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Cue for a television phenomenon
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I WAS at the 2001 Benson and Hedges Masters snooker final at a packed Wembley Arena.
Glamour kid Paul Hunter, “the Beckham of the baize”, took the trophy 10-9 after a battle that stretched long into the Sunday night.
The “baby-faced bandit”, Fergal O’Brien, one of the slowest players in history, was heckled: “For f***’s sake, hurry up! We’ve got work in the morning.”
A game of fractions is not best experienced 200 feet back in a smoke-filled conference centre.
What is the World Championships without its super slow-motion replay, cult of celebrity and commentators’ catch-phrases? “Stand by your beds!” “Where’s the white going?”
Snooker is made for TV. But the game’s potential was fully realised in the mid-1980s.
Given unprecedented access to players and managers during a 1980s snooker tour, sports
journalist Gordon Burns offers a unique snapshot of the transformation of a dour sport.
It all started in 1985 with “that final” between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis, he writes, when the nation found itself in the grip of a new sporting obsession. “This was Coronation Street with balls,” he writes.
Like Murdoch and the English football league, sports entrepreneur Barry Hearn caught the wave and rode it. He founded a promotions company and signed pretty much all the great players.
But in one corner were safe characters like Steve Davis, Dennis Taylor and Terry Griffiths.
In the other were the bad boys – Alex Higgins, Jimmy White, Tony Knowles – threatening to bring the whole thing crashing down.
There is a great chapter, invitingly titled “Entouraging with Jimmy”, where a PR man struggles in vain to re-brand the Whirlwind with Armani suits.
Snooker’s boom owes as much a debt to its clash of characters as
the money-men trying
to re-brand its image.
One of the questions arising from this book was why these scandal-prone hedonists are spawned from a game that requires such skill, concentration and gruelling practice.
The foreword from commentator and
industry magazine Snooker Scene editor Clive Everton goes someway to answering it: “Snooker players are not a bad lot, on the whole. They usually win modestly, lose gracefully, even when a pound of skill may be outrageously outweighed by an ounce of luck at the wrong moment. Yet it sometimes seems that they have to use so much brain power for this most cerebral of games that they have little left over for real life.”
A must read for anyone with a top break over 30.
TOM FOOT |
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