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‘Three minutes hard, three minutes recovery. Two and a half minutes hard, two minutes recovery. Then 90 seconds four times off a minute recovery. Then six at a minute off a 30-second recovery. Last 600m I pushed it; right ankle felt sore.’
Snooker was really in the doldrums when Barry Hearn took over in 2010. At first I didn’t have a clue what he was doing with my sport. I thought he was having a laugh, but over time it’s all begun to make sense.
Barry was at the heart of snooker during its glory days in the 1980s when he formed Matchroom with Steve Davis and Tony Meo. But in the 2000s snooker started to go down the pan. It lost its main sponsor, Embassy, and TV ratings fell (not surprisingly because there was so much competition in the shape of new TV stations). It was getting to a stage where even the best players couldn’t make much of a living from the game, while the good, solid pros didn’t stand a chance. Then, in July 2010, Barry, who was chairman of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, decided enough was enough and that he was going to sort snooker out once and for all. After a vote in June 2010, he took a controlling interest in the organisation’s commercial arm, World Snooker Ltd, and so began the Barry Hearn snooker revolution.
Barry and I go way back. I first met him when I was a 12-year-old lad standing on a box to play my snooker. He was already a snooker legend then – the former accountant who ran the snooker club in Romford and managed so many of the world’s best snooker players, including Steve Davis. He phoned up one day out of the blue.
‘It’s for you,’ Dad said. ‘It’s Barry Hearn.’
I thought he was winding me up. I got on the phone, and, sure enough, it was Barry. He wished me good luck for the Amateur Championship on Saturday, then said there was one other thing.
‘I want to manage you,’ he said.
Bloody hell! Barry Hearn, manage me! At 12 years old! Amazing. Dad had decided he’d taken me as far as he could, and now it was time to let the professionals take over. Barry and I have been close ever since. We’ve had our fallings-out, but he’s family really.
I know I drive him crazy at times, but I also know he cares about me. Last year Sports Life Stories made a documentary about me, and he was one of the main people they interviewed. ‘I’ve managed Ronnie O’Sullivan twice,’ he said. ‘Some of the greatest days of my life have been with Ronnie O’Sullivan. Ronnie O’Sullivan has also driven me round the bend; driven me nuts. There are times when I could hug him and there are times when I could kick him. I prefer the hugging.’ I prefer the hugging, too!
As well as being a great businessman, Barry understands me. ‘Sometimes he doesn’t have that confidence,’ he said. ‘Sometimes he needs an arm round him, sometimes he probably needs a clip round the ear. His biggest strength is what God gave him; he’s a natural player. He’s born to play. His biggest weakness is Ronnie O’Sullivan himself.’ I watched that interview and thought, this geeza could be a shrink.
Actually, Barry was lovely about me in the documentary – as well as perceptive. ‘He is a player who has fallen in and out of love with the game, the authorities. Sometimes he thinks he’s got the world on his shoulders, and yet he can be the nicest person that you’ll ever meet. He’s an enigma, and geniuses are enigmas.’
If I’d been a single fella or in a happy relationship, and the family was all sweet, I would have said from the off that it was the most fantastic thing Barry had done for snooker. I’d say happy days. More tournaments, more playing opportunities, more time away from home. Fantastic. But being in my position, it was actually the worst thing that could have happened for me. I would have wished it had gone back to eight tournaments a year, as it had been before Barry took over, because I could have played them and then I would have been at home a lot more, wouldn’t have had to do all the travelling, and I would have been able to fit in my time seeing the kids without the lawyers using my schedule against me in the custody battle. But when Barry went from eight to 27 tournaments within six months that screwed me.
It was an incredible change, and in many ways one that was needed. Snooker had been going through a terrible time. People always talk about how snooker lost its popularity, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. What happened is that it never prepared itself for when tobacco companies were banned from sponsoring events in 2005.
