My psychiatrist is ignoring my phone calls. I’ve done his head in already!
Ronnie O’Sullivan is as entertaining as ever... even if he does give Mail Sport a roasting for a cream tea blunder
RI’m never going to leave snooker on a bad note. No way I am caving in now
ONNIE O’SULLIVAN is in his kitchen looking for jam. Mail Sport has brought scones and clotted cream to his east London townhouse but we are without the other accompaniment needed to make up his favourite snack.
The slipper-wearing Rocket, 48, goes through condiments on his table and searches his cupboards before peering into his fridge. ‘No jam, mate,’ he sighs after seeing his dream of a proper cream tea die. ‘ What’s going on? How can we not have jam? I’ll have to keep fasting and just drink tea.’
As he consoles himself by making another cuppa, I note that jam is not all that is missing from the minimalist home he shares with his partner Laila Rouass, the former Footballers’ Wives actress. Indeed, if this was an episode of Through the Keyhole, the panel would never guess who lives in a house like this because there is nothing on show from his storied snooker career, other than a piece of silverware on his kitchen table.
‘I’ve got the Saudi trophy there,’ says O’Sullivan, pointing to the World Masters of Snooker prize he won in Saudi Arabia last month. ‘But the other ones I’ve won over the years, I just leave at my mum’s. Laila would rather have what she’s got on the walls than a picture of me with a trophy in my hand.’
Good job, really, because where would she start? This season alone, O’Sullivan has had a trophy in his hand five times. He has also banked a record £1.2million in prize money and could add another £500,000 by winning the World Championship, which gets underway on Saturday.
And yet, the World No 1 fears he is suffering from the ‘yips’.
‘If I was going to give you an objective view, I would say, “Yeah, it’s a great season”,’ he admits. ‘But from an emotional point of view and enjoyment point of view, it’s been challenging. I have felt like I am going out there with a water pistol while the other geezer has got a machine gun. It’s been really bad since January. I’ve got into such a bad place with it.
‘I’ve over-perfectioned myself to the point where I’ve driven myself insane. I have just beaten myself up to a point where I don’t even know if I am playing well or not.
‘I am so wrapped up in it that I need to unwrap it, get myself out of it, and I need to do that by coming from a different angle.’
That different angle is provided by his psychiatrist, the renowned Dr Steve Peters, with whom he reconnected during this month’s Tour Championship in Manchester, where he lost to Mark Williams in the final.
‘I’ve done his head in. I’ve had him for a week and he is ignoring my phone calls already,’ jokes O’Sullivan. ‘If I could afford to have him with me all the time, I’d go, “What’s your price? £ 2million? Done. You’re with me”. I see it as part of my way of rehabbing. I have done a lot of rehab before from certain things and I believe I am in that place at the moment.
‘I’m trying to rehab myself from someone who is not happy with playing to someone who is happy and can go out there and play and compete.
‘I need to get rid of all those negative beliefs that I have stored up over the last two years which are not helpful for me. I don’t want to go out there and feel like I’m scared to go near a snooker table. The goal is to keep winning but to try and enjoy it more.’
O’Sullivan’s other long- held coping mechanism has been running. He had not done it for some time after a specialist told him last year his knee ‘could explode’ if he ever jogged again. On the day we meet, O’Sullivan has just completed a four-mile run after a more favourable prognosis from former UK Athletics team doctor John Rogers recently.
‘He did some tests and said, “You are fine, stick a little injection in there, you’ve got 40 good years in that knee”,’ he recounts. ‘So I had my first run today in like four months. F****** amazing.
‘It has been a big help for me, running. I don’t want to be on pills. So if I can get out in the fresh air and run, it means I don’t end up going down that route.’
With both Peters and running back in his life, O’Sullivan knows he has a chance of coping with the gruelling World Championship — a tournament he described as ‘hell’ and an ‘evil event’ in his compelling recent documentary, The Edge of Everything. Were he to go all the way, it would be the first time he has won all three Triple Crown events in the same season. Even more significantly, it would give him the outright record for most world titles, having equalled Stephen
Hendry’s haul of seven in 2022.
