potrero view

May 2009

Retired Pool Shark Makes His Home in Mission Bay

By Anthony Myers

Looking back on his life, billiard aficionado Donald Mark, 74, who once bested Willie Mays on the felt, has no regrets.  The east Texas native grew up in San Francisco.  He lived in Hunters Point and the Fillmore, where he attended Roosevelt Middle School with Eugene Brown, Ray Taliaferro and Johnny Mathis.  Yori Wada, who directed the Buchanan YMCA for many years, became a father figure to the young Mark, introducing him to the game of pool.   “I was more than a pool player.  Way more than just a pool player.  I was adventurous, I had ladies.  I went into other things like paper, check cashing, identity theft and the like.  I had certain principles though, I never believed in allowing myself to be the cause of anybody’s harm.  I refused to do anything that might hurt somebody.”

Mark learned from local billiard aces Rooster, Soldier Boy and Jesse the Go Away Kid.  He played at Knights Pool Room, and at an unnamed Filipino poolroom on Sutter and Webster streets.  “I ran it [the Filipino poolroom].  Why?  Because Filipino’s at that time had their likes and they were clean cut.  They liked smoking cigars, gambling, an occasional blunt and not to be bothered with racking balls and running the business, which I didn’t mind.  It gave me an opportunity to practice for free.  I’d never be broke because they gave me money to gamble with.”

“I knew how to get out of the jams and win.  How to win where there was no possible way to win, I’d win anyhow.  You might say I’m highly competitive.  But I didn’t try and rattle or cheat somebody.”    

Mark joined the navy at age 17.  “I wanted to get into aerial photography, ya know? Taking pictures from above.”  But his naval career aboard the General W. A. Mann sea transport was cut short because Mark hated how all the black and Filipino sailors were made to be stewards.  “I shined my own shoes and if I was gonna make a hamburger it was gonna be for me!”  On a shore leave in Vancouver, he returned a few hours late, and was kicked out of the service.  

“Canada is a lovely place.  I never felt so much weight off my head before I visited Vancouver.  There’s nowhere in the world, I felt, more beautiful than Puget Sound.  In Vancouver, I didn’t sense something that I wasn’t even aware of until I left here: the systematic racism.  They don’t feel that there.  You just do not feel it.  I wondered for years, how could I possibly come back and live here the rest of my life?  Because I don’t love America; to me all that’s bullshit.  That’s propaganda.  It’s more humane in Vancouver.  They’re not systematically concerned with the belittling or degrading of somebody else.”

In 1953, after his brief naval stint, Mark traveled around California in search of new places and people to play.  “Nine-ball is the money game.  At that point I quit totally playing for free.  That’s when you’re a shark and you’ve become a professional and never play for free.”  While Mark was a good player, and loved to gamble, he wasn’t a classic con man, tricking his mark into laying down his green thinking to take advantage of an easy win.  “I had too much respect for the game to hustle.  I just straight outplayed them.  I reached a point where I wouldn’t play for less than $100.  I beat Willie Mays for $15 and he made such a fuss about it.  He told me, ‘Well you got your breakfast!’ I was so disappointed.  I thought he was a bigger guy than that.”

Mark has lived at Mission Creek Senior Community since it opened in 2006.  He’s comfortable, but must endure exhausting physical therapy as a result of a broken hip he suffered late last year.  He has an estranged daughter Nadja, 31, who lives in New York, and three sisters who live in San Francisco.  When asked if he had any brothers Mark deadpanned, “I’m the brother.”

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