Everything you have ever heard about Ronnie O’Sullivan is true. This week in the Ally Pally after he had reached the last eight of the UK Masters he came out with something profound, also something he had said before.
“I feel I have life in perspective,” said O’Sullivan.
On and off he has been saying versions of that for 25 years. Sometimes instead of “in perspective” it was “out of perspective”. Sometimes for “motivated” it was “lacking motivation”. Sometimes he was “loving” snooker and other times it was “boring”.
Where most players have careers, O’Sullivan has had a shared journey. For every time he stepped out on the precipice threatening to leap, he has managed to find a way back.
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For a player that so often shared his thoughts on despondency and personal distress, last year he celebrated his 46 years on earth by becoming the oldest world champion in snooker history. His seventh world title equalled Stephen Hendry’s record.
Quite a distance to come from the Irish Masters in 2002 when, still in his 20s, O’Sullivan arrived to Dublin. Furtive and understated, he sat himself down in a private room off the main hall in Dublin’s Citywest Hotel.
Now etched with grey, his hair and eyebrows were dark as anthracite and he pulled hard on a cigarette. Silently he nodded to the waitress as she placed a china teapot on the table. Then he spoke.
“Yeh, luv fanks,” said Ronnie in his mix of Essex and East London accent. He had won the world championship the year before, his first. But his body of work until then had as much to do with vast potential and the derailing of it.
He was an open book. Looking back at notes from the meeting the conversation went seamlessly from one life spasm to the next.
“I was 19 when they put me mum away,” he said. His father Ronnie Snr was serving an 18-year prison sentence for killing Bruce Bryan, the driver for the Kray twins’ older brother Charlie.
“It would be great if I had dad out wif me now. I’m dealing wif it. I wasn’t before. He’s alive and I’m seeing ‘im and he’s there.”
He also had a little sister.
“I wanted everyfing to be all right when me mum was put away. Danielle, she was just 12, very young. I tried to sort everyfing out wif dad inside too, and I realised I just couldn’t do it. After four weeks I give ma sister to ma mum’s friend.”
On his way that season to attaining the world number one ranking for the first time, the life perspective he has this week was then nowhere in sight.
“It’s only been over the last 18 months that I’ve been getting glimpses, getting some clarity in me life, in me mind,” he said sipping the tea.
A few years before during the 1996 World Championship, after assaulting press officer Mike Ganley, he received a suspended two-year ban and a £20,000 fine.
Two years later he won the 1998 Irish Masters but was stripped of his title and prize money when a post-match drug test busted him for cannabis. Abuse of drugs and alcohol resulted in rehab spells in the Priory.
The rap sheet is impressive. Shaving his head mid-tournament at The Crucible in 2005, losing 11 of the last 14 frames in a quarter-final against Peter Ebdon, leaving the arena in the sixth frame of a 17-frame match against Hendry in the 2006 UK Championship and, in 2015, suffering from debilitating insomnia he declined to defend his UK title.
O’Sullivan has buried himself more than once.
One mechanism he has had in his favour is an ability to talk about whatever is ailing him. With his bouts of clinical depression came a candour and frank honesty. He had an ability to autopsy himself.
Like a troubled Paul McGrath or Alex Higgins, his public exposure and susceptibility to self-harm also drew qualified affection. But even switching to playing left-handed mid-match found him in trouble with Alain Robidoux for perceived disrespect.
O’Sullivan has been able to articulate that his lurches, seizures and tumbles were never the end point. Although it sometimes looked that way and he may have himself believed it was, he was able to explain struggle as an ongoing fixture, a series of never-ending conflicts he would sometimes win and often lose.
Just 26-years-old that day in Citywest, some scars were healing while others had yet to open.
“I said to the doctor, I still don’t feel right. I said I do everything I’m supposed to, but I still get these anxiety attacks, this panic . . . I was like this robot where snooker dictated everything. Now, I have to check in with meself sometimes.”
Latterly O’Sullivan’s threats to walk have given way to an infatuation with running. He is an unlikely poster boy for healthy living.
In an interview with Runner’s World last May, he told them: “I’ve noticed I don’t get so moody, there isn’t the same self-loathing”.
He has rewritten the score of life around the baize and it was often mood music that promised abrupt endings, messy finales and self-implosions.
Cue aside, his genius has been not to let that happen, let it end badly. He has become a modern sporting paradox. Longevity, not brevity. This week is O’Sullivan in perspective, still adding to a life’s work.