World Snooker was an association run by ex-professional players and many of them didn’t have the necessary entrepreneurial skills. I think that if Bernie Ecclestone had been in charge of snooker, the moment he knew tobacco sponsorship was going he would have done something about it. Everybody was given five years to prepare for it, and World Snooker should have started securing new sponsors from that time on. But they didn’t. They were arrogant. Their attitude was, once tobacco goes everybody will be wanting to sponsor snooker, so we’ll deal with that when the time comes. And what happened is that all the other sports prepared and moved on, they got backing from telecommunications or banks or whatever, but snooker had no sponsor.
I’d won the Embassy World Title in 2004, and that was the last year of tobacco sponsorship. And World Snooker never had anything in place. They didn’t put it out to tender early enough, and were left with no bargaining power. All they were left with was unsponsored tournaments. It was catastrophic for snooker. If Barry, never mind Bernie Ecclestone, had been in charge at that point he would never have let it get to such a state. There wasn’t enough money to put into the events, and so they couldn’t even put them on. They were left with their BBC events, a couple of Sky, a couple in China, one in Ireland and that was it. Pathetic. A true humiliation for snooker. It was basic maths.
Stephen Hendry’s manager, Ian Doyle, who ran 110 Sport, was trying to set up a rival tour and get the players to come over to his side. If that had happened World Snooker would have collapsed. Not surprisingly, World Snooker got bottly and offered the top eight players big pay incentives to stay with them. They said, right, we’re in trouble and our way out of it is to promote the sport. So the people running World Snooker went, how do we keep our top players? Because if we keep them we’ll keep the BBC on side, but if we lose them the BBC will lose interest. So World Snooker panicked and started offering the top players big salaries to promote the game. It was a salary to play, but we also had to do things like magazine shoots to promote the game. I felt that money was basically for my vote, but it was all a shot in the dark; just a desperate attempt to stop 110 getting hold of the game. World Snooker succeeded, but it wasn’t good for snooker. You needed people to come in and look at the game like a business.
But did the game ever lose its popularity? I’m not so sure. After all that time when Steve Davis played Dennis Taylor in the final, and they got 18.5 million viewers on the BBC, there were only four channels on the telly. Once Sky came in and shook everything up, it was inevitable that snooker would never be able to enjoy such a huge share of the viewing figures. The world was changing, and snooker wasn’t going to be the exception to the rule. Where snooker failed was that it never thought ahead – actually, it didn’t even think in the present. Who knows? If it had got its thinking cap on, and Barry Hearn had been involved all along, it might be as popular as golf is now. Even though snooker’s adored in the Far East, it was never exploited – in the best sense. The people running the game had tunnel vision. They were, like, well, we’ve got our four BBC events, a few invitations, a couple in Thailand, we’ve got nothing to worry about. But once tobacco sponsorship ended, there was nothing to fall back on.
Even though it suited me when there were hardly any events on, for most players it was a nightmare. They’d be practising for a month or six weeks between events, with no cash coming in. If your form went there was a lot of pressure on you to do well in the next event. Whereas the attitude now is, I’m playing in 30-odd events, I’m bound to do well in three of them.
The journeymen players, those who were on the circuit but would never win events, did actually find a way of coping. But that was more a reflection of how uneconomical snooker had become as a sport than anything else. With fewer tournaments they cut down on their expenses because, for example, you didn’t have to be paying for hotels all the time. In a way it was more economical to play the professional game when there were fewer events because so many players actually lost money by turning up for events – hotels, petrol, eating, you name it, it all adds up.
Now, with so many events, some would argue that it’s harder for the journeymen to make ends meet because, unless you’re winning, the money is not much better and the expenses are still the same – the Hilton’s still £100 a night, it still costs £100 to fill your tank up to get up to Preston (I know not everybody’s going to stay in the Hilton or eat up as much fuel as me!). So if they’re away for, say, 28 tournaments a year, they might be paying almost five times as much in expenses as they were doing pre-Barry Hearn. A lot of players are finding it tougher now because before they could get a bit of part-time work in a club. But the bottom line is the sport itself is in a much healthier state.
