Running: The Autobiography (7 page)

I always knew Dad wanted the best for me; that he’d do anything for me as a child to give me the better chance of success. So I always felt he was largely to thank for my success. He taught me everything I knew, kept my feet on the ground, gave me the best opportunity, the best cues, the best practice facilities and best practice partners, and that needed paying back. When Dad was in jail I felt we were in it together. I wasn’t about to abandon him when I was out here. I always felt it was a team effort – me, Dad, Mum, and my sister Danielle.

In those two years I also thought that was the end of my time as a champion because it is the age when most champions stop winning. Stephen Hendry won his last major tournament when he was around 34, but you can forgive him because he crammed so much into such a short amount of time, just like tennis player Pete Sampras did. Maybe he burnt out a bit quicker than his talent deserved as a result. I’ve had gaps where I’ve still played but not with the same intensity as somebody
like Hendry would, and that’s probably why I’ve been able to continue going over a longer period of time.

But sport is a business as much as anything else, and you have to look at things practically – when will I find my days numbered? Can I keep going on till I’m 40? It’s my job, it’s my life, it’s what I like to do, and you want a sense of when it’s going to come to an end. In your own mind you’re trying to prepare yourself for it, and you can only go by the people who went before you. That’s all there is – history. But in my heart I didn’t feel I was coming to the end. I still felt confident in my own game.

At other times I felt I was past my sell-by. This was a new era of players, and I was deluding myself. I questioned the type of game I was playing and whether it was equipped to deal with the new generation. I told myself that even though I thought I was playing an aggressive game, the new players were looking at me thinking, who is this old codger? Perhaps it was like me playing Terry Griffiths 20 years ago; he’d so rarely take a risk. And maybe they were looking at me in the same light, going: ‘This Ronnie O’Sullivan, he’s a bit too negative for me. He don’t fancy the job.’ I was getting paranoid.

I did have to reinvent myself as a player because I felt I was on the back foot against a lot of these players; that they were more aggressive to me, playing a different game. When I started out, the likes of Steve Davis were more careful. They wouldn’t just break the balls open. They were more percentage players whereas now, even though they don’t miss much, they’re still percentage players; they just go for harder shots and get them. Whereas years ago you would have thought a ball is safe, today’s players now think, well, that’s my chance. Against the likes of Steve Davis you knew you might get beat but you wouldn’t get blown away. So you could start slowly and work your way into
a match. With these guys, there’s none of that. As I said, I was 4-0 down to Higginson, and I’d not done a lot wrong. Twenty years ago he would have won a lot of tournaments.

All the new generation are aggressive – perhaps 30 of them who, on their day, could beat anybody. When I started out there were seven or eight who could kill you off, but you’d never meet them till the quarter-finals; now you’re getting them first round and you’re thinking: ‘Cor blimey, I don’t fancy this geeza!’

It’s funny how the standard has gone up so much while the incentive to play the game has fallen so much. Twenty years ago you could get close on 20 million people watching the World Championship final in the UK, but nowadays you’d be lucky to get five million. There was the tobacco advertising, and money in the game, and the financial rewards were massive. But this new generation were probably the ones watching it back then. It was a big sport, a glamorous sport. Perhaps I’m reaping what I sowed. People tell me my game encouraged others to come into the game and play aggressively and fast.

So I changed a few things in my game, developed a few new shots. My two lean years were partly down to me not playing well and partly down to problems off the table. In the 2011 World Championship I was ready to give up, then I was introduced to Steve Peters and he turned my thinking around. I rediscovered my passion for the game, and my attitude was a thousand times better than it had ever been before.

After working with Dr Steve for a while, I didn’t feel I ever gave up in matches. If I lost, it was just because the other guy had played better on the day and that was a lot easier to live with. It wasn’t easy because you then thought, well, I gave it my best and still lost, but it was easier. There was a transition period where I changed my game. I’m quite a good student of the sport, and I watched other players and thought that to
move on to another level and last another few years I needed to improve certain areas of my game. The new players pot with such ease. Before, players made it look like hard work. The new bunch made it look like every ball was over the hole: I needed to start thinking like that. I changed my grip and technique and started committing to the shot – if I was going to miss I was going to miss positively. I wasn’t going to twitch them in any more.

