RAY REARDON INTERVIEW Where are the characters? Today’s players forget... this is showbusiness!
‘In the 1978 quarters, Big Bill put away 30 pints’
RAY REARDON is telling the extraordinary story about when it all came crashing down. It dates back past the phone call from a prison cell, past the six world titles and past the time he encountered the chap with a fire extinguisher stuck in his backside.
It’s a story that rewinds all the way to 1957 in Stoke- onTrent when he clocked on one Saturday morning at Florence Colliery.
He was 25 and a miner, just like his dad, and was wearing the customised gloves that made the other men laugh.
Hands worth protecting, he reasoned. It was a viewpoint that endured 11 years, from his first trip down a pit in south Wales aged 14 to his last on that morning at Florence.
‘I was about a mile underground,’ he says. ‘I was trying to break this giant boulder and nothing I tried was working. I was kneeling down for what- ever reason and then, just like that, bang, the roof collapses. The girder holding it up had come down but it hit the boulder, creating this tiny pocket of space for me.
‘I didn’t have enough room to move an eyelid and I had to breathe through my nose because if I opened my mouth I’d suffocate to death on the dust.
‘I was kneeling down and my blood pressure was coming up because the blood wasn’t getting through to my legs. Three hours I was like that before they got to me. Three hours.’
This tale marks just about the only time in two hours that Reardon isn’t grinning or chuckling. But suddenly a smirk crosses his face.
‘ I had to concentrate on something to stay calm,’ he says. ‘I started imagining my brother Ron, who is 17 years younger than me. I was imagining we were home and playing marbles. Thousands and thousands of games of marbles we played in my head that day.
‘ I was trying to stay alive but I’m still not sure if I let him win any of them.’
Reardon is laughing. Winning is what he did and what he does. This son of Tredegar was the genial master of snooker in the Seventies, six times victorious in the World Championship, tying him second with Steve Davis in the modern era standings behind Stephen Hendry.
He was one of the first great characters of his craft, the man with the widow’s peak whom they called Dracula.
He would wear cloaks and ham it up, bubbly on the outside yet ‘evil on the inside when there was a chance to win something’, he says. It was true then and it is true now, aged 84 and going strong.
‘I still get a century every few weeks or so,’ he says.
He is meeting Sportsmail at Churston Golf Club in Brixham, Devon, where he has been club president for the better part of two decades.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the World Championship moving to the Crucible in Sheffield in 1977 and Reardon is the last remaining champion whose wins straddle that point in time. He won one of his titles at the famous old arena and won the previous five in venues from Manchester to Australia.
No former world champion is older and none match the scope of his memories, spanning the age of mavericks to the age of machines.
‘Are there any characters now?’ he asks. ‘Beyond Ronnie O’Sullivan and Liang Wenbo, I’m not so sure.’
His mind goes back to the Seventies and Big Bill Werbeniuk. ‘ He’s dead now, but my word, he was something,’ Reardon says. ‘ There was about 19st of him.’
The Canadian was the son of an armed robber and prone to a pint at the table.
‘I played him at the Crucible in the 1978 quarter- finals,’ Reardon says. ‘ We started at 10.30am and he had five pints before he started.
‘We then play eight frames and he has a pint per frame. So that’s 13. Then he goes to the interval and has another five before coming out and playing the next session and drinks another eight pints.
‘I think he had about 30 pints, all in. He actually had a tax allowance for it, if I remember correctly.
‘For about three months he was able to claim his drinking helped his business, which was professional snooker player. He was claiming the price of his pints against tax.
‘It worked a while but me and a few others all applied for the same dispensation and they stamped it out. Sorry, Bill.’
Then there was the hurricane that blew through the sport in the Seventies. Reardon first met Alex Higgins in the moments after lifting the world title for the first time, back in 1970. His duel with John Pulman had been a 70-frame epic and, as he was waiting for his trophy, a 21-year-old wandered up with no desire for small talk.
‘I was waiting for the presentation and I became aware of someone by my side,’ Reardon says.
‘It was Alex, who I’d never met, and he said, “I am playing you up at Burscough”. That’s it. No congratulations. I thought, “You little s***”.
‘When I did play him on Tuesday, he goes to the table and hits 67 and misses the last red.
‘A voice came out of the audience saying, “67 in one minute and 32 seconds”. I’d never
‘Ronnie is a genius. Helping him added 10 years to my life’
heard anything like that before — putting a time on the break. Fantastic.
‘I went to the table and pocketed the last red even though the frame was up and I said, “One red, one second. Beat that, you little s***”. The crowd went mad for it but he didn’t speak to me for a month.’
Reardon feels sadness in recalling a snooker genius who struggled with his vices and never lived up to his potential. His talents somehow only won two world titles in the era which Reardon dominated.
‘I liked Alex but he was Jekyll and Hyde,’ Reardon says. ‘I beat him in the ’76 final and he was drunk in three sessions. But then he beat me in the ’82 final with 135 in the last. He really should have won more.
‘I remember when I was asked to do an exhibition with him once at St Mellion golf course in Cornwall. I said to the organiser that I would get Alex to Cornwall and then he was theirs.
‘So I picked him up and drove him down from wherever we had been and handed him over. I came back to play him that night and he was gone. He’d run off to a casino in Plymouth.’
The tales offer a window to a more charismatic time in the game. ‘I went to the Welsh Open recently and in four hours none of the players interacted with the crowd,’ Reardon says. ‘It’s sad, really. It’s still showbusiness, isn’t it?
‘Now the players are so insulated — you go through a manager to speak to them. When I played, Terry Griffiths had been a bus conductor and I was a miner, a blue coat in Butlins and a policeman.
‘I played snooker from when I was a kid, before I went in the mines, and I won six Welsh amateur titles in succession. But I didn’t turn professional until I was 35. I’d had a life before professional snooker.
‘I’m not criticising anyone or saying they need to join the police but I’m just saying it is different now.’
Reardon’s mention of the police has brought more stories to his mind.
He joined the force in Stoke in the late Fifties shortly after his mining accident had persuaded him to stay above ground. ‘There was still no money in snooker then and I needed a job,’ he says. ‘The police initially said I was too unfit because I could barely run 200m after being in the pits so long.
‘I remember explaining to the sergeant, “Let’s say there is a bar fight. I’ll walk down and they will have time to knock holy hell out of one another and I can just scoop them up”. The sergeant liked that.
‘I ended up a bobby for seven years. You’d see some odd things. I got a call one time because the night watchman at the theatre had engaged in an act with a fire extinguisher and had got into difficulty. Oh my. He lived but that was interesting.’
Reardon is laughing. He loves a tale and that’s one of several reasons why Ronnie O’Sullivan gets in touch with his old mentor when he can. He called up Reardon in 2004 during a crisis in confidence and their three-year partnership yielded a world title.
‘Out of the blue I had a call one day from his father in prison (Ronnie Snr was serving time for murder). He must have got hold of a guard’s phone or something,’ Reardon says. ‘ He asked if I thought his son should be winning more and I did but I told him Ronnie had to call me himself if he wanted to do something.
‘Two months later I got a call and I’m so glad. My word, to see him practise. A genius. Being around him added 10 years to my life.’
Reardon chuckles. The tally is at 84 years and counting. His golf handicap is 18, he still beats all comers at snooker and generally ‘gets on with enjoying life’.
But he would love to hook up with O’Sullivan again, should the five-time world champion need inspiration for a first since 2013.
‘If he needs me I will always be here,’ Reardon says. ‘I could help him. Sometimes it only takes a chat, a laugh and a few stories.’
From collapsing mines to extinguishers, Reardon has that covered.