Jimmy White: Whirlwind finds shelter from life less ordinary

The Whirlwind stands there. Black jacket, white shirt. Hands drilled into his pockets, the mischievous grin. Jimmy White. You can't quite remember how many lives it is he has lived now. Two or three. A snooker life of near misses. A snooker life of decline, screwdrivers and cocaine. A snooker life in the gloaming but now sweet and hopeful.

There were days when his trips to Dublin could encompass a squadron of celebrities in his Shelbourne suite. Phil Lynott, Ronnie Wood, Alex Higgins crushing it. Good friends, they had a common goal of excess. For Jimmy, snooker was sometimes an infringement.

He was the hapless star of the baize, who could do nothing to upset anyone except those close to him. The roguish talent, who didn’t realise that for decades he was living his live in a virtual prat-fall.

It took from the early 1980s to around five years ago, but after his six missed World Championships between 1984 and 1994, an estuary of drink and dune-sized quantities of cocaine, Jimmy fell to earth.

Bad landing

When he did, few were surprised at the bad landing. His €6 million in career prize money had vanished. His Irish house in Kilcock was gone. His wife had left him. From Tooting to Thailand, he had played too fast, too hard. The only thing he hadn’t lost was a love of the game and the dream. He held on to his cue. He started again.

“It was never great fun. I’ll tell you why I took cocaine,” he says. “The first few times I took coke was to keep my drinking going. Because, if I had cocaine, I could go on. Say you’d just drunk 10 pints of Guinness, you’d be wobbling about. You have a couple of lines of cocaine and it’s like you’ve just come out the door. It’d bring you around. I never took cocaine sober and I never stopped drinking when I was taking cocaine.

“Soon as I had the drink I wanted the cocaine because a little part of my brain said, well, I’ll keep you drinking. I call it the Devil’s Dandruff because it is f**king evil. It gets hold of people so quick. F**king evil and, for me, not good fun at all. I mean sometimes it was . . . because instead of falling about I’d be dancing because I was paranoid. But I never looked forward to it. You become devious when you are a drug addict. You are lying to yourself, which actually is a most confusing thing.”

His life until now seemed like a series of badly ending sketches. In his book, Second Wind, he tells a story of driving home drunk with Higgins in the front seat after an epic binge in England. He crashes the car into a wall. He glances to the side and there is no Alex. He turns "into the pissing rain where the windscreen should be".

Higgins jumps to his feet doing a jig. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” he says. “I’ve got nine lives, babes, nine lives.” The crash leaves Higgins believing that he’s indestructible, Jimmy the impression of a steering wheel on his chest.

“Ronnie Wood stopped taking cocaine a long time ago and Higgins never took cocaine,” he says. “Higgins just smoked the weed. Even my own people who drank a lot . . . even they didn’t know what I was doing.

“The drug dealer would come in and he would walk past me and not talk to me. I’d be waiting for the [tic] tac and he’d walk past and go to the toilet. I’d go into the toilet and do the deal. Very sleazy. It’s f**king disgusting. It’s disgusting what you do. There’s no shame to it.”

Life is a list of tournaments and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Jimmy White has become James Warren White. And James Warren is e-cigarettes, sweetener in his coffee and the tournament shuttle bus back to the hotel; Jimmy used to be the 10-seat Mercedes for a trip to Wimbledon.

Destructive momentum

You could miss the cheery, self-destructive momentum of Jimmy and his life down the rabbit hole. But James Warren is a happier cue man.

More busy now than in the 1980s, he is ranked 62 in the world in a professional circuit where you have to be 64 to get a start. Today is Dublin. Tomorrow Portugal, the next day Wigan in England for a qualifier to play in Germany. He hasn’t qualified for the World Championships since 2006.

James Warren, though, is a realist. He sees the talent coming through and crowding him out, especially in China. It's where the World Championship will go in five years as the sport calls time on The Crucible. While he continually stokes the embers, he knows James Warren will never flare as brightly as the Whirlwind did 30 years ago. A first World Championship win will never happen.

He hit 25 centuries in the 1991-92 season. He won the British Open twice, the Irish Masters twice, the UK Championships once, the Thai Masters, Pot Black, the Canadian Open, 24 tournaments and 30 titles. But six will always be his number.

“I was an under-achiever, big time. But I never harmed anybody except myself,” he says. “I’m big odds against winning the World Championship. But I still believe. I still believe.”

No regrets? He sits back and he knows that among the many things in his career, there are regrets. But without them, it may have been a live less lived. No stoned tennis in Ronnie’s Kingston pad with McEnroe. No insane crusades with Higgins. Maybe no MBE for the South London boy. No regrets? He pauses.

“I have to apologise to my family and my friends for getting involved with this terrible drug,” he says.

He continues: “My biggest regret is that I didn’t listen to anybody. Say I was playing a tournament in 10 days time. It would take four days to get normal again, think straight. You’re still ratty with people.

Go back out and party “Snooker definitely saved me because when a tournament came up, I’d stop taking the drugs because we got drug tested. The thing I didn’t want to do is get banned. I know that sounds hypocritical, but it put the brakes on. Then I’d get beaten and go back out and party. No preparation and not going to bed . . . I regret.”

Jimmy pulls a Cheshire cat smile. James Warren gets up and leaves for another appointment.