O’SULLIVAN,
who will also be working as a Eurosport pundit, has often played down the significance of winning No 8. But now he admits: ‘It would be nice, I’m not going to lie. If you asked me a week ago, I would have said, “Nah, I don’t really care, just going to go there, play my snooker, fall back on a bit of Eurosport work, enjoy running with my mates, get out to the Peaks”. That would have been the attitude, but not now.
‘If someone is going to beat me, they will have to do what Williams did the other night. I am not going to give up. Now I have committed with Steve, I want to go there and smother myself in the mustard and just go for it.’
THIS year will be O’Sullivan’s 32nd consecutive appearance at the Crucible, another one of his many records. It is also the 30th
anniversary of his heaviest defeat in Sheffield — a 13-3 secondround thrashing by John Parrott.
‘ I remember that for two reasons,’ recalls O’Sullivan about that 1994 humiliation as an 18-year- old. ‘Because I was in a really good place, really happy. I’d just won a couple of tournaments. I had just made a bit of money. All right, I got pumped by Parrott, but I wasn’t worried about that.
‘But that was also my first night where I went out and partied hard. When I got beat by Parrott, I couldn’t wait to get home so we could go out clubbing. It was the first time I went, “Right, let’s see what this partying s*** is all about”. Up until then, never had a fag, never done nothing, I was clean. From that moment, that was the six, seven years where I went a bit doolally and it got the better of me.’
By now, we are well versed in what happened next. O’Sullivan’s life spiralled to such an extent that, by 2000, he had checked himself into the Priory to treat his alcohol and drug addictions.
‘The first two or three years the partying was great, it was fun,’ he says. ‘But the last three years, it got a bit out of hand and instead of me being in control of it, it became in control of me. If I could have just had someone around me to go, “Look, you are not doing that”, which my dad would have done, I wouldn’t have done it. But he wasn’t, so I was left to my own devices.’
His father, Ronnie Snr, was jailed for life for murder in 1992. In The Edge of Everything, O’Sullivan emotionally recalled his dad saying ‘tell my boy to win’ as he was taken away from court following his sentencing. There was, though, another comment he made years before which has always stayed with his son.
‘When I was about 11, my dad said, “One day there will be a player that never misses”,’ reveals O’Sullivan. ‘I thought, “F****** hell, that would be cool”.
‘About three or four months ago, I was talking to him about not being happy and why I am so hard on myself. He said, “It might be what I said to you as a kid. Maybe that is what has f***** you up. Maybe you thought that was you. Maybe it’s my fault”.’
O’Sullivan might not have become that man that never misses but he has come closer to snooker perfection than any other player. Regardless of whether he wins No 8, he will go down as the greatest of all time.
ASKING him whether he believes he is the best ever elicits a five-minute answer. ‘I suppose statistically it sort of says I am,’ he begins. ‘But certain people come into the sport and they have such an impact on it, like Tiger Woods did in golf, Stephen Hendry did in snooker, Phil Taylor did in darts.
‘I’m not sure I actually did that. I never changed the sport like Hendry did, I never changed people’s perceptions of what is possible. I wouldn’t say I was the greatest. I’ve just had a longer go at it than Hendry.’
O’Sullivan’s longevity is almost as remarkable as his talent. Earlier this season, he became the oldest player to win the UK Championship and Masters, having already been the youngest.
Yet after an hour in his company, one question still lingers — why does he keep playing a sport that he so often seems to hate?
‘I just love it when it’s good and want to sort it out when it’s not good,’ he says. ‘I am never going to leave snooker on a bad note, so there is no way I am caving in now. I’m quite an obsessional character, quite a complex person. I want to leave after a really good spell. I want a sustained period where I enjoy the season and I go, “You know what, a lot of happy faces, good year, I am 51, 52, come on, grab hold of yourself here, it is not going on for ever, f****** hell, just jack it in”.’
And as I head to his front door, he sends me on my way with the words: ‘ Sorry about the scones. But you f***** up with the jam.’