2
‘Monday, five miles, 47 minutes. Did not enjoy my run, calves felt tight, lost my love for it at the moment, it feels like an effort.’
Life has a knack of kicking you up the arse when things are going well just to remind you who’s boss. It was 2008: I’d just won the UK and World Championships, I’d made three 147s that season, my running was going brilliantly, I had a beautiful baby and a two-year-old toddler. I was on top of the world. In theory. Unfortunately, my relationship with Jo was collapsing.
The role of dad has always been important to me – I knew what it was to have a good dad who would do everything for you, and I knew what it was like to lose one for the best part of 20 years. I’d always thought I would be a dad, but didn’t really know what to expect.
I was only 20 when I became a father, but unfortunately I’ve never really been part of Taylor’s life, so I had never properly experienced what it meant to be a dad. And then, when Lily was born, it suddenly hit me. Boom! It’s hard to put into words what it’s like. When friends of mine are having their first baby, I tell them this is going to be the best feeling you’ll ever have. That’s what it was for me. It just gave a bit more meaning to life. Everything seemed to have more point.
I was there for the birth. Jo had an emergency Caesarean because the cord wrapped round Lily’s neck, and they said, we’re going to have to do a quick Caesarean and get her out. It wasn’t planned, but it worked out well because it was short and sweet. I got a phone call, rushed down there, didn’t know what to expect. It was 2–3 a.m. You get to the hospital and it’s all quick, quick, quick. You’re panicking, but for the nurses it’s just an everyday thing. Then, within 10 to 15 minutes, it was done. The baby came out, it’s a girl. Wow! Pure elation.
I was 28 and life suddenly made more sense. Until then I had just been playing tournament to tournament and one year rolled into the next; then Lily arrives and a sense of responsibility comes with it. It was a bit of pressure, I suppose, because I had to provide for this little baby. I’d provided for Taylor for eight years, but because I didn’t have an active role in her growing up it didn’t feel like it. You stop thinking so much about yourself as a self-contained unit and more about yourself as a father – making sure the baby eats and sleeps and has a good home.
When you’re just looking after yourself you kind of know you can get through to the other end, and in the end it will be alright. The feeling I had now was almost primitive – I was the hunter-gatherer, the provider. Family has always been important to me, and we have always been a close unit, even when both Mum and Dad were banged up in jail. Mum, Dad, me and my younger sister, Danielle – the O’Sullivans. We’d always supported each other throughout, and this is what I hoped for with my new family. We were close in every way. Last year I bought a house in Loughton, a couple of miles away from the rest of the family in Chigwell, and I couldn’t cope. I thought, what have I done? It was like another world to me, and I seemed to spend all the time driving from Loughton to Chigwell so I knew it wasn’t right for me. Mum, my snooker table at Mum’s, Dad, Danielle, my running routes, my local haunts, like the bagel bar, are all around Chigwell. Sometimes you don’t realise how rooted you are in your community; it took me moving a few miles down the road to realise it!
So when Lily was born it was important to be around Chig-well. For the first few months Jo and I were getting on fine. We’d started going out in 2001 and had been together for around five years. Jo and I met at Narcotics Anonymous, where we were both being treated for addiction. We had a bond from the start, and in the early days we got on great. We’d always had our little tiffs, like everyone does, but soon after Lily was born things started to become difficult. Before, I’d always had my own routine. Ask any sportsman or sportswoman and they’ll tell you the same. Without routine you’re lost; you’re not going to achieve anything. I would go for my runs, work out in the gym, play my snooker. But when Jo was pregnant there was more pressure on my time. She wanted me to go to all the meetings about childbirth and getting ready to have a baby, but I wasn’t into all that. Perhaps I could have been more supportive, but I saw that as her role. I was there for her to tell me about it when I came home, but I couldn’t break up my day for hospital appointments and meetings about birthing pools or how to pack your bag for the maternity ward.
