America has them in abundance: Mohammad Ali, Tiger Woods and Michael Johnson to name but a few. Mainland Europe isn’t short on talent either, with the likes of Roger Federer, Annika Sorenstam and Michael Schumacher flying their respective flags. They can share Martina Navratilova to avoid arguments.

But in Scotland we have, on our very own doorstep, a man who in his own sport has equalled, and in some cases bettered, the achievements of all these great, great individuals: Step forward Stephen Hendry

Hendry is unrivalled in snooker terms, because he has been World Champion seven times. That is one hundred per cent, cast iron, set in stone, fact. His championship haul is without equal.

But, unlike in America where we often hear chest-beating calls of “I am the greatest” or “I am the fastest man in the world,” Stephen Hendry prefers to remain modest. Displaying a level of humility reserved only for Scots, he qualifies the true essence of greatness exclusively for In The Winning Zone, without lauding any praise on himself.

“Anyone can win once. Dozens have proved that. But to win over and over, like Schumacher or Woods, means you have attained a level of greatness. Not that I walk around saying I’m great or anything like that. But the results would back that up.”

However, the jury is currently out on Stephen Hendry. Some would say he is entitled to say he is great. Of course he is. He is the most successful snooker player of all time. No-one has achieved what he has.

Others, of course, would argue to the contrary. That he is a has-been, that he will never regain the form he once had and, by that logic, will never regain the trophy that once ground a groove on his mantelpiece, so long was it rested there.

Once again this year we saw the Championship pass him by. That it went to another Scot, John Higgins, is a comfort for the patriotic amongst us, but it doesn’t solve the enigma that is Hendry.

Of course, the question always asked is why he has struggled to rediscover the form that brought him his record seven world titles. Unfortunately, Stephen is as bemused as the rest of us.

“There are several reasons,” he speculates. “Maybe the desire and the hunger haven’t been there; maybe it’s better players; [maybe] old age? Having my cue broken? Who knows?”

His next point is the most poignant of all. “If I did know, I’d start winning again.”

It is a difficult question to answer, one which Hendry has no doubt asked himself many times. It is certainly true to say that he was severely affected when his cue was broken in a Thai Airways flight in 2003. He hasn’t won a ranking tournament in three years.
But, quite significantly, it may also be combination of the other factors. He is older, there are better, more dynamic players coming through, and they are arriving with a greater desire to win.

As you grow older, you may mature as a player and achieve greater focus, but the balls still need to be sunk. An old pro like Hendry knows this.

“90 per cent [of snooker] is [down to] ability. If you can’t pot balls, there is no point in learning to concentrate.”

Hendry went to the Crucible this year as the top ranked player in the world. So his early exit is not so much about him having off-days and losing his form as the fact that, quite simply, he may have lost his will, or confidence, to win. Following his exit to Ali Carter in the second round of this year’s Championships he told the Daily Mail: “I’m obviously lacking confidence….The UK Championship was my only decent run this season, but if you haven’t got that self-belief you’re going to struggle.”

But, regardless of his belief, he still has the motivation to win. Some athletes don’t achieve (either publicly or personally) true greatness until they make ‘a comeback’, such as Michael Jordan. Others, like Mike Tyson, can systematically ruin what was once great about their career by trying in vain to make comeback after comeback. Born on the harbours of South Queensferry, Hendry doesn’t think his ship has sailed quite yet.

“I don’t know how many years I have left at the top. I thought 35 was old and I’ve passed that. 40? That’s coming up soon, but ‘The Nugget’, Steve Davis, is still going strong at 57. So who knows? It is the only thing I don’t really know.”

He remains defiant, just as he did as a young upstart in 1990 when he beat Jimmy White 18-12. Hendry is a proven winner, ‘The Golden Boy’ of snooker. He may, or may not, rule the world again, and lift the prize that has felt his fingertips more than any other. But winners don’t give up, and Hendry, the ultimate winner, has no intention of doing so.

And, despite his current rut, he retains his sense of humour.

“What advice would you give to the younger players coming thorough, Stephen?” We ask.

“Take up golf,” is the reply. At least then we might have a chance of beating him…

In The Winning Zone May 07

Ronnie O’Sullivan has never been short of advice. In 2001 his doctor told him that his depression stemmed from a lack of serotonin in the brain and prescribed a daily dose of Prozac. In 2002 a therapist from the National Drugs Helpline told him that his problems were the consequence of his addiction to marijuana and that if he kicked his habit he could kick his demons.

