The good fella

"He’s just the loveliest fella you’ll meet,” gushes the taxi-driver between hardcore rants about house prices and the Port tunnel. I’m heading out to Jason’s snooker hall in Ranelagh to meet Ken Doherty – and it’s about the fifth tribute of this kind I’ve heard in the last hour.

It is an indisputable fact that everybody likes Ken Doherty, as well they might. A remarkable sportsman and an all-round good guy, it’s sometimes hard to square him with professional snooker – a vocation that has famously produced more than the occasional tosser. Demonstrably grounded, he lives with the wife around the corner from his mam’s and still treks into Jason’s for practice everyday.
“That’s me alright”, Ken laughs, leading me through the sadly defunct snooker emporium to his practice room, out back. “I’m the Mary Poppins of the game.”
Jason’s makes for a heartbreaking sight today. There are huge rectangles of plush, never-worn carpet where the green felt tables once stood. An antiquated delivery bicycle rests in the corner, at the top of the staircase.
Like all the other cobwebbed bric-a-brac here – the tray of odd pool balls, advertisement bills for extinct products, once imperial bronze light fittings – it belongs to a different century, not the aggressively upwardly mobile neighbourhood around these parts today. Tellingly, Michael McDowell’s constituency office is right next door.
If it’s a big, fat sappy moment for me, I can’t imagine how it feels for Ken Doherty. As a child, even before the snooker bug bit, Jason’s was his personal Disneyland.
“I was too young to actually get into Jason’s on my own, so my brother used to take me in after mass on Sundays to play Space Invaders. There was only a pool table here then, but it was the hub of the area.”
Aged 10, young Ken would awake on Christmas morning to a miniature snooker table. Already an avid fan of the game – he and his dad never missed Pot Black – by lunchtime that day, he discovered that he was actually not too bad when it came to pocketing balls. When Alex Higgins’ second World Championship title in 1982 inspired a generation to take to dank, dark halls, Jason’s would give itself over to snooker, just as Ken was doing the same.
“Once Higgins won in 1982 I was hooked,” Ken recalls. “As soon as I started coming in here and showing a bit of promise they’d give me a free hour everyday, then sponsorship, then pocket-money. So now they can’t get rid of me.”
Though the hall is closed, Ken retains a practice room upstairs that's covered in personal effects and Manchester United memorabilia: a signed Keane shirt, pictures commemorating trophy moments, photographs taken with John Hurt and Alex Ferguson.
“I read Alex’s book and knew he was a big snooker fan, so I brought him a snooker cue with a plaque on his retirement,” says Ken. “I had to give it to him even though he changed his mind! What else could I do with it? Glad he did stay on though.”
Far more animated and jolly than his seemingly nerveless presence at the snooker table would suggest, no one has a bad word to say about Ken Doherty, and odds are, he doesn’t have a bad word to say about you. Nothing you ask causes him to bristle, bitch or respond in anything but the most positive fashion.
Famously, John Higgins – Ken’s friend and recent air travelling companion – is no great fan of Ronnie O’Sullivan, nor is Stephen Hendry. But ask about rivalries between his colleagues and Mr. Doherty almost guffaws.
“Aw, there are a few rivalries but most of the guys get on really well. It’s not like we’re all one big happy family but we have to get on. We all spend long hours in a hotel somewhere. You’re away from home, it’s maybe a day before your match, and it’s really boring. So we all play a bit of cards together, have a bit of banter. We all love the poker.”
What is it with your lot and poker?
“Oh, it’s the Jimmy White effect. I think once he won that major tournament, the rest of us thought we’d have to keep up.”
Having recently started to dabble in commentary for the BBC, he equally kind about the gang in there.
“Hazel [Irvine] is lovely and Ray Stubbs is just brilliant for the football banter. Then John Parrott and Steve [Davis] are hilarious. I love that Scouse humour up against Davis being really dry. But I was playing so bad lately I thought I better have something I can fall back on or I’ll be selling papers in Ranelagh.”
Enquire about rather less endearing folks and Ken is equally well disposed. Earlier this month, Quinten Hann, the volatile Aussie took his leave of The World Professional Billiard and Snooker Association, the game’s governing body. Hann hadn't played on the circuit since a sting by undercover journalists in May 2005 when he offered to purposely lose to Ken in the China Open in Beijing.
Is Ken disturbed by this development? Is he glad to see the back of a player who constantly threatened those around him? No, predictably, he’s perfectly nice about the whole debacle.
“Well, he had that legality hanging over his head. He was actually supposed to be playing me that match – but I knew nothing about it until I read it in the paper and he didn’t actually commit the crime.
“He was always a temperamental fella. Even as a kid, I remember his mother bringing him over to the UK and he was a complete headcase. But in a funny sort of way. Like the way he was always asking other players to get in the ring with him. Only Mark King ever did. And he was a good boxer, Quinten.”
The other bad boys of the game get equally good press.