I didn’t feel it was something I had to contribute to until the baby came along, and I always felt we’d know what to do when it happened. I’ve never been one for preparing for things; I’ve always been much more, let it happen and see how it goes. I think men are just constructed differently from women biologically. There is something in women that makes them want to prepare for babies, and they feel it much earlier than men do – ’course they do, they’re carrying the baby. Whereas for fellas, we’re not really involved and don’t understand what our contribution is supposed to be till the baby arrives.
I’m not saying I’m right, but this is the life of most successful sportsmen. We need our routine; we need to be focused; we are selfish; we do have to put ourselves first. Jo wanted more of my time, but I didn’t know how to change and wasn’t sure if I could change.
Sportsmen also tend to be superstitious, and I thought any slight change to what I was doing would detract from where I wanted to go. Also, practice is bloody important. As Matthew Syed says in his great book Bounce, it’s not natural-born genius that tends to distinguish high-achievers from less successful sports people, it’s practice – he reckons that you’re never going to get anywhere in a sport unless you’ve put in 10,000 hours’ practice, and he’s got a point. Then, when you’ve put in your 10,000 hours you can’t just stop. You’ve got to keep practising, reinforcing your good habits. So the idea that you could give all your practice a miss, then just turn up for tournaments, was always going to be a nonsense to me.
It might seem old-fashioned, but the way my life is it was always going to be my partner’s main role to bring up the kids. I don’t mean that in a sexist way. I’d be happy to do it if I wasn’t playing. And I am happy to do it when I’m away from the game. But the reality of life for any sportsman is that you’re on the road loads of the time, travelling from hotel to hotel, earning your crust. Obviously, I’d be there once I finished my practice and come home and bath them and feed them, do whatever, but it never quite worked out that way.
I spoke to other snooker players who had become dads to see how they felt, and how they worked out their fatherhood responsibilities. So I chatted to Stephen Hendry and Jo Perry – I chose them because Stephen’s the best the game has known, and Jo hadn’t achieved as much but had still dedicated his life to sport. In terms of application, there was probably no difference between the two, but one was seven-time world champion and the other was a good player who hadn’t won the same kind of silverware. I wanted two different perspectives. Jo Perry told me: ‘I get up in the morning, go to do my snooker, go to the gym, and when I come back from the gym my missus says, do you want to help feed, put the baby down, and it’s all great.’ Stephen Hendry said: ‘My life didn’t change at all, my missus knew what I was like, I was down the snooker club five hours a day, I’d be in the gym in the morning for an hour, my missus was happy for me to do anything I had to. If anything she was, get the fuck out of the house because you’re getting in my way.’
For any sportsman a successful relationship is always tricky to negotiate, particularly where kids are involved. Talk to any golfer or tennis player, anyone who spends most of the year on the road. Yes, they might well want to be home most of the time, and share all the domestic responsibilities, but that’s not ever going to be the reality while they take their sport seriously. It’s impossible. The simple truth is that for those years you’re playing sport at the highest level, you can’t maintain a true balance between family and job, and something has to give. In the relationships that work, wives and girlfriends accept that they are going to be left to shoulder the burden of bringing up kids unless they hand over to childminders. It ain’t ideal, but life’s not ideal. Of course, lots of women don’t want that deal – they want their own career, their fella at home most evenings, shared responsibilities. My advice to them? Don’t get involved with a sportsman – and certainly don’t have their kids. (One of the few exceptions is football where it is much easier to be around a lot of the time because you’re only playing once or twice a week for 90 minutes, and after training you have so much spare time – but even then you’re going to have loads of time when you’re simply not around for your partner.)
Again, I want to stress I was never going to be the easiest person to live with. But that was obvious from day one. I’ve always been obsessive about practising. There’s nothing unusual about that – Steve Davis once said he overpractised when he was at his peak, but if he didn’t he felt guilty. If you didn’t practise you felt guilty, and if you felt guilty you didn’t play well. Daft, I know, but that’s how it works. It’s difficult enough to make any relationship work, but so much more so when you are on the road for so much of your life. I couldn’t blame Jo for getting frustrated, but nor could I change my lifestyle unless I gave up snooker.