A counsellor from the Samaritans – which O’Sullivan had called in a state of fevered desperation on the eve of the World Championship in 2001 – told him that it was all about his destructive relationship with snooker and that if he quit, things would start to look up. A sports psychologist who worked with O’Sullivan told him that his problems were to do with focus.

O’Sullivan has that effect on people: everyone wants to help, to advise him, to get inside his head and make things better. Maybe it is that irresistible combination of eccentricity and vulnerability. Maybe it is his roguish humour and immense personal warmth. Whatever it is, people want to reach out and attempt to understand him. For every friend and acquaintance there is an opinion on what is wrong and what to do about it.

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But it was Mike Brearley, the former England cricket captain and now a psychotherapist, who offered O’Sullivan the most novel perspective. “Is your dad right-handed?” he asked O’Sullivan after he had confessed to problems with his cue action during one of their therapy sessions in 1998. O’Sullivan nodded.

“So that means there’s a good chance he stabbed the man he killed with his right hand,” Brearley said. “Maybe what happened in the club that night is affecting your right arm. There were people in the war years ago who were made to shoot people and didn’t want to do it. Years later their arms became paralysed.”

Brearley reasoned that if O’Sullivan could come to terms with the night his father knifed a man to death, it would solve his cueing problems, which would help him to feel better about life. It was Freudian logic that, to quote O’Sullivan, “was off the wall and did my head in for a long time”.

O’Sullivan, 31 with a steady partner and three children, is no closer to understanding why his world is shrouded in darkness. “A lot of the time I am in pieces and I still don’t know why,” he says as we sit alongside each other in the bar at Grove Snooker Club in Romford, Essex.

“Some days I think one thing, the next day I think something else. It is like there is this damn committee going on in my head. Shall I; shan’t I; am I up or am I down; am I doing the right thing; should I carry on; should I go home; have I done enough; have I had enough; do people really care; do I hate snooker; do I love snooker; have I had a good time; has it been great; hasn’t it been great; is it time to move on; have I got another five years in me; should I give up now. Arrrrgh! I’ve got all this s*** in my head to deal with.”

Did the antidepressants help? “For a while, yes,” he says. “I started taking them at the start of the World Championship in 2001 and they helped me to get through that event [his first world title] because I was ready to walk out of Sheffield at the beginning of the competition, I was feeling so bad. I carried on taking them for around nine months. When I came off them, I went back to the up-and-down mood swings.”

Why not try them again? “I never really wanted to take them in the first place because I had read things about people who had come off them and ended up in a bad way and it kind of frightened me. I don’t want to end up suicidal because of the medication. I can handle being suicidal if the buck stops with me, but I hate the idea of going up the spout because of something I’ve taken. If I can blame myself, I can deal with that. I like to be hard on myself. Maybe that’s one of my problems. No matter what happens I always feel like a failure.”

That sounds strange, given what he has achieved on the snooker table.

“But I am a complete failure,” he says. “I feel lucky to have won two world titles, but I feel robbed because that’s all I won. If I had a bit of consistency in my game I would have never got beat by [Graeme] Dott [in the semi-finals of the 2006 World Championship] or [Peter] Ebdon [from 8-2 up in the quarter-finals in 2005].

“I threw away two titles because I wasn’t strong in myself, because I couldn’t take it. I know I was capable of challenging [Stephen] Hendry’s record [seven world titles]. But I haven’t produced. How can I be anything other than a failure?”

Is Hendry’s record that important to him?

“Yes. No. I don’t know,” he says and giggles mirthlessly. “People say I am full of contradictions and they are right. I’m a walking contradiction. One day I’m up, one day I’m down. One day something is important, the next day it ain’t. On some days I don’t even try to analyse what’s going on in my mind because I haven’t got the slightest idea. I know it must be a nightmare for people who are close to me. But at least I am open about it all.”

Open enough to talk about his father?

It is the autumn of 1991 and O’Sullivan is in Thailand for the World Amateur Championship. It has been an audacious period for the 15-year-old potting machine, with a series of victories in pro-am matches and a runners-up medal at the English Amateur Championship. His precocity has secured a three-year deal with Barry Hearn, snooker’s most influential promoter, and he is enjoying the thrill of travelling around the world playing exhibition matches and tournaments. The phone rings in his hotel room and his mother comes on the line. As she talks, O’Sullivan’s stomach begins to tighten. “I’ve got some news to tell you,” she says. “I don’t want you to do anything, everything’s all right. But Daddy’s been arrested. He’s in police custody. He’s been involved in a fight and someone’s been killed.”

