Why Rocket Ronnie is more Steve Davis than Hurricane Higgins
Despite having missed out on winning an eighth World Championship last month after going out in the quarter-finals, Ronnie O’Sullivan is undoubtedly the greatest snooker player there’s ever been. But though he cues with lethal accuracy, he’s put his name to more than one hit-and-hope book down the years.
As well as two volumes of autobiography, O’Sullivan has tried his hand at noir-ish crime and he’s even written a diet guide, Top Of Your Game: 70 Recipes To Help You Eat For Success.
His latest book, Unbreakable, is a kind of follow-up – a self-help memoir built around tales of his triumphs and disasters intended to help the reader not just get to the top but cope with the pressures (and pleasures) once there.
It’s a nice idea, but from the moment young Ronnie knocked off a 147 break in a record time of five minutes, eight seconds in 1997, it was plain he was no more like other men than Mozart or Michelangelo were. Though O’Sullivan has always been honest about being in or out of practice, he’s also a player highly dependent on his moods.
No one throws as many matches as Ronnie does, almost at the whim of some temporary fury or funk. Equally, no one can turn a game around on a sixpence like O’Sullivan. He sparks in and out of form. He’s a hard man to copy, in other words. To watch a world championship winner such as, say, Mark Selby or, further back in time, Dennis Taylor, is to think that given enough time and dedication you, too, could make a go of the sport. But to watch O’Sullivan in full flow is to realise you could live your whole life over again and not once even momentarily attain his clarity of focus. At one point in Unbreakable O’Sullivan says he thinks a friend who calls him autistic might be on to something. Maybe he is, but even if Ronnie is also correct to believe this putative autism is the spur to his pinpoint cue-ball control, how are the rest of us to benefit from the insight? The best parts of this book are when O’Sullivan tries to place himself on the sport’s mood spectrum. To fans, he’s in the lineage of what he calls snooker’s rock ’n’ roll rebels – Jimmy White and Alex Higgins.
But while worshipping those two, O’Sullivan believes the players he should be bracketed with are Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry – ice-cool wizards whose emotions never cloud their judgment. O’Sullivan goes on to tell us that for all his worldly success, what he values most is ‘being grateful’, ‘being humble’ and, most tellingly, ‘being able to smile when I miss a shot or play badly’. Rocket Ronnie? More like
Rocking Chair Ron.