Running: The Autobiography (12 page)

Dad thinks we’re very different people. He knows there’s a lot of stuff I’m just not bothered about. He’s driven to succeed; driven to want to be the best. He only loves winners. Messi’s a god, everyone else is shit, that kind of thing. ‘They call him great, he ain’t great, he’s fucking shit, look at him, cunt, shit. Shit. What are they all talking about, he’s shiiiiiiiiit.’ He’s funny when he goes off on one – like Peter Cook in an old ‘Derek and Clive’ sketch. I listen to him and think, well, is he right or wrong, and by my reckoning the player he’s going on about is playing for Arsenal or Tottenham and obviously isn’t shit. He’s a harsh critic. It was drummed into me from an early age to have that mentality, but it just wasn’t me. Often I’m so quiet, so withdrawn, that I just turn my phone off for days to get away from everyone and everything. As soon as I switch it on, I see emails and texts and I don’t know how to cope with it. It scares me. I don’t want it, I just want to keep my life as simple as I can, which is hard. And I’m finding that now because everyone wants a piece of you.

When I played the adults some got annoyed losing to me,
and some loved it. I remember this Canadian fella, Marcel Gauvreau; he was about number 30 in the world and he turned up at the pro-am, and I was due to play him, and I thought, god, he’s a legend. I’d been watching him on the telly. He’d got through to the quarter-finals of the Mercantile Credit Classic; he didn’t win events but he was a regular quarters, last-16 man. And I played him in a quarter-final at Stevenage and this was a major pro-am – about 128 players, anyone who was anyone was there. Steve James, who was ranked number eight in the world, was playing, so we’re talking quality.

I played Marcel in the quarter-finals and I had an 80, a 90 and 130, and I beat him 3-2. When I got a frame off him, I thought I’d done well. When I got two frames off him, I thought, fuck, if he beats me 3-2, I can go back to my local snooker club and say I took two frames off Marcel Gauvreau. That was how much of a scalp he was. And I ended up beating him 3-2.

I came off the table and he went: ‘Hey, man, that kid’s unbelievable! He’s made a hundred and thirty and a ninety. Who is this motherfucker?’

And I was like, wow, because he became my fan. After he played me he wouldn’t leave me alone. Every pro-am I turned up at he’d come up to me and go: ‘This is the kid!
This is the kid!
’ and I’d think, what’s he on, this geeza, is he mad or what? I could never see what he thought was so special about me, but I was just glad to make a friend. I’d love to know where Marcel is now.

But a lot of the adults hated playing me, and hated getting beaten by me even more. Many players are driven to playing for the wrong reasons, and they’ll do anything for a result. I know sport is about winning trophies and getting silverware, but I’ve always been more of a believer in playing for the spirit
of the game. I really believe that if you took all money out of the game, it would be much fairer and more sporting. It would be a nicer sporting planet; having said that, though, I’d be a lot poorer.

There was a lot of jealousy from the older guys. On a couple of occasions I owed them money. I owed Nicky Lazarus a tenner, and his dad was Mark Lazarus, who played for QPR. They were quite a hard-nut family in Romford, and I owed Nicky the money because I was into fruit machines. I was shit scared of him. Every time I went to tournaments I avoided him. He was probably 20, 10 years older than me, always had a nice bird with him, so he was one of the dudes on the circuit. He was a good player.

Nicky caught me one day and said: ‘Oi, you give me my fucking money back! You think you can get away with it, but my dad knows more villains than your dad.’ I thought, shit! He’s really coming after me. And it was all over a tenner. Maybe he was showing off his alpha-male qualities.

Without Dad I don’t think I would have got anywhere in snooker. I think I would have got in a lot of trouble, probably been banned from tournaments. Dad was good at punishing me, getting me out of bother and sending messages to certain people at snooker tournaments not to lead me on because I was so easily led. He’d tell people to keep an eye on me because I needed to be watched. I was a little fucker, and Dad had told them: ‘If he misbehaves make sure you tell me.’ I know they all reported back to him because he found out everything I’d been up to.