O’Sullivan flies back to the UK, where he is met by his mother and taken to the prison where his father is on remand. O’Sullivan looks at the man who has been the centre of his existence – a charismatic rogue who had built a lucrative chain of Soho sex shops from nothing – kitted out in standard prison garb. Then it hits him; he breaks down in tears.

For the first time in his life, O’Sullivan notices a tear escaping the eye of his father.

On September 21, 1992, O’Sullivan Sr was convicted of the murder of Bruce Bryan, a driver for Charlie Kray, the elder brother of the Kray twins.

Accounts vary, but what is certain is that the stabbing took place after an argument in a Chelsea nightclub. Summing up, the judge implied that the attack was racially motivated, a contention that was overturned in a sentence review in 2003. O’Sullivan Sr has two years of his 18-year minimum sentence to serve. The only contact between father and son for the past 16 years has been by phone or in a prison visiting room.

For many years, O’Sullivan Jr was unable or unwilling to examine the extent to which his descent into mental illness was related to his enforced separation from his father, who had lavishly financed his snooker career and provided him with discipline and inspiration. It was only recently, while leafing through the diaries he had kept as an adolescent, that O’Sullivan began to realise how much he has changed in the years since his father’s conviction.

“I found the diaries and just started to look through them,” he says. “And I had written stuff like, ‘Got to the quarters of this tournament, got to the semis of that tournament.’ But I wasn’t down on myself because I was losing. There was stuff like, ‘I need to start winning and it will happen soon.’ And I thought to myself, ‘F***ing hell, that don’t sound like me.’ I must have been about 12 at the time.

“I would never think something like that now. Now when I lose it’s, like, ‘Doom, gloom, playing s***, can’t pot a ball.’ It’s difficult to believe that I used to have so much belief and optimism. Back then I knew I was untouchable. Now I never think it’s going to happen for me. Before every match I expect to lose. I am petrified and it cripples me. Unless there are 4,000 people watching or it is the world final, I can’t do it. If I am not flowing in the first round I feel like throwing the towel in.

“It’s like when I played Dott in the semis [in 2006]. My game started to deteriorate and I thought, ‘I’ve got three days against him and if I get through that I’ve got two days against Ebdon.’ And I just didn’t have it in me. That really cuts me up because years ago that would never have entered my mind. I would have thought, ‘Just get through this game.’ Back then I knew it was going to turn around.”

For a long time after the conviction of his father, O’Sullivan tried to numb his feelings of fear, guilt and self-loathing by using marijuana and alcohol, but it sent him into a downward spiral of intoxication and paranoia. In 2000 he realised that he was out of control and pulled out of the UK Championship to check into the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, southwest London.

“It was a nightmare,” he says. “If it hadn’t been for the month in the Priory I don’t know what would have happened. It gave me some space from all the madness. Talking in groups helped me to understand how bad things could become if I didn’t get it under control. I also went to Narcotics Anonymous, where I met Jo [his partner and the mother of two of his three children]. She doesn’t really get my depression, but she relates to the addiction problems. Bloody good thing, too.”

I ask if he is still off the dope and booze. “I occasionally fall off the wagon,” he says. “The last time I had a drink was on the Sunday of the world final [in May]. I remember getting up and thinking, ‘You wouldn’t be feeling so bad if you were in the world final.’ We went out to a restaurant and I ended up having a few. I am not perfect, but it is under control, at least compared to how it was.

“I go through phases of trying to find out what’s the bloody answer. I am very into seeking other people’s philosophy on life, just to get a handle on my own problems. I looked into Buddhism and Islam, but I haven’t really bought into any of them. I still have demons and it drives me mad every day. I guess the thing is just to deal with things as they come. Maybe that’s the only way forward.”

Ronnie O’Sullivan faces a stern test in his opening match of the PartyBets.com Premier League, which starts in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, today. O’Sullivan, who has won the competition on the past three occasions, will play John Higgins, the world champion, in a best-of-nine contest.

O’Sullivan’s remarkable success in the league – he won the past three finals without dropping a frame – has led many to speculate that the format of the event suits his psychological profile. Because the seven-man competition is played over three months, O’Sullivan is never required to spend more than a night away from home.

