‘I’m nowhere near the player I was aged 14. I should have won 12 world titles’: A very emotional Ronnie O’Sullivan sits down to watch footage of his first televised match in 1990 as he begins his hunt for a record eighth Crucible win
- The great Ronnie O’Sullivan revisits his first televised snooker match from 1990
- O’Sullivan is emotional watching back the footage, when he was aged just 14
- Despite success, O’Sullivan thinks he should have more World Championships
Ronnie O’Sullivan is smiling as he drifts towards a rueful place. He knows it all worked out in the end, but the longer we watch an old video, the more he thinks of the way it was. The way it could have been, too.
‘This is triggering me a bit,’ he tells Sportsmail, and there are regrets. But he cannot draw his eyes away from the 14-year-old lad on the screen. The lad who had nothing and everything. ‘What happened to him?’ O’Sullivan says. ‘Where did he go? I can’t believe you found this.’
We are staring back at a distant moment in time, because it is footage from O’Sullivan’s first televised match.
It was 1990, he had been invited to play the Cockney Classic on ITV, and what we are viewing is the earliest portrait of the artist as a young man. The artist who went on to win seven world titles and, who on Saturday, sets off in pursuit of an eighth.
But what else might that boy have done? It’s a question that runs laps in the mind of one of sport’s most fascinating figures.
Ronnie O’Sullivan was left with regret after watching his first televised match from 1990
The seven-time world champion said the younger version of himself was technically better
https://youtube.com/watch?v=K2aiU0Qkqgc%3Frel%3D0%26showinfo%3D1%26hl%3Den-US
‘What a player,’ O’Sullivan says, and he’s studying the kid as he sizes up the table against Steve Ventham. We are 20 seconds into the six-minute video, scoreless, and he has a hard shot to left-middle, with the cue ball pressed to the cushion behind the black spot. The red doesn’t touch the sides on its way down. One.
‘I was just technically so good back then,’ O’Sullivan adds. ‘Compared to then I’m just all over the shop now.
‘As a kid I was relentless. I’d win everything — juniors, amateurs, pro-ams. By the time I was 13 I had beaten Willie Thorne on his own table when he was eight in the world, and Ken Doherty when he was seven. I was only 12, 13 and I knew I was going to bash them up.
‘In the end, people would see me turn up for a tournament and be like, “F***, he’s here”. And I’m talking about world-class players.
‘I remember Anthony Hamilton once went to my mate and said, “You didn’t bring him, did you?” He was a proper player and I was 13. No one wanted to play me. Now they have half a chance because I make a few mistakes.
‘Back then they had nowhere to go. They were bang under it from the gun — I miss that so much. When you’re in that zone you just feel like a train without any brakes and it is all so comfortable and nice. That is the feeling you live for.
‘I miss that ability to know I’m going to crush them. Now, I’m not sure. This video is what I’m talking about.’
In the clip, one of the commentators, six-time world champion Steve Davis, is saying those in the know have been monitoring this lad for three or four years. He’s portrayed as a gathering tornado and within two minutes the break is at 36 and counting.
‘I was very confident from 12 up until 16,’ O’Sullivan says, and he’s back in that time shortly before his dad went to prison, his mum too, and before the drink, drugs and technical misadventures in seven years of ‘carnage’ from 1993 to 2000.
He felt that he began to lose his way as a snooker player when he started copying other styles
O’Sullivan believes part of losing his way was when he started to self-coach in his late teens
‘After 16 I lost my way. I started copying other people’s style when my own was perfect and because of that I lost my cue action and fluency, and it was all through trying to become a better player.
‘I started to self-coach, and I lost my way. I should have stuck with what I had as that kid and everything would have been different — my love for the game, the amount I won, and I wouldn’t have chased the emotions I got from snooker in other ways. Finding solace in drink, wacky backy, food — I was just trying to change the way I felt.
‘I went from fantastic to really bad. I got a lot back, so I’m now at an OK place with my game. But I’m still nowhere near the player when I was that kid.’
There is applause coming from the video — the kid has just cut a red 45 degrees into a corner pocket, sending the white off three cushions and between yellow and brown to sit perfectly on the blue. The half-century is worth £50 to a lad who would go on to win £13million as a man.
‘For a lot of years I played terribly and people said I was moaning,’ O’Sullivan says. ‘Because I was winning tournaments, people thought I was being disrespectful. But I wasn’t. I could only be true to myself and I know how good I could have been. What could I have achieved if I hadn’t torn that kid’s game apart?’
The question dangles as the kid reaches 75 in under five minutes.
‘I could have probably had 10, 11, 12 world titles,’ O’Sullivan says, and he means it. He might even be right.
‘I could’ve, but anyway, listen, seven is not bad. It’s not bad.’
Not bad at all, actually.
O’Sullivan is pictured above at 10 years old in 1986 before he quickly became a major force
The 47-year-old does not know how long is left in his time at the top of the world of snooker
O’Sullivan is unsure how long he has left, except to know he is not done yet. ‘I could have another five, six, seven years at the top,’ he says.
But he is feeling his age. He’s 47 now and the winner of everything: seven world titles, seven apiece at the UK Championship and Masters. No one has his numbers, barring one frontier, which is the World Championship.
If that goes his away across the next 17 days, he will hold the record outright from Stephen Hendry. But he has already adopted the tone of an older heavyweight relying on early knockouts.
