Doherty still late but better than ever

Rose is a ticket. Mrs Rose Doherty, mother of world champion snooker player, Ken, is a ticket. "That lad, he's always late. He said he'd be here 10 minutes ago. And he drives down. It's only a walk up the hill from his place. Do you want his mobile number," she asks.

"Yes please," you answer.

She reels off the number and the last three digits disappear into Telecom oblivion. So you ask again.

"One . . . four . . .seven," she repeats. "You know 1, 4, 7, the score Ken never gets when he's playing." A ticket.

Jason's snooker hall sits just around the corner from the family home. A part of Dublin's Ranelagh, you walk in, stride up to the cashier grill, and blather it out all at once.

" . . . the house of Mrs Doherty . . . Ranelagh Avenue . . .the mother of Ken Doherty, the snooker player . . . ?"

They peer out suspiciously and after a 10-second `will we or won't we' visual hosedown, you are sent around the corner and Mrs O'Doherty puts you in the front room with the Pope on one wall and Ken on the other.

On top of the television, the blessed World Championship trophy sits unscathed, the one Ken almost smashed into a motorway bridge as he held it aloft in his open-top bus ride from the airport.

Without turning it you can just about read the dates and the inscribed names - Alex Higgins, Steve Davis, Stephen Hendry, Ken Doher . . .

Ken bursts in the door and says his hellos. He is dressed in his casual snooker gear; black slacks and a purple velvet loose-fit top. On the television John Higgins struggles to keep pace with Dominic Dale in the final of the Bournemouth Grand Prix event.

The world champion takes a quick look and muses: "He's going for the plant," then turns around and asks: "you watching that?"

Zap. It's gone.

Today is a day to look forward, not back at reminders of his inauspicious beginning to the new season. Doherty has already gone out in the early rounds of two serious tournaments. He gained some lost ground at an eight-man invitational tournament in Malta last week. Today is grand prix and soccer day.

"This is my year as world champion. I think it's going to take a little time going out with that on my shoulders," he says. "Losing in the Scottish Masters and in Bournemouth was disappointing, but initially there is going to be more pressure on me. I don't mind that. It will take time.

"Overall I've fulfilled my dream. But I've got to forget that now and carry on. I still want to achieve. I still have goals."

Last spring Ken Doherty finally left his sound, wholesome image on the street and expressed himself on the table. His characteristic humility was seen as a flaw in a game where notoriety would have perversely offered more riches. Keeping his head down was a natural instinct. It still is.

"Too soft. A lot of people have said that. They've said I'm too nice. I read one of the quotes in the papers after the World Championship. It said: `Nice guys do win'. Maybe they do. I don't want to be a horrible person. When I'm on the table I'm focused, not nice. Off the table you can be yourself.

"My good friend Eamon Dunphy. He often said it to me. He said, `Ken you're too fuckin' nice. You have to be a horrible bastard. You gotta have that will to win and you gotta realise that'. I knew where he was coming from, but you know he couldn't read me from the inside. I'm not going to become a horrible bastard now just because I've won the world championship or to please anyone else out there.

"But sometimes it pissed me off that people thought that. It was perceived as a weakness and it pissed me off. But I've proved them wrong. I mean I'd play my mother best of three and I wouldn't let her win."

When Doherty went out early at Bournemouth three weeks ago, he returned to charmless Ilford in Essex, but he couldn't stick it - the routine, the buildings, the emptiness, the defeat. He needed to get his dander up.

His manager, Ian Doyle, was once publicly critical of what he perceived as Doherty's laziness, but the player now sees the importance of balance in his life.

"I miss Ireland an awful lot. My whole idea is to be here as much as possible. I've spent 10 years now in England and it can be very lonely. Okay, you're travelling a lot, but you're still away. That's a down side. It gets boring.

"My daily routine in Essex is going up to the club in Ilford at 10.30 to practice, staying there until 6-6.30, going for something to eat and then coming home. When I come home I don't really have anything to do. So from 7.00 until I go to bed at 11 or 12, I'm basically bored out of my mind. "This is home for me. This is where I'd rather be and do my practice. The problem is I don't have the same practice partners here. The quality isn't here. I need players to keep me sharp and there are not enough in Ireland. At the same time I can get away to Ilford where there are no real distractions. It's like a boxer preparing for a fight.

"After Bournemouth, I just didn't feel like playing for a few days. You know if you're feeling lonely and depressed that's not doing you any good. When I'm here in Dublin, the loss is in the back of my mind, when I'm in Ilford it's at the forefront and when you're world champion and you lose, it hurts even more."

Doherty is convinced that he is playing better now than he has ever played before. He has greater confidence in doing better things on the table and critically, is a lot happier over more difficult shots.

His self-belief has taken nourishment from the world championship, a title that might have turned like a maggot in his skull had he not won it after victory in both the junior and amateur world championships.

"That confidence will help. The frustrating thing is getting the quality practice into a game situation. Good practice is not going to guarantee certainties, but if it's not in the locker room, you're not going to find it on the course - know what I mean?

"I've being doing exactly what I did before the world championship . . . but here I am, watching Higgins and Dale in Bournemouth on television and I'm not there. These are guys I should have beaten."

Doherty's triumphant ride into the city centre has been the envy of other players on the circuit. Shouldering sports champions from airports to Mansion Houses in the frenzied way Ireland does holds a certain amount of curiosity.

