Rocket still has capacity to create sparks

SIDELINE CUT:Ronnie O'Sullivan is the never ending struggle and, depending on our prism, the weary battle we all have to face, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON

AWAY FROM the horse track, a week of Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs and Ronnie O’Sullivan has in different ways been beguiling. Rooney’s a raging bull in ballet shoes but plays the oafish dunderhead, who cannot help himself. Acting the wrong way or saying the wrong thing stalks him.

Giggs is the drifting talent in the Manchester United team, who has defied the years of forgotten glories and physical decline. At 37-years-old he’s a fresh breeze with an intense, frozen stare around the turf at Old Trafford. How does he do it?

O’Sullivan, however, is the one who draws our gaze as much when he is sitting as when he is playing and although he doesn’t know it, has held custody of my heart since 1996.

It was then, back in the Crucible among the over-lit dressingrooms and their large mirrors with rows of miniature light bulbs, where the warren of dull narrow corridors lead to dead-ends and fire doors or closets with mops and brooms.

In the bowels of the dingy theatre there are exits and re-routed passages here and there. Some of them open and you can inadvertently find yourself hovering over the shoulders of players with a curious 980 people staring back, the light from behind shafting into the dimmed auditorium.

It was there among the patch work of press cuttings flapping on the corridor walls – Sunday Sport: “I snookered her mum and then potted her daughter”; the Sun: “Rocket man Ronnie takes off”; the Mirror “I hate snooker, Ronnie” – the patched-up paint jobs, and the cramped spaces that the usual darlings had vacated for two weeks while the snooker lads moved in, that the Rocket hung out between frames and games.

O’Sullivan sat quietly in the press room, his dickey bow peeled open, pulling hard on a cigarette. He would talk to anyone, the press, officials, the impossibly good-natured Embassy girls or the cleaning lady. Always agreeably guarded, he seemed content to be on the periphery while drawing the entire attention of the room.

That year, one’s infatuation with the Rocket faltered somewhat but it didn’t die after he assaulted snooker official Mike Ganley. It was unreasonable, violent and disgraceful, although his abject apology, you felt, was as truthful as the assault was brutal. To some it was unforgivable but to the organisers forgivable enough to fine him £20,000 but not throw him out of the tournament.

To his admirers, one glimmer of mitigation was that he was at least being truthful to his anti-establishment impulse as the assault was sparked by the official asking O’Sullivan’s guest to leave as they had not met the exacting dress code.

Each year, from those early days, you could tell Ronnie’s moods by his hair or how sultry he appeared during intervals and matches. His eyes could droop to a melancholic distraction, sometimes insolence.

The year after assaulting Ganley in a frenzied few minutes of perfection he made a 147 break faster than was believed humanly possible. Then in the 2006 UK Championship, he forfeited a 17-frame match against Stephen Hendry when he was just 4-1 down. He faced the Scot, said “had enough of it mate” and left. Another £20,000 fine.

That same season in the World Championships O’Sullivan played with his left hand against Alain Robidoux. The Canadian accused him of disrespect and O’Sullivan’s response was that he played better with his left than Robidoux did with his right, a mere statement of fact. Summoned to a disciplinary hearing he was asked to prove his ambidexterity and racked up three frames against former world championship finalist Rex Williams. He won all three. The charge was dropped.

At the China Open Ronnie invited a member of the press to perform a lewd act on him. In another match he sat with a towel draped over his head. In 1998 he was asked to return his prize money after being stripped of the Irish Open title after testing positive for cannabis. All this and the love just grew and grew and grew.

This week the affection was there again and with it the willing, the desire to see him end his current losing streak. Perhaps our reaction was because O’Sullivan is like us all, while more self-contained characters like Rooney or Giggs are not. Their lot is that they are contentedly rich footballers, distant and untouchable.

Maybe it’s because O’Sullivan is constant live theatre, a series of acts that contradict, shock, frighten, degrade, impoverish, delight, enrapture, entertain and highlight our own flaws and inadequacies. O’Sullivan is the never ending struggle and depending on our prism the weary battle we all have to face. That he has doubts so much greater than his immeasurable talent, questions impossible for him to answer and chemical changes that control him makes him not wilfully weird but conspicuously authentic.

In the firmament of the “flawed genius” there are few that conform to original as the one-time drug addict and clinically-depressed Chigwell boy. His magnetism is as much that lack of counterfeit, his faithful portrayal of damaged goods as the jaw-dropping five minute 20 second 147 against Mick Price in 1997 or his three World Championships.

George Best swam in the same pool and eventually drowned. Becoming the slowest suicide in modern sporting life afforded the fans of Belfast’s chosen one the cold comfort of his undeniable honesty. There was little wavering about his chosen way out. Alex Higgins had it too but an impoverished life at the end lulled him towards self-pity and ultimately a lonely and sad exit and perhaps less admirers than he should have had.

Diego Maradona doesn’t seem to have the capacity for the nuclear option. His ill-hidden narcissism and showmanship seems adequate enough to prevent him from destroying the thing he loves most. The path chosen for the gentle Paul McGrath is a continuing and disturbing narrative, and Paul Gascoigne’s is similarly lurching between relative health and despair.

On holidays three years ago in the south of Spain an oil rig worker based in Gibraltar said in conversation that he lived not far from Gascoigne in Newcastle. He told a story of being out one night at home with friends in a local pub where they spotted the former England player at the bar.

A few minutes later that same confused Geordie arrived over to ask if they would mind if he joined their company. Even half drunk the rigger detected a desperate poverty and loneliness about the greatest footballer of his generation. Gascoigne merrily played the jester for the rest of the evening.

Enigma is always a draw. Unpredictability fills halls. Against himself on Wednesday night O’Sullivan overruled a referee’s decision in his World Championship quarter-final match against John Higgins and because of it the Scot took the first frame of the final session before winning the match.

Afterwards he said that he was a “work in progress” and that “it wasn’t the playing that was hard but the in between bits”.

No disillusion or threats to walk away, though. For a player who sometimes sees the world so obliquely that is stunning progress. The love lives.