Sport

Ronnie O’Sullivan’s inner battles make him so compelling to watch

Relationship between profession and his state of mind is frequently quite complex

Ronnie O’Sullivan claimed his sixth world title at the Crucible on Sunday. Photo: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Jonathan Liew
Tue Aug 18 2020 - 09:18

Perhaps it was fitting that it should end on a miscue. Maybe this is just the imagination playing trick shots but for a snooker player widely acclaimed as the greatest of all time, Ronnie O’Sullivan does seem to miscue quite a lot? Certainly more than you’d expect from your average preternatural, life-affirming, once-in-a-generation talent.

There was one against Mark Williams at the 2016 Masters that cost him the frame. One against Ali Carter at the Crucible in 2018 that cost him the match. In fact, there are compilations on YouTube: the horrible scrape of the cue, the ball skewing through the air, the horrified gasps of shock from the crowd.

And so it was again, against Kyren Wilson on Sunday night: a poor one-sided final about to be crowned with a glorious century break, if only O’Sullivan could pot a tricky last black. “Clunk.” An audience groan. For O’Sullivan, simply a scowl of grim, placid acceptance. As if this had been coming all along. As if he knew it would end like this. “If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, and hug it in mine arms! Now, to collect my sixth world championship and a cheque for £500,000.”

Maybe you found this quite a dissonant ending. To me, it was perfect. It was pure Ronnie: beauty tarnished by ugliness, ugliness uplifted by triumph, triumph pursued by fatalism and inevitable talk of retirement. This is why the frequent comparisons with Lionel Messi or Roger Federer, with Picasso or Mozart, have never quite seemed to capture the essence of him. Or why, if he is indeed such an unimpeachable talent, it has taken him seven years to regain the world title.

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It’s not just about the beauty, or the perfection. It’s not just those irresistible passages of play when he makes the game look so easy he may as well have downloaded it. It’s also the darkness and the doubt, the wandering thoughts, the duelling contradictions, the quiet madness bubbling beneath the surface, the sheer fragility of what you’re seeing. Or, put more simply: you can’t truly appreciate an O’Sullivan break without simultaneously confronting the possibility that at any moment, and for no reason at all, he might miss.

Often you will find these contradictions rather glibly expressed as O’Sullivan’s “demons”, a term that only really serves to underline the inadequacy of sport’s mental health vocabulary. As O’Sullivan explains so well in his book Running, the relationship between his profession and his state of mind is frequently far less operatic and far more complex.

Sometimes it manifests itself in an overactive imagination, other times in a lapse of concentration. Sometimes it leads him into addiction, other times into ennui, other times – as when he disdainfully tried to smash his way out of a snooker against Mark Selby in the semi-final – into a sort of wilful self-sabotage.

“Am I prepared to give blood, sweat and tears?” he said in an interview before the tournament. “No. Would everybody else like to see me give blood, sweat and tears? Probably yes.”

For us as onlookers, there is a faintly problematic ring to all this. After all, the greatest part of sport is the part you don’t understand, and O’Sullivan’s thrilling inconsistency and caprice are part of what makes him so compelling to watch. But to what extent is it legitimate to enjoy the spectacle of someone teetering on the precipice? To what extent does O’Sullivan owe us his talent? To what extent is he required to keep practising for hours in dimly lit rooms for our entertainment?

There isn’t a right or a wrong answer to this, by the way: it’s simply an acknowledgement that with certain athletes – Nick Kyrgios and Tyson Fury also spring to mind – what is in their best interests and what is in ours are not always in perfect alignment.

This is a problem for snooker too, which has long been bracing itself for the day when O’Sullivan finally takes his leave. In a way, snooker has been a victim of its own inexorable rise in standards. A sport in which any of the top 16 can now punish the slightest safety error is one that will inevitably tend to reward the steady percentage players: your Selbys, your Wilsons, your Anthony McGills. Even Judd Trump has to become a wiser, less interesting player to reach the game’s summit.

The truth is that in order to thrive as a flawed maverick in the modern game, you need to be at least as talented as O'Sullivan. And as O'Sullivan so tartly pointed out earlier in the tournament, there are few signs that anyone else currently comes close.

In the meantime, we still have Ronnie. And for all the usual wild extrapolations – now for Hendry’s record! Sports Personality of the Year! a knighthood! – perhaps the least we owe a man who has provided us with so much pleasure over the years is to accept him on his own terms. He is 44 now, and by all accounts as happy as he’s ever been, with a diverse range of interests and a healthier outlook on life.

“Everything in moderation” is one of his mottos, from food to exercise to rest to snooker and in that simple phrase lies the secret of his unlikely contentment. Perhaps on reflection, O’Sullivan’s greatest triumph was to conquer the ledger of his own happiness. Perhaps the toughest opponent he ever had to crack was himself. – Guardian