Ronnie O’Sullivan: I could stay at the top with one arm and one leg but majors are different
It is difficult to know which is more extraordinary. To be arriving at this week’s UK Snooker Championship as the world No 1 exactly 30 years after becoming the youngest-ever winner of a snooker major. Or to be quite so certain, just ahead of turning 48, of your place still among the absolute elite of any sport.
“Staying in the top eight? I could do it in my sleep, easy... I could do it with one arm and one leg,” Ronnie O’Sullivan declares grinning, between surveying a snooker world he has largely reigned over for three decades and tending to a slow cooker crammed full of vegetables.
“But that’s quite something,” I venture.
“What is?” he says.
“To be going to York still as one of the favourites for a tournament you first won in 1993. I can’t think of a span like that in any sport. Ever.”
“It’s either quite something... or doesn’t say much for the opposition,” O’Sullivan replies, before emphasising the brilliance of some rivals and the difference between a quarter- or semi-final and submerging yourself in the required emotional “mustard” to win a triple crown event. That, he stresses, does now mean searching the depths of both his physical and mental resolve.
“I’m not surprised to be world No 1,” he says. “If I thought I was getting bashed up and couldn’t do any better, I just wouldn’t play. No chance. But while I’m able to find ways of competing, it’s not a bad life. Gets me out of the house. I’ll pick and choose the tournaments where I’ll dig deep – the other ones I’ll play for the fun. I make it work.”
Not that any visitor would instinctively know they were in the home of snooker’s undisputed king.
There are two cue cases in the corner of the room but no other visual hints of his career. His partner, Laila Rouass, drops in to say goodbye before going out with their dog – “she [the dog] loves Ronnie,” Rouass says – and it is a scene of domestic normality.
“What did you expect? A trophy cabinet? A shrine?” O’Sullivan says, laughing, before explaining why he prefers few reminders of a pursuit that oscillates constantly from day job and social pastime to obsessive passion and relentless torturer.
“For me, the players are sent from pillar to post,” he says. “I’m not prepared to put all my eggs in that basket because of the way I feel like the players are thought of within the sport.
“I got rid of all my trophies. Everything’s gone. I’ve had to go the full hog mentally... get myself in a place where I can do without snooker. It’s just there because I want it. You don’t want to be a needy snooker player and have them people looking over you, mate. It’s like Braveheart – you are prepared to kind of die for your freedom.”
The “them” to which O’Sullivan refers are the sport’s authorities at a time when exhibition work has emerged in China, recently scheduled during a World Snooker Tour event in Northern Ireland. Players were duly threatened with punishments that could include fines, bans or even expulsion if they participated. The WST argues that it must protect the interests of the entire tour, which comprises 130 players from 20 countries.
O’Sullivan believes that a crossroads has been reached and wistfully recounts a line from the film Senna, where the Brazilian talks about the thrill of “pure racing” when he was driving go-karts growing up, before the unwanted politics of Formula One began to intrude.
“They were the best years for me,” O’Sullivan says. “When I was a kid I’d be polishing my cue, getting my shirt ironed, shoes shiny. I won’t even wear a good suit [now]... because [some of] the venues are so bad that I wasn’t prepared to put any good clothing on. So I picked the scruffiest pair of trousers, the scruffiest pair of shoes, the scruffiest shirt. They are putting logos on you left, right and centre. Anything nice gets destroyed. It goes in a rucksack and when I get there I pull it all out. It’s all crumpled up and I just put it on. I don’t give a s---. I still look alright. It is what it is.”
O’Sullivan is still hoping to extend his unprecedented longevity by another decade but that will depend on his schedule. “I’m not just thinking of next week, I’m thinking of 10 years,” he says. “I’m not a hamster. I don’t get on the hamster wheel and keep pedalling until I run out of breath and die. And then they get a new hamster.
“I like to look after myself. [Stephen] Hendry and [Steve] Davis probably played a lot when they didn’t want to. Had their managers saying, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that’. My dad was that person – he went away – and I was just my own boss really.”
It is almost impossible to overstate the paternal influence of Ron Snr.
O’Sullivan’s hero and mentor was convicted of murder in 1992 and Ron Snr’s last words inside the courtroom after receiving a minimum 18-year sentence were simply: “Tell my boy to win.”
His boy somehow repeatedly did, memorably wrapping up a 10-6 win against Hendry in the following year’s UK Championship with a four-minute break of 85 before visiting Gartree Prison with the trophy.
O’Sullivan was only 17 back then. He is now 47, and I wonder if he might be willing to watch that last frame back over. “Stick it on if you want,” he says.
As well as playing, O’Sullivan is a regular studio expert with Eurosport and so there is one obvious question. What does pundit Ronnie make of fresh-faced Ronnie?
“I look alright,” he says. “Confident. Measured. Instinctive. That first red weren’t a bad shot. It’s see ball, pot ball – a bit like Luca Brecel. I’ve never got nervous. I like playing in these situations. It was all on Hendry. I was this young kid, just turned pro, and having a good week. I used to walk to the venue. No one would bother me.”
The longer O’Sullivan watches, however, the more he finds fault.
“It was gradually getting worse, though,” he says. “Look at that long bridge hand. I was getting away with it – but the bad habits were setting in. As a 14-year-old, you will see my hand is in tight. My game got worse from this tournament onwards for six or seven years. For me, this just reminds me of the worst years. What was to come...”