This contrasts with, say, the World Championship, which requires an 18-day stint in Sheffield. This has never been an easy feat for O’Sullivan, who often takes solitary walks late at night to fend off the boredom and demons.

The Independent – Sep 07

The object of all this attention is wearing a Nike T-shirt bearing a picture of Michael Jordan, a reminder that he is himself little more than a star-struck kid – indeed, he was still a teenager until earlier this month. But Ding Junhui is already the third most popular sportsman in China, behind the Houston Rockets basketball player Yao Ming and the 110-metre hurdler Liu Xiang. And if he wins this year’s 888.com World Snooker Championship, which begins tomorrow, then 1.3 billion people will proclaim him a national hero.

To do so, however, Ding will have to beat the favourite Ronnie O’Sullivan in Sunday’s first-round match, a draw that O’Sullivan, no more delighted about it than Ding, this week called “a fix”. He later retracted that accusation, but there is no doubt that O’Sullivan v Ding is an unusually mouthwatering prospect for so early in the Championship, made possible only because Ding, at the time of the draw, was ranked 27th in the world. He now stands ninth.

Over a sumptuous lunch at Chung Ku, I ask Ding, through his ever-present interpreter, what it is like to play O’Sullivan. “He is technically the best player in the world,” comes the reply. “You can never give him a chance. And it is not only tough to play against Ronnie, you have to play against the crowd too.”

There is bitter experience in Ding’s words. In the final of the Saga Insurance Masters at Wembley in January he had the misfortune to encounter the Rocket in particularly turbo-charged form, with a raucous audience both urging on their hero and cheering his young opponent’s misses. At 9-3 down in a first-to-10 match, a tearful Ding was about to throw in the towel, but was dissuaded from doing so by O’Sullivan himself, who sweetly told him that there are bigger things to worry about in life than a snooker tournament, that he should think of his family. “I grew up after that,” Ding says. “It won’t happen again.”

There are some, however, who think that as soon as he shakes hands with O’Sullivan on Sunday, the Crucible will prove too hot for him. They forget that the Rocket was merely levelling the score in January, having lost 9-6 to Ding in the final of the Northern Ireland Trophy last August. And in winning the UK Championship at York in 2005, Ding yielded just 17 frames, winning 45. He manifestly has both the stamina and the talent to win the biggest tournament of all.

The first signs of that talent came on a pavement outside his house – in Yixing near Shanghai – when he was eight years old. “In China at that time there were not many snooker clubs. My father played with his friends on a table in the street, and one day I played one of his friends at eight-ball pool, and beat him.”

His father, a humble shoe salesman, soon realised that he had a prodigy on his hands. He took Ding to Dongguan, where China’s national snooker team trained, and where the two of them lived in a room of five square metres partitioned from the club. When they ran out of money, Ding’s father phoned his wife and told her to sell the family home in Yixing, mortgaging their lives against his boy’s ability.

The gamble paid off, and some. Ding Snr doesn’t sell shoes any more. Bankrolled by his son’s sponsors, he owns a 26-table snooker club in Shanghai, although that is the least of the impact Ding has had on snooker in China. More than 100 million people watched him win the 2005 China Open, and since then, interest in the sport has erupted. At any time of day, there are said to be around two million people playing snooker in China. More than 10 million people play more than once a week. And Ding, almost coyly, concedes the extraordinary effect he has had.

“When I was a small boy, snooker was not in the top 10 favourite sports in China,” he tells me. “Table tennis was top, followed by soccer, basketball and badminton. Now, basketball is top, because of Yao Ming. But snooker is definitely in the top five.”

Following this burst of immodesty, Ding turns his attention to some steamed scallops. His interpreter, Matt Zhang, adds an observation of his own. “Ding is very famous in China,” he says. “He goes down no street unrecognised, even faraway cities in Inner Mongolia.”

To achieve such fame, he had to travel even further than Inner Mongolia – to outer Wellingborough. An astute Blackpudlian called Keith Warren, who already managed several Chinese players as well as Britain’s Peter Ebdon, had known about Ding since the boy was 11 and regularly beating decent adult players. When he was 15, Warren invited him to England for six weeks to practise with Ebdon, who was then world champion. He saw enough to invite him back more permanently, getting him digs in the Wellingborough home of Ebdon’s mother-in-law.