I was gambling on the fruit machines and when I was eight or nine I was swearing a lot. When I missed a shot down the club, I’d be: ‘Fucking cunt, fucking this, fucking that’, and I’d be smashing my cues. I was terrible. I hated missing the ball
and I’d just get the hump and become so angry with myself. I got banned from Pontins when I was 10, and of course Dad found out about that, too.

I threw a beer glass full of Coke across the ballroom when I was being chased – I wasn’t throwing it at anybody, I just smashed it on the floor so the fella behind me would stop chasing me. Eddie Manning was a bit of a lary geeza from Leicester, always had a suntan. Fast Eddie they used to call him; he’d have all the birds and he was having a go at me. He’d started poking me and taking the piss, bullying me. I threw the glass in his direction. Splat! He went: ‘You cunt’, and started chasing me. I still had the glass in my hand so I threw it on the floor, obviously it smashed, and that wasn’t right. But then they claimed I’d throw a glass at an old lady, which I wouldn’t do in a million years, so I got banned for that.

Even though I got in trouble all the time, Dad was my safety net. He was a tough disciplinarian, and when I’d done wrong I knew I was for it. He’d humiliate me in front of my mum, his dad, his friends – verbally more than anything, intimidation. When I got banned from Pontins he called round the snooker player Mark King and his dad, Bill King. Dad had paid for the holiday, paid for all our spending money, and had said to Bill: ‘Just look after him, make sure he doesn’t misbehave and if he does just give me a call.’ So we went there, and I got banned.

But when we went up to the disciplinary hearing, the report was written by the snooker referee John Williams and he said that on the Monday Bill King came up to him and said, you’ve got to get hold of Ronnie because he’s messing around. So it turned out that the man who was looking after me now appeared to be grassing me up to the tournament official. Dad invited Mark and Bill round to our house to explain what had happened and Mark said: ‘They were calling Ronnie Mighty
Mouth’, and just shit stirring. I knew from Dad’s face that I was going to be in shtuck when they left.

Dad gave me the slipper treatment. I couldn’t sit down for a couple of days because my bum was so sore. Good old-fashioned put-you-in-your-place stuff; it probably didn’t do me any harm. Not that I thought so at the time.

I was quite independent from an early age because of the snooker and also because of Mum and Dad working. I was left to go away by myself a lot. I was given petrol money, money for spends etc. from the age of 11. A lot of kids would travel with their parents, even when they were 17 or 18. I’d just turn up on my own. I loved it. I could play the fruit machines, mess about; if I got beat I could have a laugh with some of the older lads. I was buzzing. Those weekends were great.

Not surprisingly, I paid less and less attention to school work, and left school without taking exams. I had got on well with most of the teachers. I think they were all curious about me, and the snooker. When I was 10 or 11 my headmaster, Mr Challon, heard that I had got £450 for winning a competition, and he didn’t believe it.

‘Ronnie, is it true you’ve just won £450 in a snooker tournament?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Can you bring in the trophy and cheque to show me?’ He was particularly interested in seeing the cheque.

I got home and told Mum. ‘Mum, is it okay if I take in my trophy and cheque to school tomorrow. The head wants to see it.’

She smiled. ‘Course, you can.’

So I put them in my school bag, got called into his office, he had his mate there, and he went: ‘Show me this trophy!’ So I got it out, and he said: ‘Well done! Very well done!’ I liked Mr
Challon. The teachers were supportive of me. They knew my mind was fixed on being a snooker player and as long as I went to school they didn’t push me about exams.