“It’s a thing with Alex Higgins and Jimmy White and Ronnie O’Sullivan. They’re all God-given talents with some kind of flaw, but they have flaws people can relate to. We all have flaws and everybody loves a rogue.”
Always generous in his appraisal of people, Mr. Doherty’s easygoing approach often makes you suspect the phrase ‘water off a duck’s back’ was coined with him in mind. At a time when most fanatical supporters are freaked out by the dread Glazier family and their parasitical talons, Ken, a die-hard red who memorably paraded his World Championship trophy before the Old Trafford faithful in Manchester, remains sensibly cheery.
“I still love going to the matches – I’m trying to get over there for Saturday,” he tells me. “But I love Keane and since he’s gone it hasn’t been the same. But the forward line is still great. They’re just lacking something in the mid-field. I’m not too worried about the business stuff. Everybody is very sceptical about the Glaziers. But as long as they’re making funds available to buy players and Alex Ferguson is happy, then I have to be happy. He’s never put us wrong yet.”
Though he seems totally unshakable, Ken, who once described snooker as being ‘more about frames of mind than frames’, has suffered some erratic form of late.
“Oh yeah. I’ve lost a lot of finals. The one that hurt me the most was losing the UK final to Mark Williams. Then in the same season – this would be 2002 – I lost the World Championship to him (18-16) and that killed me. It was a totally subconscious thing. I mean, I was telling myself it was okay and it was still a great achievement to come so far, but it was in the back of my mind that I had missed this great opportunity to be a double world champion.”
Well, he gave it a hell of a go. Watching the World Championship that year, The Crucible – to use a well-worn sports cliché – became just that, as Ken, doing a mean impersonation of Muhammad Ali on the ropes, kept coming back from the verge of oblivion.
“I still don’t know what was going on. The first match was 10-9, the second 13-12, the third match I was 10-0 up against Higgins, he came back to 9, but I won it 13-9 or something like that. The semi was 17-16 and the final was 18-16. Apparently I played the most sets ever in the whole of a world championship without actually winning the thing.”
His bipolar performance that season would seal his reputation as the game’s pre-eminent comeback kid, earning him the nicknames ‘Crafty Ken’ or ‘Ken’Do’. “I’m just glad they don’t call me clueless Ken," he says. "But I prefer the Darlin’ Of Dublin myself.
Much like the momentous Liverpool comeback against Milan in last year’s Champions League final, watching him that year, having engineered such an extraordinary series of reversals in fortune, you felt it was in the bag for him. He must have felt so too.
“See, I disagree with you there”, he interrupts. “It was more like watching Man United beating Barcelona. Yeah, it did seem that way. It seemed almost destined after all those comebacks. That was the hard thing. I nearly had him. I clawed back from 10-2, but I just couldn’t get ahead that day. But I’ve had to tell myself it’s all history now. Had I won it, it would have been almost as good as Dennis Taylor taking it in 1985, but when you don’t lift the trophy you’re just confined to the realm of statistics.”
Then he laughs.
“But my official slant on it is that I’m an entertainer so you have to do these things, give the people value for money. No point winning easy.”
After a lacklustre start to the 2005/2006 season, Ken has just won the Malta Cup, beating John Higgins in the final. True to precedent, Ken had trailed 8-5 before managing a thrilling comeback, winning four frames on the bounce. Coming after a five-year duck, a mightily relieved Ken described it as his most important win since taking the World Championship.
“Ah,” he sighs. “It doesn’t seem that long, but it’s been five years and I had worried it would never happen for me again. I’ve won a couple of invitation tournaments in that time, but to win a major tournament again feels amazing.”
Did he really think he was finished?
“Yeah. And it is one of my greatest fears. What’s going to happen when I really go down? I mean, the last few years have been tough, but I’ve still been in the top 16 or the top 10 or whatever. So I do worry about that. But the good thing about snooker is that we’re not athletes, even though we like to think we are. Steve Davis is 48 and he’s still in the top 16. He got to the final in the UK there. I’m 36 now, so I’ve only got a few chances. No one has done the World Championship after 40. Scary. But at least I can catch up with the wife and finally ask her what she’s been up to for the last 10 years.”
Sadly, Ken’s triumph was soured somewhat when he returned home to find himself on the front pages rather than the back. On their way back to Britain, Ken and John Higgins, friends and fellow-finalists, were ordered off their flight after an English passenger complained they were drunk.
“People will be thinking I’m becoming an Alex Higgins in my old age,” clucks Ken. “It’s not like I’m a goody-two-shoes but I’m not the person described in The Sun or The Star or The Evening Herald. It was a bit unfortunate because I was looking forward to coming home with the cup. I was hoping to get the back page not the front one.”
Typically, he shrugs it off.
“I’m not too bothered. I’ve never had trouble with the press before. I was only trying to help John Higgins and when I tried to say ‘Listen, let him back on’, they put me off the plane too. My friend Mick had to come off too and he was only drinking coffee. Thing is, John’s a lovely guy and when he gets drunk, he’s a real happy, smiley drunk. I think all the other players are having a laugh now. Higgins and Doherty kicked off a plane! Mind you, I was worried that the wife and mother would kill me before I got a chance to open my mouth to defend myself.”
