SNOOKER/ World Championship: Johnny Wattersonfinds the former world champion in self-assured mood as he prepares for the journey to regain his crown at the Crucible
A knock on the door. It's Fergal O'Brien. He left three minutes ago but has returned and is fumbling around in his pockets. "Sorry," he says stretching towards Ken Doherty with money in his hand. "I've no change," says Doherty. "Givus it again."
There is a kerfuffle and the brief ceremony takes place across the half-open door. The note is handed over. Doherty smiles and puts away his winnings. "Yeah," says the former world champion, "if it's just €1 or €20, it's all the same, you have to pay up."
It's approaching 4.30pm. The two players had been locked together in whispered silence and yellow bulb-light since mid morning. The curtains pulled to block out the April sun, the last six hours have been spent shuffling around the table, the quiet broken only by the percussion sounds of the cue tip hitting the ball and the clicking of the scattering on the table. Nineteen frames and Doherty won it on the last. A break of 81. Joe Swail has been here practising as well. Joe Delaney too. Others will come and go, giving and taking €20 notes.
On the walls Doherty reveals a little of himself. The room in the basement of the Radisson Hotel in Dublin is Doherty's room, his table, his chairs, his pictures, his place. Pride and a sense of accomplishment defines the setting. It is Doherty among the things he loves and admires.
Photographs of Doherty with George Best. Doherty with Alex Higgins. A framed, signed Roy Keane number 16 Manchester United top, Pele's autographed Brazilian shirt hanging beside it. Doherty with Jason Sherlock. Doherty with Colin Montgomery. Doherty with his wife, Sarah.
Doherty is now 37-years-old. But this is no shrine.
He presses a button and the curtains open. Outside is the slanting light of late afternoon. Normal life floods in. He rubs his eyes. This is World Championship week and the second-highest placed player in the provisional rankings is looking towards the Crucible.
It has been a frustrating season. Four quarter-finals and three last-16 places. He twists his face at the reminder. The year he won the World Championship in 1997, he reached four semi-finals before conquering Sheffield. But with Doherty there is always optimism and grind at work. He was not called "Clingfilm" for nothing. Too positive and full of common sense for festering regrets, his glass is usually half full. Some people say he's too nice. Some people say he should win more. Some people say he has left his best years behind.
"Do I care what people think? No," he says. "Have I won the World Championship? Yes. I don't play the game for other people or really worry about what they think. I play the game because I love it. I've won the greatest championship that I can win.
"Yeah, I'd love to win it another couple of times and I came very, very close to doing that.
"There is always someone who is going to criticise you. They have their opinions and good luck to them. I don't do it for them, I do it for myself. You have to. In a selfish way, you have to. You are probably never going to be happy with what you achieve in your life across the board. (Stephen) Hendry. He's won six, seven World Championships. Maybe he'll be happy, maybe he will but he still plays the game.
"He plays for a reason and he still gets disappointed when he loses. Maybe I could have won a bit more . . . I probably could have . . . I know I could have. I didn't and if I don't, who cares? Who cares? Who else cares except me at the end of the day. It's about how guilty I would feel if I didn't produce what is expected of me. I have to live with that and at the moment I'm living pretty happily."
Doherty has always been able to find the point of equilibrium. When his position in the game began to unravel a few years ago and his ranking slipped outside the critical top-16 places, he reacted with typical vigour and intensity. He did what he's good at doing and worked harder. He changed a few things in preparation, in technique but at the heart of his revival was grunt and discipline.
While he had anxiety attacks about the consequences of falling down the ladder, he came to realise that the concern about holding his place was also contributing to the downfall. At each turn he conducted himself as he has always done. While the mercurial Ronnie O'Sullivan walked out in the middle of matches, tested positive for dope and condemned this year's World Championship draw as a fix, Doherty held on to the fundamentals that have come to define him, his common touch and an underlying gratefulness for what snooker has allowed him to do.
Even so, those very characteristics have been inverted and used to unearth weaknesses. Those qualities that make Doherty likeable and respected have also been used to beat him when the colours have not been falling.
"I don't believe what I read," he says. "It's nice to get attention but I don't get carried away with it. Sometimes I get embarrassed about it. I'm not in it for publicity. I'm in it for the game. It's nice to be asked for an autograph but you know sometimes I get embarrassed about it.
"The thing is to be yourself. So if Ronnie is doing all these things, he's just being himself. That's himself. I'm totally different from O'Sullivan. I wouldn't say I agree with him but I understand he has personality problems. He has mental problems in that he suffers from depression. I don't know what tempts him to say all these things and do all these things and I wouldn't agree with what he does or says.
"I don't know about the dark side of the world he lives in. He's loved for doing these things. He's loved for the way he plays the game. But he's also loved for being a bad boy. He's very vulnerable and he's very fragile, I think. He's great for the game and I love watching him play but I wouldn't like to be him.
"No matter how many World Championships he's won or how much talent he has . . . I wouldn't swap it for the world. If anything I'd be quite scared of being someone like Ronnie O'Sullivan.
"Me? Even if people think 'ah, he's too nice' . . . I'm not going to be a nasty bastard just so as someone else is going to think better of me for it."
In the spring days of his career, when the tobacco industry threw money at the sport, affluence was part and parcel of the game. When Doherty won in 1997, there were 14 decent tournaments to stretch a season. This year he's played seven, with Sheffield the last. When Imperial Tobacco were forced to withdraw because of the tightening of British government legislation regarding sponsorship in sport, there were inadequate replacements.
