Ronnie Be Good

It s often said that snooker players do their talking on the table. For the purposes of this interview, Ronnie O Sullivan made an exception he was sitting on a chair, in the tournament director s office at Goff s, Co. Kildare.
He had just beaten his childhood hero and mentor, Jimmy White, in the first round of the Benson And Hedges Irish Masters and beaten him well. Having slip-slided out of the top 16 in the world rankings, White played like his mind was less on sinking the black during the match than on sinking the black stuff after it. O Sullivan, now ranked seventh, hardly broke sweat and, indeed, went on to win the tournament celebrating its 21st anniversary with some ease.
A true people s champion in the mould of an Alex Higgins or a Jimmy White, the 22-year-old Londoner has such a swagger in his play that when he s on form he s more rock n roll than any Gallagher brother. And true to form, not all the headlines that he has grabbed have been in the sports supplements his father was sent down for his part in a robbery after which O Sullivan Jr. fairly lost the plot in food and drink binges.
But it s a hale and hearty character who greets me in Goffs; these days O Sullivan is the picture-postcard of health and more interested in the baize than the booze. In print, he may occasionally appear a little arrogant, but in truth it s just that he has no truck with false modesty: he knows that if he keeps his head, his name will be spray-painted onto the wall of his profession s all-time greats.
He s already well on the way to sporting immortality: he won his first ranking tournament when he was 17 and has already chalked up four titles this season alone, including the UK Championship, and is one of the favourites to wrest the World Championship trophy away from Ken Doherty in Sheffield later this month.

NICK KELLY: Does it feel odd to beat players who you once watched on TV as a kid?
RONNIE O SULLIVAN: When you first come up against the top players, there s this mental barrier there, especially when you re an amateur when you get to the winning line you start thinking about who you re beating rather than just winning. It took me a couple of years to get used to it. But now I play people like Jimmy (White) and Stephen (Hendry) who were my two main inspirations growing up all the time so you just get on with playing your own game.
Do you (ahem) remember the first time?
The first time I played Jimmy was in Blackpool. I was 16. I beat him 5-1 to qualify for the European Open in Belgium. I had played maybe 50 or 60 matches by that time and I was full of confidence whereas it was Jimmy s first match of the season and he was pretty rusty.
Do you feel that you re carrying the torch originally kindled by the likes of Alex Higgins and Jimmy White?
In my style of play, yeah. But off the table I couldn t go drinking . . . I m not a drinker anyway. Obviously I have to have a release sometimes and so I might go out on the batter that might cost me three or four tournaments in a season. But there s 15 tournaments. So I m probably up for, like, ten of them. But I find it difficult to keep myself motivated for a whole season.
Have you seen Alex Higgins recently?
I ve only met Alex a couple of times. As I was coming into the game, he was going out. I was around him a little bit but I can t say I know him that well. I ve got bundles of respect for him because if it weren t for people like him snooker wouldn t be what it is today. He was the reason they put snooker on the TV. You need personalities in sport and he was the biggest.
How has the game changed since then?
There were a lot of characters in the game. Nowadays because there s so much money involved, everyone s much more competitive so the players don t mix as much as they used to do. When you re competing against people every week, it s hard to have a laugh and a joke and be best of mates. Because you know that the next day you re gonna have to go out and try and beat him he s an enemy, basically.
It s been said that the complete dominance of Stephen Hendry over the game during the 90s had a detrimental effect on the game, at least from the point of view of snooker as a personality-driven spectator sport.
Hendry has this reputation as being too methodical, but he s not. He has talent. He takes on hard shots and gets 99% of them. He took the game on to another level. (Steve) Davis would wait for players to make mistakes and then pounce whereas Hendry will take on that long red, and nine times out of ten will pot it and go on to make 70 or 80. That s the difference. Davis would never take on anything risky. He would play safe . . . because safety was what he was good at, the philosophy being that if you put your opponent in trouble you eventually get an easy chance.
You have a reputation for being quite impulsive, even impetuous, in your style of play.
Sometimes it s hard to refuse balls that you know you are capable of potting even if it seems as though only a lunatic would go for them. Most of the shots that I go for, I get. It s only the one I miss that people say well, he shouldn t have gone for that .
How did you become so good at such an early age?
I was a pretty quick developer physique-wise. I was 5 10 when I was 14. All the other kids were only starting to get bumfluff! I was playing to quite a high standard when I was 12 or 13. I was knocking in centuries all day.
Did you know even then that professional snooker was what you wanted to do with your life?
Yeah. I loved the game. I couldn t wait to get up in the morning and get down the club. I d finished school when I was 14 and I just wanted to play snooker. I wanted to turn pro when I was 15 because I thought I was good enough by that time, but they wouldn t let me because the rules said you had to be 16.
There s a saying that being a good snooker player is proof of a wasted childhood. How do you feel about that?
Well, you can have all the qualifications in the world but you ve got to have common sense. And I always felt like I had common sense. Obviously qualifications help but I always felt that if I hadn t made it as a snooker player, I would have been able to do something else and been quite successful at it.
Nothing is guaranteed in life but I always felt that I would land on my feet. I ve got good people around me. My mum and dad have been a massive influence on me and helped me out. I m trying to repay them back for all the help that they ve given me through the years. They stuck with me when I was a kid.
Some commentators have described you as the greatest natural talent the game has seen. Do you feel under pressure to live up to people s expectations?
No. Deep down I do know that I m good enough to win not just one world title but I ve got the ability and the game to win . . . well, I wouldn t like to say how many I could win. But when you look at other players you realize that if is a big word in sport. But if I click for those two weeks when I m in Sheffield, I have no doubt that I will win it. In previous seasons I ve played really well for three or four tournaments before Sheffield and then when I got there, I was burnt out. This year, I ve had a good start. I ve won three (now four) tournaments and got to the final of another. And I don t think it s taken much out of me. I don t feel like I ve even started yet.
Do you feel that your time has finally come?
I ve felt that for the last few years. This year is a good one for me. Last year I had a good year but the year before last I ballooned up to 15 or 16 stone. I was eating a lot and having late nights and drinking and doing all the wrong sort of things.
My da was away and my mum was away. Not that that s any real excuse. But I suppose I could get away with that lifestyle when they weren t around. But as soon as my mum came out she wouldn t have it. She sort of disowned me. I thought, I can t have that, falling out with my mum . She s too important to me. So it was basically for her why I got myself together. If she knew some of the things I got up to, she would have had a right go at me so I ve had to simmer down. My mum s brought me up and she wants to be proud of me. n