And the longer Barry’s been in charge the more he’s ironed out the problems. He saw the ranking system wasn’t fair, so he changed it. We went from six to around 20 ranking events, and although the winner might only win £10,000 in lots of them, the events carried important points. What it basically meant was that winning four tiny PTC events was the equivalent of winning the World Championship, so a lesser player could easily find himself heading up the world rankings. Now the points reflect the prize money, so say you got £10,000 for a PTC event and £250,000 for winning the World Championship, you’d have to win 25 PTC events to get the same points for winning the World Championship.
That seems fairer to me because only the very best players are going to win the World – and you ask any player what they’d prefer, 25 PTCs or one world title, and I guarantee every single one will go for the latter. What the system meant as it stood was that all the top players had to enter the small PTC events just to nick a few points and avoid dropping down the rankings, so you were effectively blackmailed into playing in them.
We ended up with players ranked number one who’d never won a senior ranking event. It was like when tennis player Caroline Wozniacki was world number one, even though she’d never won a major and found it difficult to get past the quarter-finals. So when Barry started you could never really say there was a genuine number one, but what he did do was generate more playing opportunities which benefited the players who only had their snooker to worry about. For me, though, it turned into a headache. I was caught between playing for important points in these unimportant events or seeing my children.
I actually enjoyed these smaller events when I played in them. They were good for sharpening your game up, and it was nice to get away from home and play a bit of snooker and see where your game was at. In 2012, I played in most of the PTC events and I noticed a difference in my game. When you’re playing so many matches you don’t have time to worry about whether you’re cueing right; you just have to switch straight on. So you become much more in tune with your game. If you were struggling you just had to find a way of getting through it; playing your way out of it.
It hardened you up. It was like I was back at Blackpool all those years ago when I was 16 and was playing, and winning, match after match. One match would turn into another and it became like going to have a knock down your local club whereas before, when there were only six or eight events, every one had to count. Now it was like you win one, you lose one.
In many of these PTC events there’d only be a handful of people allowed to watch each match. It really was like Black-pool! The games were held in cubicles, and the most you could have were four seats one end and four seats the other end, a referee and two seats for the players, and that was it. No TV, no nothing.
I loved it. I once had nine people watching me – that was a proper crowd. Lots of people complained about travelling for these events, but once I got there I loved it. Just like being a kid again. Cubicles? They didn’t bother me. I just loved to play snooker, and it was such a throwback.
I had my running trainers in my car boot, I’d get dressed in my suit in the car park, jeans off, dinner suit on, go and play for my half-dozen spectators, then off for a run when I was done. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard. There were times when I felt like shit, and thought, what am I doing here? But on the whole I loved it. I won three out of nine of the PTC events in 2012. They ain’t easy either. You’ve got to win seven matches over three days to win each one. Three matches on a Friday or Saturday then four matches on a Sunday, if you got through. And you pretty much knew if you’d played on the Saturday you wouldn’t be winning on the Sunday because it took so much out of you. The best draw was Friday match, Saturday off, then Sunday you’d be fresh again to play.
It was great preparation for Sheffield because it got me used to stop-start, stop-start, the rhythm of playing, and so it became easier preparing for a big tournament. You were permanently match fit.
What Barry did was clever. He saturated the market by putting on so many tournaments. Then, once you’d filled the calendar up if you had someone come up and say, I want to put a snooker event on, he’d go: ‘There isn’t much room, when d’you want it?’ and they’d say: ‘Well, I’d like it there’, and he’d go: ‘Well, we’d have to get rid of that tournament to put your tournament in so it will cost you money.’ Basic supply and demand. Good business. You create the demand, and that’s what Barry did. So when, say, the Chinese came along and said, we’d like another tournament Barry would be in a position to say, it’s going to cost you. And it’s worked. Now we’ve got five tournaments in China, one in Australia, three majors over here, one in Ireland. So in the few years he’s been back in snooker, he’s definitely been going in the right direction.