At the time, running was a huge help. It would clear my head. I was running well then, and keeping records of my progress. I was flying back then. And the running was holding me together. I learnt how to manage family, conflict and snooker as best as I could. I decided the best thing to do was move out of home three days before a tournament started, so by the time I got to the tournament I was clear-headed for the first round.
I was running away. I knew that was the only way to manage my career, and that I had to keep playing snooker. I wanted to be there as much as I could with the children and as a family man, but in my mind the most important thing was that I went to work and did as well as I could just to support my family.
My relationship with Jo broke down and I began to feel useless as a dad. There came a time when even running couldn’t sort out my mind. I felt defeated. I wanted to be at home with my family, I wanted to be able to go to work; I was in a fortunate position and I should have been enjoying all those things, but it just wasn’t happening.
Ever since I was a kid it had been instilled in me that you have to give your everything to your job, and my job was snooker. So the idea that I could only enjoy the family side of life if I gave up on the professional side was always going to be something I struggled with.
I was putting off the inevitable, which was that we would split up. I just thought if I stuck around, saw through the bad times, things would turn around. With Taylor I felt I’d done the wrong thing. I wished I’d been part of her life, and there was guilt there. I didn’t want to break a family up. I always remember when I was younger and Mum and Dad would have an argument and he’d go away for four or five days and then he’d pick me up on Saturday to go to football. I’d always be crying, knowing that I wasn’t going to see him for a week or so. I didn’t want to put my family through that, too. In my heart I just wanted to be there and not separate the family.
Anytime I wasn’t playing snooker I wanted to do something with Lily. Sometimes I’d take her over to the cross-country races. I’d wrap her up, keep her nice and warm, put her in the pram and off we’d go. I expected that would be how it panned out – when I was playing Jo would look after the kids; when I wasn’t I assumed I’d come in and take over. Even though in lots of ways the life of a sportsman is uncompromising and inflexible, in other ways there are huge pluses. If you’re working a regular nine to five you’re not going to be able to call for the kids from school, but in my job there was plenty of opportunity for stuff like that.
The first two months after Lily was born were great. We were both ecstatic about having a baby, but it wasn’t long before it went sour again and we were living separate lives. Then Jo told me she was pregnant again, and I was delighted. I thought another kid would help us and I’d always wanted two anyway.
Eighteen months after Lily was born little Ronnie came along. His was a natural birth, and it seemed to go on for ever and ever. He was born at Harlow hospital. When I was there for Lily’s birth, the feeling was unbelievable; ecstatic, shared, beautiful. I’d not been there for the birth of Taylor, so this was the first time I’d seen it. By the time little Ronnie was born, I was more prepared for it; I’d been through the emotions, so it didn’t have quite the same impact. But it was great to have two kids. I’d always felt that when Lily was born we have to have another – it was only fair for her to have a brother or sister. I didn’t want her to be an only child.
When Lily was born she was so aware; she looked as if she knew everything that was going on. Little Ronnie was quieter, a bit more away with the fairies. They were very different children, and still are. Ronnie is much more laid back, Lily is more talkative and outgoing. Yet Lily is shyer than Ronnie when she first meets people. He just stays the same whoever he’s with. Little Ronnie is probably more like me.
It was such a buzz taking the babies to see Dad for the first time. He was at Long Lartin when Lily was born. Dad was excited for me – and for himself. Then, when Jo was pregnant for the second time, I told Dad she was expecting a boy.
‘You’ve got to call him Ronnie,’ he said.
‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ I said.
The name was pretty much decided. Three generations of Ronnie: Ronnie Senior, Ronnie Junior and little Ronnie. Mum has a brilliant way of distinguishing the three Ronnies. You can always tell who she’s talking to. ‘Ro-nnnnnie’, gentle and loving and going up at the end – that would be for little Ronnie. ‘Ronnnnie’, still fairly gentle and loving but more grown up – that would be for me. And then the bark: ‘Ron!’ That’s for my dad.
