George Jansco
Everybody laughed four years ago when George Jansco sat down to pay. They couldn’t imagine anyone making a $50,000 investment for, of all things, a pool tournament. A golf tournament or a bathing beauty contest, sure, but a pool tournament? Heaven forbid!
Jansco, a plump, pleasant little man who enjoys a good joke, laughed right along with them. He was laughing the other day, in fact, when I saw him walking toward the Johnston City, Ill., bank.
To almost everyone’s amazement, Jansco’s dream has mushroomed into the hottest thing ever to hit the world of pocket billiards. In George’s own fascinating dialect, “Interest spread like a forest fire–no, even faster than that, like a grass fire.”
Until Jansco started passing out handbills declaring his “World’s Pocket Billiards Championships,” few people outside the Southern Illinois area called “Little Egypt” ever had heard of Johnston City.
A small, folksy community, Johnston City (Pop. 3891) is located in the heart of Southern Illinois’ coal-mining area, not far from Dog Walk, Freeman Spur and Whiteash. The town, suffering when several mines closed during the ’50s, was one of a small percentage of Illinois towns which declined in population during the period 1950-60.
Murtaugh Would Bet on Him
But Jansco, who had been born of poor Hungarian parents 50 years ago in Johnston City, never gave up hope for the future of his native community. His ambitions increased a couple of years ago when the government constructed a new interstate highway within spitting distance of his night club.
“I knew right then that this area had possibility,” Jansco says. “So I started work on this pool tournament and nine-hole golf course. I’m gonna build a motel, too. This is the main route from Chicago to New Orleans, you know.”
Jansco, a squat man who stands about as tall as a cue stick, was no newcomer to the pool profession. He shot a good enough game that Danny Murtaugh used to bankroll him in the days when both were knocking around the baseball minor leagues.
“I got to know a lot of pool players in those days,” says George, “and that helped when I started this tournament.”
Jansco spent nine years of professional baseball, most of it as a second baseman in the Texas League. In 1939, he hit .357, had 64 doubles and 29 homers. One day he broke up a no-hitter by Mort Cooper with a two-out, ninth-inning single.
The action was heavy in a smoke-filled DuQuoin, III., pool parlor that winter night when Jansco found out the Chicago White Sox had bought his contract. It was 1942 and George was 28. The White Sox offered him $600 a month, considerably less than he was making as a hustler, and he decided baseball wasn’t as much fun.
Won and Lost Several Fortunes
Jansco wound up making book in Evansville and stayed here until 10 years ago when he returned to Johnston City. “The laws were making it hard to earn a living,” he says, “and one day I said to my wife, ‘Honey, I was broke when I was 20 and I was broke when I was 30 and I’m broke now at 40. It’s time to settle down and make some money.’”
During this time, George had gambled away at least three fortunes, including one which he says reached $280,000. “Ray Ryan (the Evansville millionaire oil tycoon) is a good friend of mine and he always told me to shoot the works,” Jansco explains.
George still lives by that advice. He and his brother, Paulie, invested $57,000 in a new pool room for this year’s tournament and put up $20,000 in prize money–double that of the last two years. The prize fund includes the $8000 paid
the Janscos by the American Broadcasting Company for television rights to the month-long event.
In four short years, Jansco’s “dream” has ballooned from a non-sanctioned, much-maligned affair into a national event that suddenly has attracted the entire billiards academy. For the first time, the tournament now has the sanction of the Billiard Congress of America, the governing body of the billiards world.
Brunswick also got into the act. The company gave the Janscos four new tables for this year’s tourney. From a lousy start of 13 entries and a $5000 prize in 1961, the tournament now has 106 players from 36 states vying for $20,000 in cash prizes.
And while the hustlers still attract the crowds to Jansco’s Cue Club, George is beginning to attract some of the game’s “straight-laced set.” Harold Worst is one such example this year.
“Where’s the secret?”
“Television is one answer,” says Jansco. “Another is the fact I work 20 hours a day to make this thing a success. But finally,” and here he borrows a well-worn phrase from recent weeks, “the billiards world began to come around because in their heart, they knew I was right.”