Those “worst years” have been documented like never before in a superb new documentary in which Ron Snr and O’Sullivan’s mother, Maria, speak publicly for the first time about the impact of the jail sentence.
With Ron Snr describing subsequent televised tournament appearances as “like a visit” from his son, it is hardly surprising that O’Sullivan’s relationship with the sport would change.
“I had to succeed for different reasons – to try not to make him feel responsible or guilty for me not fulfilling my potential,” says O’Sullivan, who describes between the ages of 17 and 24 as his “years of trauma”. And, for all that he has since rebuilt his life and broken every conceivable snooker record with such panache, he still does not feel completely safe. “Even though things are alright now, and a lot better, I’ve still got that in the back of my mind,” he says. “I think, ‘F---ing hell, that was real. I could easily go back to that’. It still triggers me off. Now it’s, ‘How do I not let that consume me? How do I play a game and be able to go out for dinner afterwards and just park it up?’ I’m just learning. It was hard. If he [Ron Snr] had not gone away maybe I would have had a lot healthier relationship towards snooker. Maybe not.”
As it was, O’Sullivan would “play around” for parts of his career. Like when he later took a year off and would somehow bookend working on a pig farm with back-to-back world titles.
“If I was a Nike athlete, or in a team sport and paid by Ineos, I’d have probably lost my career,” he says. “I could do what I like, when I like. It was all part of the f---ing fun for everybody. What’s he going to do next?”
The documentary, which premiered this week in Leicester Square in front of an eclectic range of fans from David Beckham and Ronnie Wood to Mary McCartney and Owen Farrell, ends at the moment of O’Sullivan’s seventh world title. He tearfully told his children then that “I can’t f---ing do this anymore... it will kill me”, but what is not known is how close he came to retiring in the 18 months since that epic triumph.
“A lot of the desire went,” he says. “I just genuinely didn’t want to go near a snooker table. I’d achieved something so big. I went 18 months just hating it. For about six, seven, eight months, I didn’t go on a practice table.
“I’d go to a club, look at a table and think, ‘I can’t get my cue out’. I’d never done that in my whole career. I was, ‘F---, maybe I’ve hit my moment’. I thought, ‘There is no forcing it. I want to keep playing for the next 10 years if I can’, so I just walked away. Then, come August [this year], I thought, ‘I’ve got to go to Shanghai. If I’m still feeling like I don’t want to go near a table now, probably the game is up’. But then I started to enjoy trying to get my game back into good shape.”
He duly won the Shanghai Masters, dramatically beating John Higgins, Mark Selby and current world champion Brecel in an emphatic return to form.
O’Sullivan’s eyes then light up as he describes snooker in its simplest form: the angles and endless possibilities, the feeling and smell of being in a club, and that impossible search for mastery and perfection that, according to his dad, continues to this day.
“I’m happiest in a club, switch my phone off, playing snooker and fiddling about,” he says. “The fun bit is when there is no TV, no one else, and you are figuring things out. I’m probably a bit like an engineer. It’s not just brute force. I want to know why that ball went like that.
“It’s like a flick of a switch for me. Once it’s switched, we can go on autopilot. It’s like night and day. You know it’s there. You think, ‘F--- I’m dangerous’ and the other guy doesn’t know until it’s too late sometimes.”
The flip-side is the agony involved with drifting in and out of that elevated state, especially at the World Championship inside the indescribably intense and intimate Crucible Theatre. That much was evident from the visceral dressing-room footage of O’Sullivan venting in front of his psychiatrist Steve Peters and friend Robbie Huxley as Judd Trump narrowed his lead on the final day of the 2022 final. “I feel f---ing battered... I just don’t want to face it... I’m scared, mate,” O’Sullivan says. To which Peters replies: “You really have got to go out there and play with attitude again.”
O’Sullivan would somehow regroup to do just that and his description now of that history-making last session provides a rare insight into authentic sporting greatness.
“I wasn’t going to afford myself any doubt,” he says. “No blinking. I was just going to commit, commit, commit, commit. Let everything else take care of itself. It was about being brave. Play with the mindset of a winner. Think like a winner. Act like a winner. Walk like a winner. I can play s---. I can live with that. But there was no way I was going to think anything other than how a champion would think. It was, ‘I’m going to f---ing grab hold of this’.”
O’Sullivan admits that he “didn’t like what I saw a lot of the time” as he viewed the documentary, but stresses that he often actually felt quite different to the emotions that were being unleashed.
“I was watching a film on the way to China, they were interviewing people who have made documentaries, and how it had f---ed them up, basically,” he says. “Once I heard that, how I was feeling after watching it was pretty normal. What I felt and what I saw are completely different. Seeing myself, I was like, ‘F---, why are you doing this?’ But actually I knew how I was feeling. And it was quite a nice feeling. I could go and get a job doing podcasts. I could work on Eurosport. I can go and do other bits in China but I’m never going to get that feeling.”
And what is that feeling? “On your own. Under the most extreme pressure. Your back against the wall and you’ve got to go out there and perform. That’s the ultimate pressure. I want that high. I love competing. I love playing... I love snooker.”
The UK Championship is live on Eurosport and discovery+ from Nov 25-Dec 3, presented by Radzi Chinyanganya with analysis from Jimmy White and Alan McManus
