GLASSES HALF FULL
Snooker icon Taylor reflects happily on career that surpassed his expetations
AFEW weeks ago, a clip of Dennis Taylor kissing the ‘silver lady’ (world championship trophy) one last time went viral on social media. The popular Tyrone native had just been beaten 3-0 by Barry Pinches in the world seniors championship at the Crucible and decided it would be his final time holding a snooker cue in competition.
There were hugs and tears from his fellow players and an emotional interview from Taylor.
‘I suppose people were surprised I was still playing,’ he suggested on Thursday morning in that lighthearted, soft tone of his that has become so familiar on BBC’s snooker coverage.
‘They were probably thinking: “Did he not retire years ago?”’
Taylor did put his professional cue away in 2000, after 28 years on the main tour. Around 12 years ago, he was approached by Jason Francis who was putting together a seniors championship, involving all the great names of yesteryear. It had been a lot of fun but he reckons the competition was getting a little tougher every year.
He’s happy to just concentrate on his commentary now as well as doing exhibitions with Steve Davis in recreating snooker’s most famous match.
As restrictions lift, they are beginning to get booked for the summer and there are hopes the pair, who are usually joined by another snooker icon of the era, John Virgo, can make it across to Ireland at some point this year.
All sports like to wallow in nostalgia, but none do it quite as much as snooker. The documentary series Gods of Snooker, produced by Louis Theroux, comes to an end on BBC 2 this evening and it has been a wonderful trip back into the game’s heyday, which has as its centrepoint the famous ‘black ball’ final. Households across Ireland and the UK stayed up past midnight on a Sunday to watch the most riveting game in history. It remains talked about to this day.
‘Do I have to talk about this again?’ Davis smiled during last Sunday’s Gods of Snooker. ‘Can we not talk about one of the six finals that I won?’
Taylor and Davis will forever be linked by the high drama of that Sunday night. It was past midnight when the Irishman, who was 8-0 down at one stage, potted the black to claim the world title on a scoreline of 18-17. It was the only time that he had been ahead in the whole match.
‘Steve has been great about it, really, given that he has had to talk about it more than any other match. He’s handled it very well and he is always great fun about it when we do the exhibitions,’ Taylor says from his home in North Wales.
It was no fun at the time. Last week’s footage showed just how tortuous it was for both players, who were often caught on camera, sighing deeply or fidgeting in their chairs.
Of course, the final looked nothing like becoming an epic in the early stages. Davis spent most of the 80s being boringly brilliant and he kept Taylor off the table in the first session by playing sublime snooker. By the end of the first afternoon, it was 7-0.
‘The BBC and the sponsors probably thought this was going to be the worst final ever, that it was going to be over in no time,’ Taylor recalls.
‘I went into that final in great form, had won my previous match with a session to spare. But it doesn’t matter if you are in great form when you can’t get on the table.
‘And that is when the game becomes so difficult – you just have to sit in your seat and watch your opponent clear up frame after frame and you aren’t getting a chance. That’s why it is mentally the toughest of all sports.
‘I used to have this conversation with Peter Allis, who would claim golf is mentally tougher, but I would always point out, if your opponent is playing out of their skin on a golf course, at least you always get another shot.
‘In snooker, if your opponent is playing out of their skin, you are just sat in your seat, not able to get to the table. And that’s when all the demons come. There is no other sport where you have to deal with that kind of helplessness.’
Taylor rallied that evening, though, winning six frames in a row to be only 9-7 behind. He was driven on by the memory of his mum, Annie, who had passed away suddenly just seven months before.
When he had been in his last world final, losing a tight contest to Terry Griffiths in 1979, Annie had been in the crowd. ‘It was such a shock. My mum was only 62 when she passed away, and it was a massive heart attack.
‘When it happened, I was playing in the International and had a quarter-final that day but, the way I felt, I didn’t want to see a snooker table ever again. I pulled out of that tournament and seriously contemplated retirement.’
He was talked out of it by his father and ended up going on the most successful period of his career, winning the Grand Prix before the world championship, beating his good friend Cliff Thorburn in the final.
‘It was during that tournament that I started chatting away to her, saying I was going to win this for her. It was the same in that final.’
Taylor’s success brought the island together at a particularly dark time of the Troubles. Among the thousands of letters and cards he received, some came from inside the Maze prison, from both sides. And the first place he brought the trophy as world champion was a club in the Shankill Road.
‘It was an exhibition that was actually booked before I won the world championship. But here I was, this wee altar boy from county Tyrone, being welcomed as a champion on the Shankill Road. Sport has a remarkable ability to bring people together.
‘We saw that a lot during the Troubles. We saw it with wee Barry [McGuigan] a few weeks after I won, too. It was just a reminder that sport brings everyone together, no matter what their differences.’
For Taylor, it was the culmination of a lifetime harnessing a talent that first became apparent in Gervin’s Bar in Coalisland.