His mind wanders to last year’s final, in which he beat Judd Trump before then falling into his opponent’s arms and weeping with exhaustion.
O’Sullivan smiles. ‘That is the Crucible for you,’ he says. ‘When you’re younger, you stroll through. I won in 2012, 2013, and I woke up the next morning and could probably do that again, because I wasn’t physically drained.
‘When I won in 2020 I was done for two weeks afterwards. It was like, “What the hell has happened to me?” It was the same last year with Judd — all that adrenaline came out at the end, and even before that last day I could barely walk upstairs. That is how draining it can be.
‘If I go to Sheffield and have a 10-8, 13-11, 13-12 in the first three rounds, I’m not winning the worlds. I need 10-3, 13-5, 13-7 and then I have a chance. I can’t have early wars these days. It is like having a hangover at 19 versus 45, when you are done for five days.’
He is laughing. He’s been through all manner of self-inflicted challenges via various addictions.
He also battled depression, with many days across the past 30 years when he wanted to jack it in. Days when he went to work as an unpaid farmhand for a few months in 2013. Days when he bemoaned the smell of urine at a venue in Crawley, or the ineffectiveness of World Snooker, or headbutted a press officer, or torched the level of prize money and the quality of those who want to take him down.
O’Sullivan was not left physically drained after winning the World Championship back in 2012
But he admits recent victories in Sheffield have taken their toll as he has aged into his 40s
Despite approaching 50 though, O’Sullivan is still one of the world’s leading players
As it happens, this is one of the occasions when he says he ‘loves’ this hypnotic old game. Relishes its biggest stages. But he always was a wild blur of contradictions, a man so often perceived to channel the spirit of Jimmy White and Alex Higgins, but whose techniques, fixations and success line up far more closely with Hendry and Davis.
It can be all too easy to group the mavericks of sport together, and within such a mistake might be a temptation to see flakiness in the gifted. But none of it stands up to a study of O’Sullivan, whose 2022 world title was achieved aged 46 — respectively 15 and 16 years older than Davis and Hendry when they won their last.
For all his many flaws and misdemeanours, and he has never knowingly hid them, O’Sullivan has gone longer and burned brighter than either man, and if his 31st trip to the Crucible is favourable, he will end the argument around the greatest once and for all.
‘A lot of people say how nice eight titles would be and I’m thinking, “Well, I could get to nine or double figures because I hope I’m nowhere near the end of my career”,’ O’Sullivan says.
‘I thought I was at the end 12 years ago, but I’m 47 and still competing, still playing all right, still fancy the job. If I don’t get it this year there is always next year.’
What follows is a claim, perhaps debatable, that the numbers no longer matter so much in a game where they are building blocks of everything. It might ring as a trick of the mind, a means of downsizing the pressure, if only his reasoning wasn’t so illuminating.
‘It is definitely more about a state of mind and playing a certain way,’ he says. ‘I’m not fixated on numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I look back now and have to pinch myself.
‘I’ll never forget my relief in 2001 after winning my first (against John Higgins) and getting the monkey off my back.
‘If I was sat here now having not won a world title, I would be so desperate to have it just once, because there was a time, those seven years, where I messed up so much, that I didn’t expect it. I got there through sheer determination and resilience.
O’Sullivan is pictured in Sheffield the day after winning his first World Championship in 2001
He says that setting different goals helps him continue – as he eyes up an eighth at the Crucible
‘Keeping that perspective at this stage is hard because if you have seven titles of course you want eight. But trust me, the numbers are not a fixation.
‘It is about different goals to keep yourself going. When we are talking about the video, that is the feeling. Being in the zone, everything in slow motion, in your control, and you never want it to end.
‘Last year’s World Championship I had a bit of that — when you get to that place, it is the best. Like in the video.’
Utterly compelling. On the table and off it.
O’Sullivan is pictured playing Mick Price at the 1997 World Championship
O’Sullivan has scrunched up his face. We’ve been talking about being in the zone but he sees very little of it in one of his most famous moments — the 147 he fired in five minutes and eight seconds against Mick Price in 1997.
‘I get why people like it,’ he says.
‘If I slowed down I would have missed. I went fast because I had to override myself because I had so many doubts about where the cue ball was going. I had to not think and just play. You can get lucky that way but you won’t win a World Championship and I didn’t. It isn’t nice to watch.’
O’Sullivan thinks a lot about the ‘zone’. It’s why the video jolted him — the sight of pure talent riding waves and then those waves he missed out on. ‘Those were great days. The only regret of my career is I let that kid go and I lost myself for a while. I can also say I worked my butt off to put it right.’
For most, seven world titles would serve as a reasonable recovery. As for O’Sullivan, there is an acceptance that his snooker and wider life is now in a ‘much happier’, more balanced place than it was when his game collapsed and addictions took over.
His escape for a while has been running. He is also toying with his next chapters, and points to coaching, as well as television work, for which he has been signed up by Eurosport to cover the worlds when he isn’t at the table.
O’Sullivan says ‘I still have something in my game’ as he bids to achieve an eighth world title
‘I still have something in my game,’ he says. ‘Let’s see.’
We will. It might not be the same level as the kid. It might not be 10, 11 or 12 world titles. It might not yield a video that stuns him to regret lost gongs 33 years down the line.
It might not be that bad, either.
Watch live coverage of the World Championships on Eurosport and discovery+ featuring pundits Ronnie O’Sullivan, Jimmy White and Alan McManus
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