John Higgins was my yardstick. You looked at him and thought, he’s doing a lot of things right; then Judd Trump came along, and he does a lot of things right as well. Neil Robertson was another big factor, and Ding Junhui. If you look at their technique, all four have similarities: they play the same sort of shots and the balls break the same.

There’s a science to it. A lot of it is just how they release the cue; their timing, their grip, their balance. They are power players; they pot a red, get the right angle and go into that pack and the white will just accelerate through the balls. With one shot the balls are at their mercy. Years ago they were accurate, but they didn’t have that one shot that could win them the game. With a lot of players you can see technical weaknesses, and you know they will break down, but with this four you look at them and think there’s not a lot that could go wrong with them. Over 17 days or a season of course they’ll lose matches, but they’ll be 85–90 per cent most of the year round and I thought that for me to compete with those players I had to learn off them. I had to learn how to play as if I could win matches with one shot. To play the aggressive game you might give away a few chances, and it might be the wrong shot to go for, but my logic was that the game I was going to play would be more risky but it would also give much more of a message to the opponent: if you miss, I probably won’t.

In a way it’s counter-intuitive. As you get older the tendency is to become more conservative and take fewer risks. I was aware of what happened to Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry. I think Davis would have been better if he’d tried to match Hendry at his own game; he had the ability to do that, but he was so stuck in his ways. If he’s convinced of something he ain’t going to change, which is probably why he won so often. But I also believe you’ve got to look at the competition and think, if I’m going to move on I need to adapt and realise that there’ll always be someone coming up behind me who will take the game to the next level. And the only way to stay in the game was to go with them and not get stuck behind.

When I was losing all the time, people’s behaviour changed towards me. They were nicer to me, and I hated that. They were talking to me. Once you’re not a threat, people want to be your friend. There are certain players on the circuit who are not like that – Matthew Stevens, Neil Robertson, Ding Junhui, Stephen Hendry, Steve Davis. They’re always the same whether you’re winning or not. But some players, and their managers and friends, change.

They’d be chatting away like they were your friend, then all of a sudden, when I started to win, you could smell their change of attitude. You’d sense you were on your own again. But if I had the choice I’d much rather be on my own and be a winner than be a loser and have: ‘Hello, lads, where you going for dinner tonight? Yeah, yeah, great, and what day you going to China? When you get there we’ll meet up.’ All that bollocks. That’s the loser’s mentality. They’re good in a group, they like to banter with each other. But Hendry never bantered with people, Steve Davis never bantered with people, John Higgins doesn’t banter with people, and I’d never bantered with people. I was there to do a job, and yet I felt I’d become one of the
banterers; one of the mob that would sit there and talk bollocks for three or four hours because that’s where the level of my game had gone to.

I wasn’t winning tournaments, and I felt I was just one of those players there to make up the numbers. I was not a threat to the real contenders. Hendry was an assassin. Davis was an assassin. At my best, I’m an assassin. We’re not there to be mates with anybody. There’s nothing worse than travelling 13 hours to China when you feel you’re just making up the numbers.

When I won the tournament in Germany, the other players knew how important it was to me. I’m not sure I realised how important it was till I played in the next tournament, the Welsh Open. I went there, thinking, I’m still not cueing that well, but I’ve got a chance. In the first round I beat Marco Fu 4-2, and Marco has always been a bogeyman for me. Every time he sees me, he rubs his hands together and goes: ‘Ah, lovely, I’ve got Ronnie in the first round, I’m bound to play well.’ But now I thought I’d won in Germany and the pressure was off me. Beating Fu is like beating a Higgins or a Hendry because he always plays out of his nut against me. Then I beat Mark Williams 4-1, again not playing great but competing. No matter how badly someone like him plays, he always has that inner belief, that steel, that he can win. He was playing well then, so that was a result.

At this stage it was touch and go whether I’d qualify for the World Championship. I’d sunk to around 20th in the world rankings because I’d won so few world-ranking points for a couple of years, and every tournament I found myself slipping down the world rankings. When Barry Hearn came in he changed the world-ranking system. Before that you basically had your spot and pretty much stayed there the whole season. Then, when Barry came in, the rankings changed every two
or three tournaments. He introduced loads of new events and every point mattered.

