By Elliott West
Introduction
John Spencer is one of those players that is often missed off the greatest players’ list. A man who if you likened him to a stick of seaside rock, would have the words Working Class running through it. Born and bred in Bury, John was lucky enough to attend Stand Grammar School and started playing on the snooker tables in the local clubs at the age of 15.
For the purpose of this piece, I want to look at the man behind the silverware, someone who helped lay those first foundations to creating a modern era of snooker, dragging the game from a black and white to a colour age. A player who was often the sensible figure in snooker, acting as peacemaker and dampening down the fire of Alex Higgins explosive outbursts on many occasions.
The Struggle
Anyone who knows anything about snooker will know the tournaments that Spencer won but few will actually be aware of what he had to go through to achieve these victories. When John won his first World Professional Championship in 1969, he had to take out a bank loan of £100 to pay for the entrance fee. Although this loan would pay off, it was the first of several episodes that would litter his career but ones where he always managed to come out of them smelling of roses.
On another occasion, during the Norwich Pro-Am tournament in 1974, he broke his cue in four places but still managed to defeat Ray Reardon 10-9 in the final. Perhaps this spurred a wave of Canadian generosity when the Dufferin Cue Company presented John with a two-piece cue, two years later at the 1976 Canadian Open. An act that also made him enter the history books with becoming the first player to use a two-piece cue.
Wind the clock back slightly further and cast our attention to the 1972 World Championship, which was played in less than grand surroundings, the British Legion Club in Selly Oak, Birmingham. A cramped space with hundreds of spectators crammed in, many sitting on beer crates to watch this magical snooker encounter. With the lighting provided by emergency generators.
Spencer entered the fray, physically exhausted, having just completed a tour of Canada, a meeting that nearly didn’t conclude with John having had a minor car crash and getting stuck in a lift before one of the sessions. Spencer eventually lost the final by 37 frames to 32 after Higgins won the Thursday evening session 6-0. However, it really sums up the player that John was because he made no excuses for his defeat and praised Alex for his first World Championship title. Alex admired John and off the table, they were actually friends but that didn’t stop them getting in a tussle. On one specific occasion, John Virgo found Spencer fighting Higgins on the floor of a Crucible corridor, in desperation to shake Alex out of his red mist. Even when Spencer became ill at the end of his playing career with the eye disease myasthenia gravis, which caused double vision, Alex came to his friend’s house with a bottle of Bacardi, shocked by the news, drinking the bottle in the end ti himself because John was on heavy medication and couldn’t drink as a result.
Summary
Had it not been for this eye condition, I do feel Spencer may have won more than he did. Not to say that three world titles aren’t some achievement but the fact that he did carry on until he was 57 before he eventually retired from snooker, is some achievement. This sportsman was heavily underrated and is barely mentioned these days. He was the dapper player, who embraced the fashion of the time and was the thorn in the side for both Ray Reardon and Alex Higgins and won 27 non-ranking titles in his career. A gentleman of snooker, who had an infectious smile and a very wide commentator head on him.
