A sports journalist’s life isn’t like being a war correspondent. There’s rarely any danger of going out on a job worried that you might not come home.
But some interviews can be trickier than others. And I’ve never forgotten one of the assignments which seemed in danger of turning into a Martin Scorsese movie.
It happened 30 years ago this week during a visit to the Norbreck Castle Hotel in Blackpool; an old-worldly seaside setting with a tea dance in progress, a string quartet sawing away, and where one half expected Hercule Poirot to walk into the lobby in his polished spats and demand to know what had happened to his copy of The Times.
The plan – organised by an older colleague, Terry Smith – was for me to meet up with a rising star of snooker, discuss his ambitions to turn professional and examine the grand predictions which were being made for his future.
“Believe me, it will be worth it,” said Terry.
“You’re going to see something special.”
And that was the start of my fascination with the maestro, Ronnie O’Sullivan.
In normal circumstances, it should have amounted to a pleasant conversation with a wunderkind, 10-15 minutes of pat-a-cake Q&A, but the 16-year-old was spooked that September evening and there was something approaching dread in his eyes.
It was baffling at the time, but a decade later, when we rubbed shoulders again for a chinwag at Edinburgh Airport, he recalled how his life had been transformed forever by the imprisonment of his father after the killing of an associate.
A crazy time for the king of the cue
I’m glad he agreed to speak to me.
Heaven knows, he had the perfect excuse to cancel.
He said: “Oh yeah, sorry mate, I’d forgotten about talking to you in Blackpool, but things were going crazy at that stage.
“I spent three and a half months in Blackpool and I was really excited because I had qualified for the 1993 World Championship.
”But then, within the next few days, when I returned to London, it all collapsed around my ears when my dad was found guilty of murder and the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a minimum recommendation of 18 years. It crushed me!”
That explained why O’Sullivan had been like a caged, coiled spring when we met. A young man who seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and who couldn’t keep still for an instant – or not once he had left the table where he excelled.
And that experience summed him up and emphasised how he could knuckle down to his responsibilities in the town of rocky piers. He wasn’t enjoying himself, but he could cope with the intense demands of the schedule at the venue for the qualifiers for the main tournaments shortly after the game was thrown open.
It was a sprawling arena, equipped with a main hall which could accommodate up to 20 tables and, wherever you looked, would-be stars were potting balls, building breaks, winning, losing and, in some cases, imploding under the weight of expectation.
The gruelling schedule was utterly ruthless, with no room for frailty or blowing hot and cold. If it was Tuesday, you were trying to qualify for the Dubai Classic.
If it was Thursday, then your objective was to reach the UK Championship. There was a relentless nature to the proceedings and a whiff of desperation in the nicotine-stained atmosphere. But, for every Rocket, there were at least 20 or 30 damp squibs.
That class of 1992 included three players – O’Sullivan, Scotland’s John Higgins and Wales’ Mark Williams – who would subsequently become among the finest ever to grace the game and they stamped their imprint on the Crucible in the years ahead.
The star power was there from the start
But it was Ronnie who commanded the most attention. And not least because he breezed through his first 38 contests, eventually winning 74 out of 76 matches and showing plenty of glimpses of the spectacular pyrotechnics which became his trademark.
Away from the green baize, controversy followed him around.
There were spats, disagreements, fines, suspensions, lurid headlines and a variety of press conferences where O’Sullivan spoke candidly about his frustrations and how he wished he could escape from snooker and play football with his mates.
He told me in September 1992: “You just got your head down and played day after day after day. There wasn’t much else to do in Blackpool at the end of the summer anyway.
“I wasn’t interested in going to the seaside. All that mattered was snooker at that stage of my life. Sometimes, it could be incredibly boring. But I wanted to be the best and make my parents feel proud of me. I still do.”
If he was the restless youngster, lurking in the Norbreck shadows, worried sick about what was happening back home in Romford, one couldn’t blame him.
He was just a kid, albeit somebody who was looked after by a chap called Derek ‘Del’ Hill, who had the stature of Mount Rushmore made flesh and wore the stoical countenance of somebody who had seen it all before and wasn’t surprised by anything.
These tests of temperament, technique and stamina were great preparation for the peripatetic life of the itinerant snooker professional. Yet, while it had clearly worn down O’Sullivan by the stage of our meeting, he had attained his objective and shown the qualities which have earned him so much kudos, cash and commendations.
In the intervening period, the Rocket’s achievements have deservedly become the stuff of legend and despite his bouts of depression and disenchantment, which subsequently led to him discussing the benefits of Prozac – “I was churning, mate, absolutely churning, but it was a life-saver” – he has been the shining luminary in his domain.
Blink and you missed the brilliance
It’s a testament to his resilience, his determination and, above all, his prodigious talent with a cue in either hand, and while some of the game’s purists have shuddered at his eccentricities and idiosyncratic behaviour, he is to the green baize what Lionel Messi, Tiger Woods and Ben Stokes are to football, golf and cricket.
In the entertainment stakes, few feats anywhere else in sport have ever surpassed the unfettered brilliance displayed by O’Sullivan during his magical maximum break of 147 at the Crucible in 1997 when he cleared up all the balls in just over five minutes.
I know he has his critics who argue he should play more events and detractors who mock his moaning about the lack of personalities who frequent the modern circuit.
He’s right, though. Some of the new brigade more closely resemble blank-eyed automatons than fully-fledged members of the human race.
In this light, it’s remarkable that O’Sullivan, at 46, is continuing to dazzle and destroy opponents and remains No 1 in the rankings with seven world titles to his name, despite a childhood which owed more to Minder than Roy of the Rovers.
As he once remarked: “I was taught to say nothing to the cops. To keep schtum. When the police came to my school to talk to the pupils about road safety or something, one officer asked me my name and I replied: ‘No comment’.
“Then, when my mum kicked me out of the house, I would go to fast food restaurants and order three hamburgers, two large fries, a giant chocolate milkshake, nine McNuggets, four ketchups, three barbecue sauces…and a Diet Coke.
“Heaven knows why I bothered with the Diet Coke, but there you are. My weight ballooned to 16 stone, 17 stone, and I had no discipline. I once met David Beckham at a club and I had my eyes opened to what a whale I had become. As we were leaving the place, I heard this lass tell her mate: ‘Look, there’s Beckham.’
“Her pal responded: ‘What one? The fat one or the skinny one?’
“And I thought: ‘God, I must be fat’. And I was.
“I was really enormous and it was exactly the boot up the backside which I needed.”
Nothing has come easy to O’Sullivan except knocking reds and blacks into pockets at a formidable rate of knots.
But his contribution to snooker has been immense.
And it all started at the Norbreck, with the faithful Del Boy in the background looking out for the youngster even as he racked up 21-century breaks in his rookie year.
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