In the Welsh, I beat Judd Trump in the quarter-finals, and that was another turning point. He was one of the leading players coming through the ranks, got to the World Championship final and was playing with huge confidence. I thought, I’m not going to play cagey snooker, I’m going out to give it a go. And that’s how it went. I went bang! Long red. Eighty. He went, bang! Long red. Eighty. I went bang! Long red. One hundred. He went bang! Seventy. And I thought, 2-2, we’re having a row here, this is good! I’m enjoying this. Then, at the interval it goes 3-2 to me in another single visit, then 3-3 with another 70 odd. And I’m thinking, wow, he’s hit me and I’ve hit him with everything. There came a point when he changed his game. He started playing shots he wouldn’t normally. He started to not go for his shots, waiting for me to make mistakes. And I thought, whether I win or lose this match there’s a chink in the armour and I’ve found it. Psychologically, he’s no longer the machine everybody thought he was going to be. I know John Higgins beat him in the 2011 World Championship final, but that’s how he had felt to me till then. From then on he didn’t feel like a Higgins or Hendry to me – with those two I felt there was no chink. You might beat them, but there was never a chink.

You always measure yourself against the top four or five players, and to get to an important stage of a tournament and feel that you’ve got the edge on someone like Judd felt good. I thought, if you’re not going to go for your shots I will, and I went bang bang bang bang, thank you very much, 5-3. And I got through a match that I thought I wouldn’t be able to – I was 36, he was 22, and I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up with him. If that was the standard, I didn’t know whether I
had the stamina or consistency. But the same thing happened that had against Maguire. When it got to 6-6 he started playing cautiously. It’s alright playing the big shots in practice, and in the early stages of the match, but when it really matters is in the final stages of a big tournament.

Graham Dott or Mark Selby at 3-3 would have been a tougher match than Judd Trump at 3-3. Although Judd plays a lot more aggressive, attractive snooker, at 3-3 you don’t want to be playing Selby or Dott; you’d rather be playing Trump. Sure, he can blow you away, but if you stick to him you’ve got a chance. And nobody can blow everybody away. I don’t care if you’re Barcelona; Manchester United can hold on to you, and if you get to 80 minutes, you’re still 0-0 and you twitch, they’ll nick a goal because they’re used to it and they believe in themselves. Boom, miskick, boom, through the goalie’s legs, Barcelona beaten. And snooker, or any sport for that matter, is no different. So Trump was someone to measure myself against. And I thought, okay, I might not be able to be as aggressive but I’m trying to play that game – or play the game I can play to feel I can compete with them – and when it came to it I fancied the job. Sure, I was nervous against Maguire and Trump, but the more I got into it the more I thought the odds were in my favour.

I got to the semis and played Selby. We nickname him the Torturer. Just as when you play Trump and you play a nice, open game, you enjoy it, and you know you’re either going to get smashed off the table or have a good game, but you’re going to play the shots you like to play at a nice tempo, so it was the very opposite with Selby. I didn’t know my arse from my elbow, I couldn’t cue, I didn’t feel like a snooker player because he plays a game in which, unless you match him in certain areas and score, he’s going to beat you.

I was matching him in the safety, but when I got in the balls I wasn’t scoring, and I lost 6-2. But I came off and thought, well, at least he didn’t aggravate me like he did in the past. With a lot of people, if you respect their game you don’t mind losing to them, but there are certain players you don’t appreciate. They’re still very good and get the job done, so you have to respect them for that, but it is painful. Selby is the Torturer, just like Peter Ebdon (I love Psycho – that’s what Dad nicknamed Ebdon – but he’ll be the first to admit he likes to slowly strangle his opponents). Tactically, there is probably no one better than Selby in the game. He’s prepared to play a lot of long frames – he’s happy to take five hours to play five frames. But that’s no good to me. Every punter’s paid their money, and I feel like I’ve robbed them. They’ve come to see me play, and if I’ve given them ten 50-minute frames I feel shit, and want to go home and kill myself.