The recollection brings a shy smile to Ding’s face. “It was my first time away from home. In China I had family and friends around me but here I had to make my own bed, depend on myself. I couldn’t speak English, and I still find that very hard. Also, the weather was different, my surroundings were different. It was very strange to me, coming from China, to see so few people on the streets in Wellingborough, seldom anyone at all at night. There were no tall buildings. The food was different. I had never used a knife and fork before, but I learned quickly. It all improved me a lot as a person, made me more independent, although at first it was very tough for me. I had never cooked for myself before, had never learnt anything from my mother, and when I tried to cook Chinese food it was inedible.”

Ding has moved to Sheffield now, where last Sunday he discovered a Chinese restaurant he considers the best in the city. Yes, he says, he had to pose for lots of photographs there, too. And yes, he had to pay. In some Chinese restaurants, his bill is waived. He still misses his mother’s cooking, he adds, especially her version of huo guo, best translated as hot pot. But she came over with him for several months at the beginning of this season, and the ready supply of huo guo was clearly beneficial: he promptly beat O’Sullivan in Belfast. Moreover, although his mum has gone home, she taught the woman who looks after him, Patricia Murphy, who comes from rather closer to Shannon than Shanghai, to make a very palatable huo guo. Next year, when he gains his five-year residential status, Ding will buy a house in Sheffield. It already feels more like home than Wellingborough did. “But it is not like Shanghai,” he says, and there’s no arguing with that.

I ask him to name the prettiest place he has seen in England? “York,” he says, perhaps thinking less of York Minster than the inside of the city’s Barbican Centre, where, in an evocative encounter between the old guard and the new, he beat Steve Davis in the final of that memorable UK Championship two years ago. And has he tried English food? “Steak,” he says, without recourse to the interpreter. “And fish and chips. Very good.”

More pertinently, I ask him what his ambition is in snooker: to win the World Championship once, twice, five times? “To be the world No 1 for as long as possible,” he says.

There are plenty in the game, O’Sullivan included, who consider that to be more a case of when than if. But to project a little further into the future, has he considered the prospect of one day surrendering his status as world No 1 to a younger compatriot? Thanks to the Ding factor, there are already 14-year-old Chinese kids wielding cues as expertly as chopsticks and knocking in century breaks for fun.

“In the near future I hope that lots of Chinese players will come through,” he says. “There are already four of us on the main tour, and lots of very good players back in China. But what they lack is the opportunity to come here and practise with the world’s greatest players, like I did with Peter Ebdon. They should come to the UK sooner and practice for a year or two to gain confidence. I was just an average player when I came. I thought I was better than I was. But I improved quickly. Like me, [his compatriots] Lang Wenbo and Tian Pengfei are much better for the experience.”

Yet Ding knows better than to talk bullishly about his chances of winning this year’s World Championship. “Four years ago there were people saying that I would win it,” he says, “but it has taken me four years just to qualify. So I need to be realistic.”

To turn his chance of winning into hard realism, he has been practising this past fortnight with Ebdon, playing the best of 19 frames every day under match conditions at Sheffield’s World Snooker Academy. He does not quite have Ebdon’s zeal for fitness, but Ding doesn’t drink or smoke and plays as much basketball as he can. He is a basketball nut, and a devoted fan, unsurprisingly, of the Houston Rockets.

Indeed, he prefers to watch basketball on television than snooker, and has barely even watched the World Championship on the box. Nor, despite living in Sheffield, has he ever been to the Crucible. Warren thinks the venue’s intimacy will come as a pleasant surprise, suiting him better than Wembley did, especially with O’Sullivan as his opponent. On Sunday we will see.

But for now, with lunch over at Chung Ku, Ding has an even more famous sporting arena to visit. The reason he is on Merseyside is that Warren, a fanatical supporter of Liverpool FC, has arranged for him to be given a tour of Anfield. He is met there by former player Brian Hall, and handed over to an elderly guide, who shows him the parts of the stadium that are usually off limits, including the fabled Boot Room, and gives him a shirt with Ding 8 on the back. Eight, as well as being worn by Steven Gerrard, is considered a lucky number in China. That’s why 888.com was so called, when someone realised that it wouldn’t hurt to have an online casino with a name that appeals to a billion Chinese. By 7 May, Ding Junhui might be a name that appeals to them a whole lot more.

The Independent - Apr 07