I was a bit of a loner. I didn’t have a bigger brother or a bigger sister. A lot of my friends were in my year – George, my best mate, was like a brother to me. George is into computers and designs football websites. No one at school had a friendship like me and George – we were inseparable. He wasn’t into snooker. Football was his game. George was a bit of a freak, like me. He had great big legs, and he’d get the ball and fly down the wing and he’d hit it and it would scream into the net, and everybody would go, there’s no way he’s only 12 years old. He was shaped like a man.

Dad wanted me to make a career out of snooker. From a very young age he instilled that dedication in me. He was always trying to steer me down the right path. I suppose back then he was moulding me into a successful sportsman. He’s a bright man, and he knew the messages he was trying to put into my head. A lot of the kids I grew up with were mollycoddled: ‘My boy this, my boy that.’ My dad never gave me compliments. I never got any praise. He never said well done to me. Occasionally I felt I was doing quite well and I was still getting criticised. But in the end I didn’t care, and it probably helped me get a good perspective on things – ‘You’ve won a trophy, it’s history, put it behind you, and now win the next one.’ And that’s actually a positive way for a sportsman to think. So that became my mentality. I was never allowed to think: ‘Yes, I’m British junior champion’, and rest on my laurels. That was knocked out of me at a very young age.

Perhaps he was moulding me into the sportsman he had wanted to be himself. Dad had ambitions to be a professional footballer. I don’t know why he didn’t make it because he was
talented. Maybe he didn’t have the mentor that he became for me. Also, because he’d been lazy when he was young, he was determined that I wouldn’t fail for lack of effort. He understood that if I was going to be successful it had to start from a young age.

I was thinking a lot more clinically than some of the adult amateur players I was up against. Most of them were 18 to 20 and had been playing for 10 years down the club, but none of them thought like me. They were often lazy in their mind and approach, and it was obvious they were not going anywhere because their attitude was so wrong. If I’d had that attitude I wouldn’t have made it. I needed to think as I did in order to become a top sportsman.

Mum didn’t play much of a role in my development as a snooker player other than cooking and making sure the house was looked after. She had her own life. By the time Dad was around 30 he didn’t really need to work any more. Amazing – especially since he’s naturally lazy. He told me that he used to be asleep in bed when the wage packets came through the door around 1 a.m., and he said: ‘I used to listen, and if it wasn’t heavy enough when it hit the floor I used to ring them up and go, “Stop nicking so much; the packets are too light.”’ And that was his work. He’d check the takings, tell them they weren’t doing well enough and had to up the takings, but really by 30 he was a man of leisure.

At 14, Dad started me off on my serious running routine. It was a deal – if I took my snooker and my fitness seriously, and learnt how to discipline myself, he said I could leave school at 16. But I had to prove my intent for a couple of years before that.

‘Ronnie, if you want to leave school early you’ve got to do a three-mile run every morning, come back, shower and down
the club for 10.30 a.m., back for 5.30 p.m., you have your dinner at 6.30–7 p.m., you’re in bed at 9 p.m.’ I didn’t like the idea of it, but thought, I’ll take it.

10

MUM & DAD: INSIDE STORY

‘Finished 86th in the Met league out of 300. Room for improvement.’

When Dad went down I was devastated. I was 17, I’d just won 74 out of 76 matches, I was professional, I’d qualified for the World Championship, so all I felt I could do was get on with stuff. I was a young man, independent, so I tried to put everything to the back of my mind. But, of course, that was impossible. It was tough. I didn’t have a clue anything was wrong before he was arrested. I was busy with my snooker, kept out of the way, was either in my room at the end of the garden or down the club so I wasn’t witness to what was going on. I saw lots of people coming and going, there were always people in the house, and Mum and Dad were usually out clubbing, having a good time. But so much of that world is show. A lot of it is being out, drinking, having a good time, Page Three birds, boxers, sportsmen. There were always stories about George Michael or Gazza, mingling with celebrities. Your ego gets caught up with it, you get sucked in by it, and shit happens. It’s easy to forget that you’ve got a family and kids, and all the important values.

