Slow play a far cry from 80s havoc
SHAUN MURPHY and Mark Selby are locked in battle that will see the Betfred World Championship trophy lifted tonight at the Crucible.
But even the rows over gamesmanship, slow play and fist-pumping that clouded their semi-final wins pale by comparison with the wild antics from snooker’s boom era.
Gods Of Snooker, a threepart BBC2 documentary from Louis Theroux, starts on Sunday looking at how the sport exploded into popular culture in the 1980s, creating headlines and celebrities.
And it was the time when the original ‘wild man’ Alex Hurricane Higgins saw protege and friend Jimmy Whirlwind White take the torch as crowd-pleasing entertainer and party-goer.
White said: “I loved Alex, watching him perform and cause havoc. He knew how to keep the party going in his way. Living like a rock star. I just thought it was normal.”
But White is frank about a crazy period of his life.
He said: “I had loads of drug dealers. Cocaine had come into my life, I must have spent hundreds of thousands on it.
“Snooker pulled me back because I wanted to win the World Championship.
“I tried crack, that was a really dark time and three months.”
White also features in another great tale from Hong Kong, having flipped, capsized and sunk a speedboat, forcing him and passenger Steve Davis to swim to shore.
Meanwhile Murphy’s view on Selby being warned by the referee for slow play in his semi-final is that shotclocks should be brought in.
Murphy said: “We are in a theatre, we are an entertainment industry.
“There is a responsibility on the players in this final to make it a show.
“There should be a shotclock, obviously longer than 20 seconds. If it’s too slow, punters will put Netflix on.”