Where the soccer team's return from the US World Cup was a contrived embarrassment, Doherty's public acclaim was genuine. No music station hijacked the event, no copycat dance troupes were asked to fill in the unforgiving hours while the bus made its laborious way through the streets. Doherty was a hero, not a celebrity.

Just after the world championship win he was talking to Stephen Hendry, his friend whom he beat in the final: "I heard you got a big party in Dublin and an open-top bus from the airport through the city centre," said the Scot.

"Yeah," said Doherty.

"When I won the world championship," said the multiple world champion, "I went back up to Scotland and there were about 40 people at the local club who turned out. That was it."

Coming up to the world championship, Doherty hadn't been having a good season. Although more consistent than he had been previously, there wasn't enough form to harbour thoughts of winning in Sheffield.

A few semi-finals under his belt kept him in view, but he wasn't shaking the world. Having been beaten in the first round of the British Open a month before, he went to the Crucible with soggy confidence.

In the first round he fell over the line 10-8. The win galvanised his spirit and it triggered a chain reaction. The isolated pieces of his play threaded themselves together and he began to play with continuity and verve. His feeling is that through the endless hours of knocking around balls on his own, he had finally unearthed past tournament form.

"When that happened the pressure just lifted and I started to play like I could play in practice. I was in the zone. Even against Stephen I felt no pressure until the last session. I wasn't afraid of him. That was the main thing. A lot of players in a final are scared of Stephen. But I'd beaten (Alain) Robideaux and (Steve) Davis with sessions to spare.

"I'd been watching Stephen's game and he'd a pretty rough ride, probably the roughest for a few years. He'd hard games against Andy Hicks, Mark Williams and Darren Morgan and the game against James Wattana was nip and tuck. My matches after the first tough one were 13-3, 13-9 and 17-7. It was a lot easier.

"I think a lot of the game is how you feel upstairs and that's confidence. It generates your persona, your aura, your whole body language. And that comes out on the table. If you're giving off signs it shakes the other person. They pick it up and I picked up his vibes that he wasn't playing that well. It's amazing what you can see just sitting there."

Doherty's a believer. He believes in the game. He believes in the formal battle dress and the hushed tones. He believes in the solemnity around the baize, the white gloves, the craftsmanship, the poise. He believes that the heart of the game is in its tradition, one rooted in what he calls "gentlemen's" principles.

The willingness of players to call shots on themselves that the referee might not have seen, the equanimity with which they face both ruin and riches and the coldblooded suppression of their emotions are the embodiment of the game.

He is a believer in all of it.

By extension, he is also part of it, part of its history, its character. He is himself a "gentleman". Doherty strives for decency, strives for respect and fearlessly holds values that have little currency to modern day hype marketeers and promoters.

Doherty, off table, is everything his hero Alex Higgins is not. The tabloids have steadfastly left him alone. Even the advertisers have been far from kicking down his door, finding it difficult, perhaps, to sell the earth and stars through a figure who is so well grounded.

Last summer Doherty handed Higgins around £20,000 by taking part in a testimonial in Belfast. The world champion stayed afterwards to sign autographs for scores of fans while Higgins disappeared to his changing room to drink with family and `friends'.

Try to get Doherty to tell the story as it is. Try to have him say that despite everything Higgins has done for snooker, he was guilty of gross indifference to those who actually cared about him that night. Try.

"He was an inspiration to me. A lot of people turned up for him. They didn't want me that much. They wanted to see him, they wanted to talk to him, to pat him on the back. It's like he's biting the hand that feeds him. I still like Alex. I feel sad for him. He's been here in this house a few times. And he's welcome."

This year holds promise and the unimportant invitational tournament win in Malta will hold a greater importance than it should. It is a useful building block for Doherty's 12-month lap of honour with the crown and a critical link in the run-in to the UK Championship, which begins this week in Preston.

He has bought a house in Ranelagh, suggesting that his life will become a balancing act of hermetic practice in England, dovetailed with spells on the tables in Ranelagh and Dun Laoghaire. In a few years he will be 30. It is up to Doherty to take advantage.

"At least two or three wins in serious competitions. I won't be happy with less," he says. Doherty won't slide or merely sit on his throne. A young man's game, he has seen Joe Johnson and, more recently, Steve Davis, sink into oblivion by losing their edge. The eyes go fractionally, the co-ordination is a heartbeat off and that is the end of it.

He looks at his watch. The soccer is starting. Tomorrow he leaves Dublin, his friends, his mam, his comfort zone. Tomorrow will judge him on what a world champion he will make. And Doherty knows it.

"He called in here not so long ago, Alex did," says the mam.

"It was after Ken had won. Knocked on the door while someone was getting something in the shops at the corner. Ken wasn't here, but Alex came in for a few minutes."

"He said to me, `do you want to see my stab wounds'?"

"I said, `I didn't'.

"He showed them to me anyway. He pulled his shirt up and his trousers down and I saw the two marks on his side, sort of hook shaped."

"I said to him, `who did that?'

"He said, `she did it to me'.

"`You must have done something to her', I said.

"He muttered about women, that sort of thing. You know Alex, the way he speaks. I couldn't really hear him. Always very nice, but he's his own worst enemy . . .

"That Ken, where is he . . .?"