The World Snooker Association was then forced to finance its own tournaments and while the landscape has improved, the game has not yet recovered from those halcyon days when free smokes and booze were table-served to the players and reporters at the Crucible from 11am to closing time. Now there are more players fighting for less money.
"There was a lot of disharmony, acrimony among the players," says Doherty. "I think a few years ago when Ian Doyle (Scottish businessman and manager) had the potential to take over the game and make it beneficial for all the players a chance was missed. Some players and managers were given a hundred grand to vote for the board and try to persuade the rest of the players to do the same.
"They called it promotional work, you know, a hundred grand each. O'Sullivan got two hundred grand at the time. Even O'Sullivan now admits to making the wrong decision. We could have been playing for £5 million a year instead of two. It was a big mistake.
"It's going to take a few years before we get into a more comfortable position. We need more events, more sponsors, more TV. We could learn a lot from golf. Twenty years ago snooker was bigger than golf. Now it's not even in the shadow of golf. They need business men with good business acumen running the sport. Years ago they had too many old players on the board. The times were good. Embassy was throwing a lot of money into the game and they thought they'd just to sit on the couch. It was too easy."
If the game's health was failing, the Crucible has always been its healthy heart. The BBC television coverage has never faltered and people have always circled around. Like Wimbledon and the Grand National, it is an institution by which people measure out the passing years and feel their age. The year Denis Taylor won it 1985. Steve Davis's first win 1981. Jimmy White's near misses 1984, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994.
Doherty yawns. "I'll be back here for two more hours tonight," he says as he tends to his cue and wipes prints from the side of his table. Northern Ireland's Mark Allen will be his opening opponent. If he wins that match, he could face this week's practice partner Delaney. O'Brien is also in the mix, Swail too.
Despite the fact he could finish the season as the number-one ranked player for the first time in his career, the arid season has caused Doherty some anxiety, much frustration. Too many quarter-final falls. He looks to the Masters when a kick allowed O'Sullivan to beat him 6-5 in the last eight. But he doesn't fear the players.
"They are good players and I'm going to be nervous playing them. But they are going to be nervous playing me," he says. "I am still one of the top players. I have to believe that."
He's been to three finals and won one, so right, there are bragging rights for life.
Hendry is 38, so he is not the oldest in the draw. What keeps him packing his bags is the same impulse that locks him in a room under the Radisson Hotel for eight hours on a spring day with the curtains drawn.
"I like a lot of things but snooker is my first love," he says matter of fact. "I'll keep playing until my eyes . . . until my heart tells me something else."
Ken Doherty . . . on players to keep an eye on
"The Ronnie O'Sullivan match against Ding Junhui is a big game. The guy beat Ronnie first time but Ronnie beat him in the Masters when Ding was ready to walk off. He was crying and Ronnie put his arm around him and said come on we've a frame to play. That was ironic because Ronnie had walked out on the previous tournament. Whoever wins that match will have a great chance.
"Neil Robertson, who has to play Ryan Day, is a good player. But the winners of that first round match will have to play Ding or Ronnie and the winner of that possibly John Higgins, so that will take four players out. Who ever comes through that will probably have a decent chance.
"In the bottom half you will possibly have Stephen Hendry against Peter Ebdon in another quarter-final. I think you have to look at those two in that section. I know Graeme Dott was not one of the fancied players last year and Shaun Murphy the year before and both won. It is a little bit more open, although over the longer sessions and over three weeks the cream will always come to the top."
Round One (best of 19 frames): 1 - Graeme Dott v Ian McCulloch; 2 - Anthony Hamilton v Marco Fu; 3 - Stephen Maguire v Joe Perry; 4 - Mark Williams v Joe Swail; 5 - John Higgins v Michael Holt; 6 - Barry Hawkins v Fergal O'Brien; 7 - Neil Robertson v Ryan Day; 8 - Ronnie O'Sullivan v Ding Junhui; 9 - Ken Doherty v Mark Allen; 10 - Matthew Stevens v Joe Delaney; 11 - Steve Davis v John Parrott; 12 - Shaun Murphy v Judd Trump; 13 - Peter Ebdon v Nigel Bond; 14 - Stephen Lee v Mark Selby; 15 - Allister Carter v Andy Hicks; 16 - Stephen Hendry v David Gilbert.
Round Two (best of 25 frames) - i - Winner of match 1 v Winner of match 2; ii - Winner of match 3 v Winner of match 4; iii - Winner of match 5 v Winner of match 6; iv - Winner of match 7 v Winner of match 8; v - Winner of match 9 v Winner of match 10; vi - Winner of match 11 v Winner of match 12; vii - Winner of match 13 v Winner of match 14; viii - Winner of match 15 v Winner of match 16.
Quarter-finals (best of 25 frames) - QF1 - Winner of match i v Winner of match ii; QF2 - Winner of match iii v Winner of match iv; QF3 - Winner of match v v Winner of match vi; QF4 - Winner of match vii v Winner of match viii.
Semi-finals (best of 33 frames) - SF1 - Winner of QF1 v Winner of QF2; SF2 - Winner of QF3 v Winner of QF4.
Final (best of 35 frames) - Winner of SF1 v Winner of SF2.
World Championship Draw (April 21st-May7th)
