Mizerak, Stephen
champion billiard player
(October 12, 1944 - May 29, 2006)The Polish American World mistakenly gave space in its weekly paper in 2006 to Steve Mizerak under the impression that the world champion billiard player was Polish. Not so. His grandparents, Andrew, an oiler in a Perth Amboy refinery, and Veronica Mizerak were Slovak immigrants who came from Czechoslovakia in 1903 and 1904, respectively, and his father, Steve Mizerak, was born on June 27, 1914, in Perth Amboy, where he was also born. In 1930, not counting children born in the United States, 1,487 of the 43,429 persons in Perth Amboy were from Poland and 1,279 were from Czechoslovakia.
In addition to working in a cigar factory and playing baseball in the minor leagues, the older Stephen opened a pool room for sports fans in Metuchen, New Jersey, many of whom commuted to work in New York, and one day to have fun picked up his four-year-old boy and handed him a cue stick on the pool table. The boy sank a ball in a side pocket and everybody laughed.
Over the next 57 years, the younger Mizerak turned out to be pool's biggest showoff.
When he graduated from high school, his father sent him to St. Ambrose University, a premier Catholic institution in Davenport, Iowa, where he qualified for the World's Pocket Billiard Championship and faced some of the best pool shooters for the first time. He transferred to Athens College in Alabama for his senior year and upon graduation he returned to Perth Amboy to teach various subjects in a middle school. He spent 13 years as a teacher. To his students he looked like a jolly green giant -- with his crew cut blonde hair, standing six feet one inch and weighing over 200 pounds.
He continued to spend time in pool rooms. The U. S. Open title he won in 1970 was his most important victory, for it put him on the road to riches and nice write-ups in the sports pages of newspapers and magazines. Between 1970 and 1988 he won 16 major titles. In 1980, he was the youngest player inducted into the billiard Hall of Fame and he was ranked sixth of all the billiard players by Billiard Digest.
Despite these achievements, his big break came in the 1970s when he appeared in a Miller Lite commercial. It took a whole day to make it. It meant that he had to practice a trick shot 181 times until it was right. It was so successful that he gave up his teacher's job in order top make more 30-second Miller Lite commercials and to do other things.
Among them, he started a company to make cue sticks and wrote instructional books for billiard players. In 1996 he founded the Senior Masters Tournament for players over fifty at a billiard hall he opened in Lake Park, Florida. He suffered a stroke in 2001 and his wife, with whom he had two sons, took over the pool hall.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)