We went to see this marriage guidance counsellor called Jerry, who suggested that I was too close to my mum, and it might help our relationship if there was more distance between us. It crossed my mind that things might improve if we moved away from Chigwell, where I’d always lived, and where Mum, Dad and Danielle all lived within a mile of me.
We were having the house done up in Manor Road in Chig-well, and Jo said, let’s move out. So I said, great, go and look for somewhere for us to live, and she came back and said, I’ve found a place in Ongar, which is 15 to 20 miles away in the sticks. I didn’t fancy it, to be honest, but I thought, let’s give it a go. It was probably the worst thing we could have done. It alienated us both – she was stuck out there, I’d travel back to Chigwell to play my snooker and then, when I got back home, there was nowhere to go.
I ended up getting on well with Jerry, the counsellor. He was into this Indian guru called Osho and always went on about the path to inner peace, and I said: ‘You know what? I get that every time I go to play snooker. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I get lost in what I’m doing, and it’s a fantastic feeling.’ Jerry was trying to attain this spiritual enlightenment through the Osho buzz, and I explained to him that snooker wasn’t just a game or a job to me, it was more than that. I told him that was all I’d done since the age of seven, that I was a perfectionist and I wanted to be the best player I could possibly be. And we had a fair bit of common ground.
I think Jerry was fascinated by how passionate I was about my sport. He was almost a guru in his own right. I enjoyed my sessions with him. He wasn’t there just for the money – sometimes he didn’t even charge me. I went to see him five or six times, and I enjoyed my one-to-ones with him because I knew he wasn’t spinning me bullshit.
I’ve tried a number of religions and gurus in my time, including Buddhism, but ultimately they didn’t do as much for my peace of mind as snooker. There were moments when these faiths or spiritual paths held me together, but it was always only ever briefly. I discovered ways of switching from a bad place to a good place, and gaining peace, but they were only temporary solutions. Every time I tried something new, my gut instinct told me I was running out of ideas; that I was desperate.
After the kids were born I was thinking of giving up the game so that I could be a better family man. In the end, though, I decided I was too young to, and that it would destroy me; that however much pain it caused me, not playing it would cause me more. I accepted that I wasn’t easy to live with. Sometimes I go into myself and shut down. I come home and don’t talk, and I would imagine that must be hard for most women. Often I feel my mind is not here, present; it’s on other things – ridiculous stuff like why can’t I pot a ball, why am I struggling with this shot – and I shut out everything else. Everything else becomes unimportant, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I don’t think I’m a nasty person. I get angry with myself, I get frustrated with myself and with the game. Even now, as I’m working on the book, part of me is replaying shots, asking why my arm isn’t connected to my body, and fidgeting about. I wish I could forget about it, just get on with what I’m doing, but I can’t. That’s me. And I reckon that’s probably the most difficult thing for people around me to handle – my inability to switch off.
But in other ways you could do worse than me as a partner. I was happy to settle down and be a dad. I wasn’t out trying to get other girls – I was too interested in my snooker and my running to do that, so I was faithful. But in the end Jo and I ran out of patience and options. We were simply incompatible. It was desperately sad that we couldn’t make it work, but for me it’s much sadder when you see couples stay together when it’s obvious that they no longer have a relationship. And I believe that can be awful for the kids, too – the last thing you want as a parent is for your children to see you rowing all the time.
In the end I moved out after we’d had a big row. I got my bags and lived out of the boot of a car for about a month – sleeping on people’s settees. I had my mate in Ongar, Chrisy Flight, and I’d go round to his house at night, and he had all these old snooker books that I hadn’t read. One night I picked up this Joe Davis book; he was never beaten at the old-style World Championship and won it a record 15 times between 1927 and 1946 and scored the first ever maximum. I’d never read anything about him – to be honest, I’d never even read a coaching book. And I thought, blimey this is good.
