeting at a Laguna Hills hotel and pulled out a wad of bills--mostly $500s and $1,000s. He put that wad away and pulled another just like it from another pocket.

“I like to have some loot just in case a game comes up,” he said.

His fabulous career took him around the world at least eight times by his count, and he was fond of saying he was known from Azusa to Zanzibar.

He became a millionaire while living through World War I, Prohibition, the Depression, World War II and other conflicts. In 1941, he married Evelyn Inez Grass and retired to Dowell, Ill.

There he became widely known as a soft touch, caving in to every sob story in the area. He gave boxes of clothes to children and peeled off countless bills to the infirm, the unemployed and the very clever.

“I gave millions out,” he once said in what, for once, may not have been an exaggeration.

With the release of “The Hustler,” Fats was reborn--not as a hustler, but as a celebrity. He became a fixture on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” beaming his fast-talking hustle into alarmed living rooms across America. And America discovered that he was funny when he told his stories.

Fats and his first wife divorced in 1984, and he moved the next year to Nashville’s plush Hermitage Hotel, across from the Tennessee state Capitol. He was often seen feeding the birds outside. He also made cameo appearances in country music videos.

In 1992, he suffered a heart attack, and he married Theresa Ward Bell the same year. Survivors include two stepchildren.

* ADDITIONAL OBITUARIES: B10