By the age of 14, he had won the British Junior Championship and, one evening in his hometown, another prodigious talent of the same age, who had just won the All-Ireland Billiards title, came down from Belfast to challenge him.
So began Taylor’s long association with Alex Higgins.
Taylor left school early and got a job, laying pipes in Tyrone. However, after a row with his boss, he decided to head for England and stay with his aunts, who lived just outside Blackburn. Working 12-hour shifts in a paper mill, Taylor practised snooker whenever he could. Higgins landed in the same part of England when he decided to try to make it in snooker.
Taylor had moved from the paper mill to selling television sets by the time Higgins arrived and he gave his fellow Irishman one for free, as he found his feet. They both entered the 1972 world championship and while Taylor lost a final-frame
‘I PULLED OUT OF THAT TOURNAMENT AND NEARLY RETIRED’
decider to Thorburn in the first round, Higgins went on to win the thing, wowing the crowd with his imaginative shots.
‘Alex was one of the main reasons for the popularity of snooker. Pot Black definitely played its part and then you had John Spencer and Ray Reardon, but it was Alex who started to bring the crowds in,’ he says.
‘But there was really no money in snooker at the time. There were 16 players who were professional and that was really it.
‘I was working the exhibition circuit, too,’ Taylor remembers. ‘Jackie Rea, who was an old pro from Dungannon, and played in the same era as Joe Davis and Rex Williams, he did exhibition work, trick shots and that sort of thing.
‘So I would do that circuit, in Pontins. And I decided to add some jokes to my repertoire. I’d test it out at 10 in the morning in Pontins. I figured if people laughed at that time, the jokes must be funny.’
Taylor’s humour became a defining characteristic during snooker’s glory days. But the main thing that set him apart were the famous upside-down glasses that were designed by fellow player and commentator Jack Karnhem.
‘When I played in the 1979 world championships, I used contact lenses for the first time and I reached the final. But my eyesight was so poor, I needed glasses. And my prescription was awkward – I was very short-sighted in one eye and long-sighted in the other.
‘But Jack came up with these glasses and they probably saved my career. Of course, they ended up being a gimmick, too.’
In a sporting sense, snooker has been one of the winners out of the pandemic and lockdown. It was one of the first sports back and that coincided with an upsurge in interest. The television ratings for the recent world championships were very healthy and didn’t take the usual fall after Ronnie O’Sullivan was knocked out, which suggests snooker is in a good place.
‘Barry Hearn has done an excellent job in reviving the interest in snooker,’ Taylor says. ‘And usually when Ronnie is knocked out, there is a bit of a slump in figures but that didn’t happen this year. People stayed interested until the end. And the final held the interest.
‘People say that Selby is like my old friend, the grinder [Thorburn], and he definitely has that. But he is like Ray Reardon too, in that he knows when to play the right shots at the right time. Players can’t lose concentration for even a second playing Selby and when it is over 33 or 35 frames, that is very hard to do. He has won it four times now, so it shows how good a player he is.’
Taylor is unequivocal when asked who’s the best player he has seen on a table. ‘It’s O’Sullivan, no question. He is the most talented player I have ever seen and I’ve seen them all. He can play any shot and any shot with either hand.
‘We never thought we would have seen anyone like Steve Davis and then Stephen Hendry came along and I thought he would definitely be the best of all time.
‘But O’Sullivan is better than either of them, and I think even Hendry would admit that. He’s the genius. People say he should have won more world titles, but he has won the same as Steve, and I don’t think he is finished yet.
‘He can win another couple.
Ronnie will be able to play at the top level into his 50s because he keeps himself so fit and in such good shape.’
With snooker in equally good shape, the hope is that there will be a player this country can get behind such as Taylor or Ken Doherty – although Shaun Murphy who reached the recent world final is an adopted Dubliner.
‘Ken is such a wonderful ambassador for our sport, both in Ireland and around the world, it would be great if another player came through. There are a few talented youngsters, a couple in Cork and Mark Allen’s stepson [Robbie McGuigan]. They just need people to get behind them.
‘But there are so many players coming out of China now. They have snooker in school over there and they have academies set up in Sheffield. It is going to be very tough.’
Taylor still tries to get home to Coalisland, and Ireland, as often as he can. He still has a sister in the town and another one in nearby Dungannon. His younger brother Brian, who lived in Kilcock, sadly passed away a couple of years ago.
‘We are all over the place, I have another couple of sisters in Australia and a brother in Lancashire. But we try to come together for a reunion when we can.’
Of course, when Taylor is over here, he is often asked about that famous April night when the whole of UK and Ireland saw him become world champion. ‘People say to me you must be fed up being asked about it? But I am not, it was the greatest moment of my career so it is nice to be reminded of it.’
‘JACK CAME UP WITH THE GLASSES THAT LIKELY SAVED MY CAREER’