It took me back to basics because I’ve often struggled with my game, and I thought I’d see what he had to say, and my game improved. Joe stressed the importance of being still on the shot, get my cue nice and parallel because I was always jacking up at the back, get my bridge hand a bit lower, get my cue going nice and straight along my chest, get my feet nice and solid, get my body bolted down, and basically I was away. The game came easy again. I ended up hitting the ball really well, I couldn’t miss – that season 2007–8 I won the UK and World Championships. It was one of my best years and it was all because I was reading the Joe Davis book. I was as fit as a fiddle, too, running an unbelievable amount – I weighed 11½ and was doing 10 kilometres in 34 minutes. I was too skinny really, but I felt great.
I’d come about 25th in the Essex cross-country championship, and that’s when I decided I was prepared to give everything up if I could just get into the Essex running team. As I’ve said, you had to get into the top six to make the team and I thought I could do it. I looked at the fellas ahead of me and thought, they’re fit and fast, but with my obsession and dedication if I put my mind to it I could achieve it. In hindsight, there was no way I was going to do it because I would have had to give up so much family-wise for the running, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.
Having said that, apart from the kids running was then the most important thing in my life. I was putting off snooker tournaments if there was a race I could have competed in instead. The running gave me an outlet that made me feel good. I enjoyed the social side of the running, looked forward to the cross-countries at the weekend, I loved it all.
And perhaps, most importantly, it was helping my head. The first five or ten minutes are hard, but once you’ve got a sweat on it’s impossible not to feel better than you did beforehand. Running really is pure serotonin. I hate to think what state I’d be in if I’d not found running. I might be four or five stone overweight because I do like my food, and I am prone to laziness. Running gave me a sense of professionalism and purpose. It made me want to get out of bed in the morning; it made me want to take care of my appearance; it made me have a bit of respect for myself and that all helped my snooker.
At the time I could easily have gone the other way. In fact, there were times when I did. I went through a period when, once a week, I did have a little release. Well, not so little, actually. I’d go out on the booze with my mates and not get in till seven or eight in the morning. It was always a Thursday; we’d play backgammon, have a few drinks, have a few joints. I’d get home for early morning, go to bed till early afternoon, then go out for a six- or seven-mile run when I woke up. I’d feel like shit when I got back and just sit on the settee, but by Friday I felt okay, so I’d do another seven- to eight-mile run, then, come Saturday afternoon, I was flying. The benders lasted about six months – drink, drugs, and backgammon. We’d start about 9 or 10 p.m. and just go on through the night. Vodka was my drink. It’s the one drink I know I don’t feel bad on. Beer gasses me up and bloats me out. Vodka is just smooth.
I’d fall asleep on the fella’s settee, wake up then get a cab home; or sometimes I’d just run home. I was that fit. I’d have my big leather boots on, my top, big cardigan, and jeans. One day I was stuck in a jam in a cab, and I had to be home for Lily’s birthday. So I told the cabby I was going to get out and run because it was quicker, and he said, but it’s three miles, and I said, look I can do three miles in 16 minutes, and I’ll get there quicker than in the cab. So with all my clobber on I just ran home, which turned out to be a pretty good way of coming off my bender. I was so fit that three miles was nothing.
I eventually gave up on the Thursday nights. I knew I was an addict, and I couldn’t keep on doing it. So I said to myself, get to the other end and once you’ve stopped keep away from those people and places, and get your head down. I learnt that about myself when I went in the Priory. I knew that however much I wanted to continue caning it, I couldn’t. It was the one road I couldn’t go down. It was difficult because I needed escapism at the time, I needed some fun in my life. But after six months I just said that’s it; end of.
Even though I had been smashing it once a week I had my best year on the snooker table, so how does that add up? Joe Davis’s advice was stronger than the drink, the drugs and the backgammon. It got me through. Running and Joe Davis will conquer any drug! (Well, any drug in moderation.) Everybody was saying to me, when you stop drinking and taking drugs your life gets better and it does in some ways, but that brilliant year professionally was when I was having my weekly benders and my private life was in bits.