I dabbled in that lifestyle, too. I looked at Dad, and thought,
that’s something to aspire to. It seemed like the good life – he didn’t need to work, had a great time socially, lots of friends. So when he went away I thought I’d carry on where he left off. I thought this was what success brought you; that once you’d done your grafting it was time to enjoy yourself. Sod the snooker, I wanted to be out clubbing like Dad had been and I tried it for a couple of years and ended up in rehab. I went down that road because I thought that’s what you did, that’s what I had seen, but it never felt right for me, even when I was smashing it. I saw them going out late, coming in early morning, parties, barbecues, everything, but my dad was a different character from me. He enjoyed that lifestyle, but I didn’t.

There’d be times when I’d look around at the people I was with and the places I was in, and think, what am I doing here? I’d go to the toilet and tell myself, you’ve got to get out of here, and I’d get a cab home and be full of self-loathing. I’d have been hanging round with the local knobheads from Chigwell, who’d smoke dope and talk bollocks and think they were smalltime criminals. We’d go to Charlie Chans and Epping Forest Country Club, and now and again we’d go into the West End, but it was all rubbish. I never fitted into that world. I always told myself: ‘Hold on, Ron, you’ll begin to like it at some point because everybody else seems to be having a good time’, but it didn’t work out like that.

I didn’t understand the discipline you needed to be a good sportsman, despite everything Dad had told me. In my mind I thought you could do all this stuff and still have a successful snooker career. I thought everyone did this with their lives. Eventually I realised they didn’t; that it wasn’t so normal. I was always happy doing my run, playing my snooker, going out for a nice little Chinese or kebab.

I was in a hotel in Thailand when I was told that Dad had been charged. Mum phoned me in the middle of the night so I knew it had to be serious. Just not this serious.

‘Daddy’s been arrested,’ she said. ‘He’s in police custody. He’s been involved in a fight and someone’s been killed.’

I was in shock, and burst out crying. It turned out Dad had been arrested the previous week. At the time Mum thought it was all a big mistake, and to protect me they shipped me out to the World Amateur Championship in Thailand. Mum thought by the time I got home it would all be sweet and he’d be out. It must have been obvious that the press was about to pick up on it, so Barry Hearn said to Mum, you better tell him before the press does. When she told me, I just collapsed. I was gutted. Desperate.

Dad hadn’t really been in trouble before, despite working in the porn industry. When he got bail I was convinced he wouldn’t go down – why would they let him out if they thought he was guilty? I was told that if they thought he was guilty they’d be scared he’d do a runner so they wouldn’t give him bail. So all the signs were that he was going to be alright; that it wasn’t a murder, it was just something terrible that happened when two people were in the wrong place at the wrong time. All the signs were that he would get off, but he didn’t.

Dad pleaded not guilty to the murder of Bruce Bryan, a driver for the East End gangster Charlie Kray. He didn’t only plead not guilty to murder, he said he’d not even stabbed him. Now we obviously know he was there in that Chelsea nightclub and he did stab the fella and attack his brother. He should have just held his hands up, admitted to it, and I think he would have got a few years for manslaughter. What seems to have happened is that Dad and his mates were arguing about who was going to pay the bill (they all wanted to pay!). Bruce Bryan and
his brother got the wrong end of the stick and thought they weren’t going to pay at all, and it ended in a row. Dad went round to talk to them, said, let’s sort it out, when one of the fellas lifted an ashtray and went to smash it on his head. Dad put up a hand to protect himself and two of his fingers were severed. That was when Dad picked up the knife on the other side of the bar, and that was that.

He told me the prosecution offered him manslaughter, and he said, no, he wasn’t taking it. It was stupid, really; pigheaded. He went against the advice he was given. Once he gets something in his head he doesn’t budge. He sticks to his guns. He’s so stubborn. At the time I didn’t realise how the law worked and the significance of his decision not to take a manslaughter plea. But eventually I realised there were people he went down with who’d done worse crimes and who were out within five years. I’d ask how come they got out earlier than him and I’d be told, well, they took a manslaughter, or they pleaded guilty. I thought, Jesus he’s got to do 18 years because he said he wasn’t there and didn’t do it; he’s mad.