I’ll bet. Mrs. Sarah Doherty doesn’t exactly conform to snooker dolly-bird stereotype. An uncommonly pretty Indian-born, Australian-raised psychiatrist, she and Ken have been together since 1999.
“She’s a good, strict wife and a very hard woman to lie to,” he smiles. “If she gets you in a corner, you just won’t be able to keep a straight face. She’s actually doing research over at the College of Surgeons, having just moved from doing forensic psychiatry between the Central Mental Hospital and Mountjoy and Clover Hill. She’s an amazing worker – but she’s very unassuming about it. It makes me try harder because I see how bloody easy my job is. We’re not the average snooker couple but it’s a great combination. The game can drive you mad so it’s always handy having a psychiatrist around the place. Mind you, she doesn’t have a clue about snooker. But I still get her on the phone asking me if I’m making the long shots.”
Given Ken’s propensity for winning the hard way, it’s not all that surprising that Mrs. Doherty finds herself unable to watch him actually play.
“She can’t watch me play on TV even. But I think I might have barred her from watching me anyway. I brought her to one pro-am up north once and every time I’d miss a ball, I’d look over and see her eyes rolling up to heaven. I had to turn my chair around in the end. She was tutting at me and throwing me such dirty looks. I won the competition in the end, though.”
Clean living, hard working and definitely not prone to drunken air rage, Ken is emblematic of the new snooker, a game you could conceivably bring prawn sandwiches to. It’s not to be confused with the old snooker, played by booze jockeys like Kirk Stevens and Silvino Francisco, with Jimmy White doing Lord knows what out the back.
“It is a totally different game now”, explains Ken. “In the ‘60s and ‘70s, snooker clubs were genuinely dens of iniquity – full of gangsters and hoods. But even by the ‘80s that was changing. Nowadays, you play in pretty plush establishments. We’re not allowed to smoke or drink on TV – not that I would anyway – and there has been a real effort to clean-up the sport.”
The commercialisation of the game has been necessary. While this century has seen something of a resurgence, two consecutive decades ruled by monolithic talents (Steve Davis would win six world championships between 1981 and 1989, with seven titles for Stephen Hendry between 1990 and 1999) have certainly put an end to the days when a snooker star could chart with a terrible novelty record.
Another blow has come from the ban on tobacco advertising. As a result, we’ll all have to adjust to the notion of the 888.com Championship, rather than the Embassy. Madness.
“It’ll be weird but God, at least we have a sponsor,” says Ken. “For a while it was looking bad. We were all concerned. The prize money has been reduced by nearly 40% this season and last season. The Chinese thing is hopeful, but they’re interested in bringing more money into China, not the other way around.”
In common with most rackets, the people’s game is banking on expansion into the People’s Republic. So far, things are going swimmingly.
“One hundred million people watched that kid (Ding Junhui) win the China Open last year. He was just a wild card entry. He beat me in the semi-final and he was superb, then Hendry in the final. When he won, you couldn’t get your hands on the felt for the tables. Even the UK fitters were all sold out because of the demand in China. It is a world sport and that’s really special.”
Ken gets another crack at Ding Junhui on his home turf in the China Open next month. The World Championship in April, however, is the obvious priority.
“I’ll be getting my head down now and starting to talk to my sports psychologist. There’s a lot of things you have to sacrifice for the game. Sometimes you’re just practising day after day, night after night. When things aren’t going well, you just want to go home. Sometimes I’m away somewhere sort of glamorous – and I’m just fantasising about sitting on the couch watching a DVD with the wife. It's hard keeping that focus as you get older, as you develop interests beyond standing at a table 24 hours a day. But the Malta win has changed everything. I feel like I’m back.”
Does he ever lament missing out on the boozy, less goal-orientated era of his childhood hero Alex Higgins?
“I wouldn’t have lasted. I’ve seen Higgins do it. I remember as a young fella being an usher and Higgins pulls me aside and says ‘If I ask you for an orange, it’s a vodka and orange and if I ask you for a vodka and orange, make it a double’. And it would have absolutely no effect on his game. It’s like Superman stuff. If I had a wine-gum I wouldn’t be able to play. But, somewhere inside, Higgins still inspires me. Not to reach for the double vodka and orange. But you watch him on a table and he’s such a great talent. He made the game. It was finished in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I prefer to think of him that way. And you can’t deny he made plenty of headlines for the game.”
So, with Ken having been thrown off a plane, they have something besides snooker now in common.
“Yeah, I know. Maybe I’ll go for a change of image. I could be the snooker rebel. Maybe I could head-butt an official at the World Championship. The Mary Poppins of snooker is dead!”
I just can’t see it somehow.
After we’ve waved Ken goodbye, Graham, trusty Hot Press snapper turns to remark; “He’s such a lovely fellah, Ken.”
Totally. Long live Mary Poppins.