Ruth McGinnis

Ruth McGinnis, while not the first woman to play professional pool, was certainly among the most important and accomplished, an athlete ahead of her time in an exhilarating but often mentally punishing sport.

It takes a minute to identify what's off about the picture, a black and white photograph that shows one end of a pool table, wide and sturdy, with a spread of balls on it. You can pick out the individual stripes and solids, even the eight-ball. Behind the table sits a wooden bench. Two triangular racks hang from pegs on the wall, indicating that this must be a pool hall somewhere.

A woman leans over the table, one arm hovering near the cloth, her hand forming a perfect bridge through which a cue stick slides, the other arm drawn back, hidden in shadow, but clearly gripping the butt of the cue. She's lined up perfectly on the cue ball, about to send it into a stripe, which, when struck, will roll out of the frame to a pocket we can't see.

The woman is inscrutable. She has a small, serious face that bears down on those balls, eyes focused, intense, eyebrows low, her mouth determined. She wears a crisp white blouse. Her hair is bobbed and a neat row of dark bangs fans across her forehead. And yet still, something is off.

And then it hits you. She's not much taller than the table. In fact, the table looks enormous in this photo and she looks disproportionately petite. But nothing is out of proportion here, you realize — the scale is exact. As you peer closer, at that pale, tiny, serious face, you realize that you are looking at a child. That's a child. A 10-year-old girl, as it turns out. A 10-year-old girl named Ruth McGinnis, who plays pool better than most adults.

She is a prodigy, a wonderment, a curiosity. And though it's easy to forget, still a child. That's why the picture seems off-kilter. Despite the billiard expertise on display, a tinge of sadness enfolds the photo. Although this girl wears the expression of an adult, there is something about seeing her small frame juxtaposed to that imposing table that is overwhelming. She doesn't seem overwhelmed — she is poised and capable, even a little scary — it is the viewer who is overwhelmed once the realization sinks in. What's that baby doing in a pool room, playing like a man?

Ruth McGinnis' biography unfolds like those of many of her pool-champion compatriots: She had early, easy access to the game, and an adult (in her case, her father) who consistently nudged her toward it. Born in 1910, she began playing pool at age seven in her father's pool room in Honesdale, PA, and by age 10 she was considered one of the billiard world's greatest performers. "Performer" is the key word here. She played in front of rapt, astonished crowds, often touring with a young Willie Mosconi, who would go on to become one of the greatest pool players who ever lived. They played exhibition matches, their little frames not much taller than the tables on which they dueled. Mosconi is somewhat dismissive of McGinnis in his autobiography, Willie's Game (1993). He was dismissive of anyone who couldn't beat him consistently, but Ruth seems to have left a particular sore spot. Mosconi devotes only a couple of paragraphs to his time as McGinnis' childhood pool partner and makes the somewhat snide remark that in the stories that surrounded these two billiard prodigies, their ages seemed to change with each telling: his kept getting older and Ruth's kept getting younger. (Mosconi was three years younger than McGinnis, a tender seven years old when his exhibition matches started.) Perhaps his snippiness is the result of some sort of child-prodigy rivalry. I suspect that part of the draw for these early exhibitions was not just that two children were so expert at pool, but that one of them was a girl. And at this, of course, Ruth would always win.

By age 11, McGinnis had a run of 25 in straight pool — a mean feat for an adult pool player, let alone a prepubescent girl — and three years later, when she was only 14 years old, McGinnis defeated the world champions in women's billiards, the well-known Flower sisters. Ruth would go on to hold the title herself, from 1932-1940. After a particularly dazzling series of matches in Chicago in 1934, the World Billiards Association named her "Queen Billiard Player of the World," a rather weighty, exalted title for a 24-year-old, but she carried it with her usual unshakable poise.

McGinnis' stats are, as you would expect, impressive. Her high run in straight pool was 128 — a women's record that wasn't broken until another prodigy, Jean Balukas of Brooklyn (who played in her first U.S. Open when she was only nine years old), ran more than 150 balls in the 1970s.

McGinnis entered men's competitions as well, after her reign as the women's pool champion ended in the 1940s. She beat men regularly, and continued her exhibition matches, playing with pool greats like Ralph Greenleaf, with whom she also performed as a girl.

When Ruth wasn't focused on her pool game — a game that turned her face into a stern, resolute mask — photos show her as smiling and animated and relaxed — perhaps a little wise beyond her years, but certainly not unhappy.

But it couldn't have been easy being Ruth McGinnis. Although she was highly respected, crowds gathered not just because of her talent, but because there was something freakish about her, this refined woman who played what was still considered a man's game. She carried herself with the air of a schoolmarm and yet she was playing a game that drew in some of the roughest types imaginable — drunks and gamblers, coarse men with axes to grind. She traveled constantly and had to practice all the time when she wasn't performing or competing. There was no "Olympic village" for her to stay in, no agents and publicists encircling her, protecting her interests, no corporations jockeying for her endorsements. It was Ruth and pool and a lonely life on the road. Why would a young woman choose a life like that in the 1930s and 40s? It didn't seem normal.

The information available on Ruth McGinnis is paltry at best. Other than statistics about her matches, very little has been documented about her life. She lived in Honesdale — the town in Pennsylvania where she was born — and appeared in a short movie, "Behind the Eight Ball," with Paul Douglas in the 1930s, one of several short films about pool in which she had a role. Her win-loss record is staggering: She lost only 8 out of 340 professional games against some of the strongest competition in the world — male and female. As for her exhibition record, she lost a mere 29 matches out of 1,532. In 1942 she entered the New York State Pocket Billiard Championship, which until then had been restricted to men, and in 1948 she was invited to compete for the world title. There is no question that Ruth McGinnis paved the way for the women who followed her.

Ruth retired from professional billiards when she was 44 but continued to participate in exhibitions for several more years. During that time, she earned a degree from East Stroudsbourg State Teachers College and soon after began teaching underprivileged and developmentally handicapped children in Philadelphia, a career to which she was devoted for the rest of her life. Her personal life remains sketchy: She had two sisters, she never married, and she chose to live as a somewhat enigmatic figure. She was elected — posthumously — to the Billiards Hall of Fame in 1997.

None of the books or articles that address women in billiards mentions that Ruth McGinnis was rumored to be a lesbian; it was one of those silent, vaguely acknowledged issues that was shoved into a corner and avoided. Her family allegedly shunned her because of this, despite her astonishing successes in other parts of her life. I sometimes wonder if her loneliness, her feeling that she had to hide who she was, led her to pool as much as her father's poolroom did. I know enough people who have lost themselves — or found themselves — on those quiet green tables to think that this might be part of the fuel that drove her to such soaring success so early in her life. Pool didn't just allow her to fight and win, to show her talent to the world, without judgment. It didn't just allow her to be somebody else: It allowed her to be no one, a blank slate of green, adorned with nothing more than solids and stripes.

Ruth McGinnis photos courtesy of Mike Shamos, the Billiard Archive, Pittsburgh, PA.

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