In the end, he was given a longer sentence because the judge ruled it was a racist attack. But that was nonsense – Dad’s always had loads of black friends. It just turned out that the fella he killed was black. Dad says time and again he can never forgive himself for taking a man’s life and causing so much pain to another family.

At least I was doing well with my snooker. It gave him something to hang on to. In a way, it felt that we did the sentence together. Dad was on the phone a lot, still keeping me in check – what was I doing, who was I practising with, who was I hanging out with? So we still had our relationship when he was in prison. He couldn’t boss me around as much as if he was out, of course – he couldn’t knock on my door and go: ‘Oi, what
you up to?’, but there was a respect for him that meant I didn’t want to embarrass him or piss him off.

‘Every time you’re on telly, Ron,’ he’d say to me, ‘it’s like I’m getting a visit.’ And I thought, if my playing snooker is the most important thing in his life, I can’t stop playing because that’s all he’s got to hang on to and all he’s got to look forward to.

So it was always a big motivator for me. That’s his currency, I thought; that’s what’s getting him through; me and my snooker. Even if he was down in the block, segregated for bad behaviour, he could go: ‘Well, I know the UK Championship is on now, he’ll be in Preston, he’ll be doing this’, and he felt that he was doing time with me; I was still there for him. And he would think that when he did finally get out at least he would have known what was going on in my life – there wouldn’t be that much catching up to do. The snooker was Dad’s motivation and mine. Perhaps if he hadn’t been in prison I would have lost my enthusiasm, or sense of purpose.

Dad used to tell me about the good times in the nick. ‘It’s marvellous, three meals a day, lots of exercise, watching plenty of telly, reading my papers, fantastic,’ he’d say. ‘It’s not all bad, this prison.’ But he was putting on a front. He hated being away from the family – especially the first 10 years of his sentence when he often got himself in trouble for being mouthy. The other day he admitted it for the first time.

‘The trouble with me, Ronnie, was that I couldn’t do my bird. Couldn’t accept it. I had verbal diarrhoea towards officers and towards authority in general because I had my life taken away from me. I lost my wife, my kids, my business, my liberty. The fact that I was so verbal wasn’t a sign of my confidence, it was the opposite.’ What he said next touched me. I’d never thought he really listened to what I said to him, but he told me
that just wasn’t true. ‘When I had eight or nine years left you came to me and said, you’ve got to slow down a bit now, things are good. Then the penny dropped. I became institutionalised, didn’t challenge everything, and I could do my prison a lot earlier.’

Dad says it took him a long time to learn how to talk to people and how to approach them, but once he worked it out it made doing his time so much easier. ‘You can’t make people feel uncomfortable, and if you want something done you’ve got to persuade them rather than tell them. If you’re going to talk to somebody who’s a bit of a bully on the wing you don’t walk into a cell with a pair of trainers, a top and a hat on because you’re looking for a fight. But if you walk in with your dressing gown and your flip-flops and sit down and chat, as soon as they spin round they see you’re not dressed for a fight. So I learnt that over time. If you stick your chin out in jail, they’ll whack it. And I had my chin whacked loads of times in there, but then I grew up. I read books and stuff. A lot of psychology books.’

