The Crucible has lost its dramatic impact

Snooker: Word that Ken Doherty had advanced to the semi-finals of the World Snooker Championship brought about hasty plans to dispatch an Irish Times man to report from the front, as it were.

Given that the king of all billiards tournaments lasts as long as Lent, newspapers tend to hedge their bets about assigning someone for the early rounds, preferring to wait until someone popular and local makes a bit of a splash. So Ken's initially masterful and then gulping, too-close-for-comfort quarter-final win over John Higgins was enough to put plans in motion to parachute a lone operator into the heart of Sheffield.

War correspondents understandably pick up all the bravery awards in this business, but I have always thought there was a certain degree of valour involved in sallying forth to Sheffield. We don't go in for ceremony in this office, but this is a sports trip that should be marked with a little protocol.

"Calculator?" "Check." "Chas 'n' Dave back-catalogue?" "Check." "Protective shield for Alex Higgins interview?" "Check." "Colours order?" "Spot the yellow and screw back for the yellow, green, brown, blue, pink and black. Sir."

What always fascinated this quarter, however, was not so much the being in Sheffield as the getting there. Surely it involves not the booking of a standard flight but the borrowing of the DeLorean car used in Back to the Future. For it is hard to believe that the Crucible, indeed the very game of snooker still exists in the disposable world of contemporary sport.

Back to the Future was the blockbuster of choice when snooker briefly ruled the globe (well, Britain, Ireland, pockets of the Far East and a small town in Canada). Back then, it was as if a bunch of characters from a Tom Waits song (and Steve Davis) met up once a year for a marathon boozing session and a spot of snooker. The frilly formality and reverential hush for which the Crucible is famed just made the whole racket seem even more decadent. When Alex was in his pomp and Terry Griffiths was at his most corpuscular and Kirk Stevens was parading around like, well, like a young Canadian kid with serious readies and a weakness for the New Romantic movement, when Cliff Thorburn stalked titles with his face of stone and when you could hardly see the table for the tobacco smoke filtering through the place, it was easy to understand the appeal of snooker. They really ought to have had Kenneth Tynan in to referee.

There must have been afternoons like yesterday and today when every television set in this country was featuring the green table followed by a harrowing close-up of Alex or the young Jimmy White, who looked more pale and street in his regulation duds than Sid Vicious ever did in his leathers and chains. You didn't really care about who won; it was more about them getting out of the place alive, about not succumbing to that imminent breakdown. Those were not sporting occasions; they were morality plays.

Academics must have carried out studies comparing the surge in popularity of indoor, slow-burning epics of working class theatre like darts and snooker and the simultaneous dip in the national economies. Thatcher was at her strongest when snooker was at its height, everybody, even the rich, was smashed broke.

Dennis Taylor's 1985 black ball shot was snooker's equivalent to the shot heard around the world. Who didn't stay up late that night to watch Dennis roll in that fateful, stubborn black and gleefully see Steve Davis's pious features cloud and then stand up to shout, in horror, "Christ, Dennis, what's with the finger-waving?"

At that point in history, provincial Irish snooker clubs were a phenomenon. They were a relatively inexpensive night out, and for the many of us who were appalling at the sport a single frame could last for hours, or even be declared an unfinished draw, like a one-day cricket international. Every town had lads who were reckoned to be good enough to turn pro. And it was not uncommon to see young fellas in jeans heading up the town towards the snooker hall carrying slender and impressive leather cases. You just don't see that any more. (Mind you, I grew up near the Border and the Troubles were bad when snooker was big, so . . . ) You could argue that Dennis's immortally cheesy finger-wagging episode stripped snooker of its inherent glorious seediness. It got its PG Cert right there.

But Ken Doherty belongs to the game's twilight spirit. He became known to most of us when Eamon Dunphy used to write illuminating essays about his early struggles in the game. And Ken had that great, bloodless face that hinted at a past and made him look a bit like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock.

The great thing about Ken is that he lives in Ranelagh. That is no big deal in itself - the census proves that everybody has lived in Ranelagh for at least one night of their lives. But he is the only world champion in any sport beside whom you can queue up in the local shop and who is happy to engage people in conversation and who doesn't care whether they know who he is.

He is not as scintillating to watch as the ruined gods that sucked him into the sport, but his nerves and vulnerability are compelling in their own way. Yesterday afternoon, he wasn't going so well, and on the radio news of his form was relegated to second in the bulletin, behind the qualifying results in the latest grand prix. That was sinful, but it was also a sign of how far snooker has fallen, how it has lost its edge.

Fight fans are fond of calling this the Dark Age of boxing; the opposite is true in snooker. It is bright and clean, it has lost its addictive toxins. That is as it must be; nobody is suggesting that the current stable should take to firing back spirits and smoking themselves into nervous wrecks just to heighten the entertainment value. But it is funny that the era of Higgins and White inspired a generation not made in their own liking but one that values caution and discipline just as much as their predecessors valued recklessness and all-or-nothing odds.

Ken seems among that middle-generation of snooker practitioners caught between the carousing pioneers of 20 and 30 years ago and the current climate where the youngsters hustle with all the emotion of a corporate banker. Take Ken and Ronnie O'Sullivan and one or two others from the cast of characters and the Crucible will seem a very bland place. It will seem, in fact, to belong perfectly to our time.