By Elliott West
“I grew up in a man’s world from the age of eight”.
Ronnie O’Sullivan
Introduction
Part of becoming a successful snooker player is being able to cope with the psychological side of the game, especially the stress that it rains down on you in abundance. No player who knows this more is Ronnie O’Sullivan who has been under the snooker spotlight since he was first spotted as a future star of the green baize at the age of seven. Now 47, Ronnie has a revealed a fascinating insight into this side of his life in his interview for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, a radio show that has been asking famous people to name eight musical tracks, a book and a luxury item that they would take to a desert island since it first launched on the airwaves in 1942. A programme that has been presented by Roy Plomley, Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley Kirsty Young and currently Lauren Laverne.
A Man’s World
Ronnie whose talent was nurtured by his father, Ronnie senior, used to be dropped off by his father to a number of snooker halls from the age of eight to fine tune his son’s natural talent for the game, places that were nicknamed the “crèche”. By the age of 12, O’Sullivan was earning in the region of £20,000 – £25,000 a year from snooker but when he returned to the classroom at school, he was far from being the chatter of the playground. Instead his classmates were more interested in talking about the latest football news. Yet bubbling below the surface was this kid who was picking up a snooker cue and beating top ranked professionals from our television screens despite the fact that Ronnie still believed that he wasn’t good enough to be “a top-class player”. Yet the irony is that his enthusiasm for snooker, caused a wave of future amateur and professional players to pick up a cue and aspire to competing on the main snooker stage.
The Colourful Side of Life
Ronnie who was born in Wordsley in the West Midlands but grew up in Essex and had let’s saw a colourful childhood. His father ran a chain of sex shops and was dubbed the “Del boy in the porn game” and the family garage was laden with videos and magazines. An eye opener for any inquisitive, hormonal child growing up but Ronnie took it in his stride, saying he was never sheltered from it, he enjoyed it and it was a life experience. However, subsequent to this, Ronnie’s father was convicted and sentenced to the murder of Bruce Bryan in 1992, the chauffeur of the Kray Twins who he stabbed in a nightclub.He was sentenced to a life imprisonment but served 18 years.
Feeling Alone
As this Desert Island Discs’ interview reveals, his father’s imprisonment hit him hard, unveiling a sense of no hope and loneliness that lingered for nearly twenty years whilst his father served his sentence. It was like cutting off someone’s right arm, that’s how close this father/son bond was and remains to this day. Not only did he feel total emptiness but a crushing duty of responsibility, bearing down on his shoulders, determined not to let him down, not wanting to mess up and for his father to take the blame, setting himself a no options’ target of not failing. A time that he describes in very poignant words.
“It was horrendous, it was horrible. I lost my best mate, I lost my backbone. I lost the plot a bit.”
Ronnie O’Sullivan
Coupled with this life bombshell, was the added factor of his mother, Maria, going to prison for a year for VAT fraud in 1996, leaving Ronnie to look after his eight-year-old sister when he was 20. This inevitably led to a very dark and hedonistic period of his life when he was partying, drinking, smoking cannabis and hanging around a number of people who clearly weren’t good for him in this state of mind. He was broken and vulnerable, a lethal cocktail of emotions that will cause you to walk in the extreme lane of life with catastrophic consequences.
The Highs and the Lows
“When I see what I put myself through, I think, ‘Why would you do it?’, most people would look at it and not do it”.
Ronnie O’Sullivan
Even when Ronnie O’Sullivan achieved the world record of getting the fastest 147 break in his world championship match against Mick Price in 1997 in a record time of five minutes and eight seconds, he still felt that he was not the player he wanted to be at the time. Rather than being a rock, he was known for moments of magic, something that he didn’t want to be known for. He wanted to be the guy instead who won the tournament and had his hands on the trophy, something he would give up everything to attain. As a result of these gruelling career targets, he would inevitably subject himself to tremendous amounts of stress and pressure. A player who believes that your nerves are tested to the extreme in the biggest tournament of them all, the World Championship. A snooker conundrum that plays tricks with your mind, potentially makes you freeze and overthink the situation in hand. A situation that has no pill available to make you happy and if there was, he would certainly be running out to buy it to feel fantastic for the rest of the day.
A Life Menu
Ronnie chooses a number of songs and a book to complement his life situations. I won’t reveal all of them because it will spoil the full contents of this 35 minute BBC interview. A flavour of this life menu are the songs That’s All by Genesis to remind him of when his talent was first spotted and his father going to prison, Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain that was playing in the background at his Thai hotel when he learned that his father had been arrested and Maybe Tomorrow by the Welsh band The Stereophonics that he would listen to when he was in rehab. He also chooses the book Running With The Kenyans by Adharanand Finn as his book choice for his desert island and his paints as a luxury item that he uses to paint dot pictures by his good friend, the artist, Damien Hurst as a coping mechanism to deal with stress. The full interview is now allowed to listen to on BBC Sounds and is definitely worth a listen to.