Although we exchanged words about his new regime – and, as he says, I’ve driven him mad plenty of times – I’ve always basically got on with Barry. Even our disagreement over the new contract was a misunderstanding. If I’d sat down with him just after the World Championship in 2012 I’d probably have been playing through 2012–13. The way I understood the contract was different from how Barry later explained it to me. The way I read it I thought, well, if you’re going to get a ban for missing four tournaments I’m bound to fall short and that isn’t going to be good for me. But I hadn’t understood that was four tournaments a year; I thought it was rolling on and on.
But Barry told me the slate was clean every year. That had been the main sticking point for me. There was also the point about restricting your trade; you had to sign a contract that said you weren’t allowed to play in any other televised event without clearance from World Snooker. In a way it is a restriction of trade, but the bottom line is that Barry’s not going to stop you playing in an event unless it clashes with his event. And he’s right in a way to put that clause in because he’s trying to build a tour and he doesn’t want me going off with, say, Stephen Hendry and putting on a rival tournament when his is on. What he did say is, come and talk to me about it, and when there’s a gap in the calendar of course you can go and play Stephen Hendry in a one-off match, or whatever you want to do.
Barry has taken the maxi prize away. That’s a bit of a bummer. There used to be £167,000 at Sheffield for the maximum – £147,000 plus 20 grand for the biggest break. He got rid of that because he said they were too easy to get. I said, you’re having a laugh, there’s only me and Hendry who have made them with any regularity, so it ain’t that easy. I’ve had 11, Stephen’s had 11 and John Higgins has had seven. I’ve had three at the World Championship, Stephen’s had two. The first maxi at the World Championship was made by Cliff Thorburn in 1983. Nobody could believe that such a level of perfection was possible when it happened. Mind you, it took Cliff about a week to make his!
All in all, Barry’s done brilliantly for snooker. If I was coming into the sport now I’d be buzzing. If I was 18 or 19, I’d think I’ve got another 15 to 20 years in which to earn good money. And the cash is coming back into the game. Next year the winner of the World Championship gets £300,000, the winner of the UK gets £150,000. Sure, we’re not talking Premier League football figures, but we never were.
Although it was terrible for the sport when we were down to eight tournaments a year, it did give me plenty of time to focus on the running. In a way it was a perfect mix – eight events a year (six ranking events and two invitation events – the Masters and the Premier League), and I had my sponsorship, and my running, so I was happily occupied.
I was running in cross-country races every weekend and they became more important to me than the snooker. Obviously it was great to get to semi-finals and finals, but there was a downside – I’d have to miss the races. Unconsciously I was thinking, well it’s not that bad if I get beaten at this stage, I’ve got a few points on the board, I ain’t disgraced myself, and I’m going to be back home for the cross-country Saturday morning. Running was taking me over.
It had become an addiction, but it was my best addiction yet by far. It’s a continual high – one of those you can just repeat and repeat. I’m not talking about jogging, I’m talking about running. Jogging is hard, but running is easy. Running is as easy as brushing your teeth. When you watch runners doing 10 kilometres in 27 minutes that isn’t hard; it’s harder for the fella doing it in 54 minutes because he’s using every muscle. When you’re jogging it’s a slog; you’re using your shoulders, your hips, you’re struggling to get your knees in front. When you’re running, everything just flows. You get in such a rhythm, it’s like a dance. Your body’s not moving, your head’s not moving, your shoulders aren’t rolling. Your hips are coming through, your feet are off the ground a lot longer. You go past a set of lamp-posts and you’re thinking, I’m covering this ground really fast. You’re just listening to your breath, your heart and your footsteps, and maybe a few birds twittering away. It’s beautiful.
I never listen to music while I run because I want to hear myself and the world as I run.
These days it feels more of a struggle. I’m running, but not like I was five or six years ago. If I go out for a run now and do three and a half miles it’s an effort because I’m still trying to go at the pace I used to go at but I can’t sustain it, so I have to stop two or three times. But I always think I’d rather stop two or three times and be running than jog and never stop. I feel like I’m wasting my time when I jog. But for me to get that feeling of running at a nice pace I have to put in the work. You have to get out and do your eight- or nine-mile run on a Sunday; you need to be doing 35 to 40 miles a week. Hopefully, by the time you read this I’ll have put in the hours and I’ll be flying again.