Even now, he’ll say: ‘We had some great times in prison’, and he’ll tell me some of the stories and I’ll think, come on, Dad, they don’t sound that great to me. He’d talk about the times down the block when they’re trying to pin a fag to a piece of string and throw it over the line, and there’s this great excitement when one of them gets it. ‘All this for a fag! And that’s what got you through – after 10 days down the block nothing matters. Everything goes. You don’t bother about your appearance, brushing your teeth, your telly’s gone. Your papers have gone.’ He sounded nostalgic when he talked about it. ‘I ripped all my photos up. Even pictures of you,’ he’d say. ‘If I’ve not got photos up, nobody can rip them up, and they can’t do you emotionally. You just go, fuck it and put it out of your mind. When you get through it and you’ve been moved on you come out
feeling jubilant that you’ve got through.’ It’s a test of mental endurance down the block. I could understand the satisfaction he got from that, but I thought, I’d rather be out here having a bad day than in there having a good one.

For his first decade inside he was a rebel, never one for accepting rules or bowing to authority. It was always: ‘No, this is what I’m doing, take it or leave it.’ You’ve got to stand up for yourself in prison, fight your corner now and again, but I think he had more of a reputation for looking after people. He’d take the new boys aside, and advise them – ‘Do this, don’t do that, don’t do that, do this, and you’ll be alright.’ And things tended to run pretty smoothly after that. He wasn’t a piss-taker; people said they could rely on Dad inside.

His currency was phone cards. He’d see a fella wearing a T-shirt he liked. ‘I want that T-shirt, here’s twenty phone cards,’ he’d say.

‘Lovely, sweet!’ they’d say. And it was a deal.

He bought phone cards, he sold phone cards and most of all he used phone cards to call home.

People would send him money in prison and he’d buy up all the phone cards with it. He’d buy the cards off people who didn’t want them – lots of people didn’t have anyone to ring, and they’d much rather have a bit of money sent off to their mum or sisters. He said: ‘I’ll have everyone’s phone cards in here, and there’s nothing nobody can do about it.’

Dad’s always been sociable, a talker. Whenever he rang anybody it wasn’t a quick hello or goodbye, you got the full 20 minutes. He phoned me when I was in Thailand and he had 40 phone cards on the floor. The screws saw him, and he was putting one in after the other, and they said, right we’ve got him, and sent him off down the block.

It was a little business really. He’d get people’s phone cards,
and say to the people working in his shops: ‘Okay, take this address down, send a few quid here, send a few quid there’, and that’s what we did. The shops were still going so there was plenty of money about. ‘Tony put that there, Darbo put that there’, and they’d just do it.

At one of the prisons his nickname was Chairman Ron. It meant we didn’t have to send anything in for him. He’d just see things he liked and buy them – tops, jeans, radios. It was a good way of doing business and saved us time. Whenever he saw anything he fancied, he’d just go: ‘I like that. How many d’you want for it?’ So he’d barter phone cards as well as stock them up for his own use.

Prisons fill me with dread. I became so used to them they were like a second home. But not a happy home. I always hated them – as soon as I went in on a visit, I felt trapped. It was like the end of the world; doom and gloom, end of freedom, nowhere to go. Horrible.

I also did a few exhibitions in prisons. They would never let me do an exhibition where Dad was because it could be seen as favouritism, so now and again I’d do it for one or two of the other boys he knew. One time I was doing an exhibition at a young offenders’ prison in Doncaster; they showed me round the wings and I was stunned by how quiet it was. They were having their breakfast and there wasn’t a sound. Eerie. Other times on the wings it was so loud and echoey that it sounded like a madhouse.

I did one exhibition at Wormwood Scrubs with Jimmy White. We were there for one of Jimmy’s mates. They all loved Jimmy of course, but I was new on the block back then. That was mental. It reminded me of the film
Scum
. Really intimidating. There were all these screws, but even more inmates and I thought, any minute now this lot could overthrow this jail.
There must have been about 100 prisoners watching me and Jimmy play. I kept thinking of that scene in
Scum
when Ray Winstone smacks another inmate in the face with the pool ball hidden in the sock. I was a bit scared, I have to admit. You just don’t know what could happen in a situation like that. Charles Bronson might think: ‘Hey, here’s my next victim!’ Don’t think I’d fancy making the front pages for that reason.