By Elliott West
Introduction
In 1987, on the eve of the World Championship, the Sun newspaper printed a story about the professional snooker player Jon Wright. Wright was being singled out as being a hell-raiser, being singled out in the piece to show that there were more controversial snooker players around at the time than Alex Higgins. Jon Wright was due to play Alex Higgins in the first round of the tournament and let’s say this player had led a colourful past with gangsters threatening to kill him, spending six months sleeping in an old taxi and smoking cannabis in his youth.
The Transformation
Wright managed to turn a corner though in his life, waking up to his lifestyle by being compared to Alex Higgins. Shaking off his Dirty Den image, Jon was sick of being judged for the mistakes of his past and was determined to turn over a new leaf. Clearly affected by his personal life with his brother being a heroin addict and his mother dying when he was only ten, led to a rift with his father after being remarried and Wright ending up in a children’s home for several years.
Thankfully his father kept in touch with his son and at age sixteen, his dad took him to a snooker club in Stepney, owned by the notorious Kray twins. Jon then moved to Bethnal Green and with a snooker club just around the corner, you couldn’t tear this youngster away from the place. The young rookie quickly started beating the best players in the area and played money matches.
Now seen as a potential threat, some of the gangsters in the area tried to threaten him, telling him to lose the match or they would break his fingers. This actually turned out to be a joke after Wright refused to play ball. The person responsible for the threat, returning to the table after Jon’s victory, smiled and said:
“Just testing, I’ll have a few more bob on you next time”.
Wright blamed a lot of his early bad behaviour on alcohol, causing him to amongst other things, lose his temper and lose jobs, including as a sales assistant in a furniture store, working in a salad cream factory and a hod carrier, all in the space of seven days and led him to be nicknamed ‘Giro John’. A nickname was given after he was so desperate for the £17 amount of the dole cheque that he pleaded at Plaistow snooker club for the money due to the post office being closed to cash it and Wright wanting to use the cash to play in a money match.
Wright then went straight and managed to get a mortgage, buying a flat in Bow. If he was ever tempted to go down that slippery slope again, he just had to recall the words of the WPBSA when they accepted his professional status, “Behave or else”. Wright went on to lose 10-6 to Alex Higgins in the first round of the 1987 World Championship but will always be remembered by his peers for being a very good snooker player who should have gone to the top of the game. A player that had an unusual snooker statistic of beating Mike Watterson 10-0 in the second round of the 1991 World Championship qualifiers, only to be defeated by the same scoreline by Mark Johnston-Allen in the third round. Jon played professionally until 1993 with his last entry being the World Championship qualifiers of that year.
