SNOOKER/Irish Masters: It's true. Ronnie O'Sullivan's father is in jail. Yes, his mother has also seen the inside of a prison, he has rarely seen his daughter, and is recovering from depression. And yes, he is the greatest snooker player on the planet. Before next weekend's Irish Masters, the world champion talks candidly to Johnny Watterson about his battles offthe table

Everything you have heard about Ronnie O'Sullivan is true.

"Tea?" asks the world champion. Lifting the china pot, he fills two cups, drags on a cigarette and nods to the waitress. "Yeh luv, fanks."

Everything you have heard about "The Rocket", he has probably told you himself. His teenage years?

"I was 19 when they put me mum away," he says.

His father?

"It would be great if I had dad out wif me now. I'm dealing wif it. I wasn't before. He's alive and I'm seeing 'im and he's there."

His sister?

"I wanted everyfing to be alright when me mum was put away. Danielle, she was just 12, very young. I tried to sort everyfing out wif dad inside too, and I realised I just couldn't do it. After four weeks I give ma sister to ma mum's friend."

His depression?

"There was a time when I didn't think there was a way out. It's only been over the last 18 months that I've been getting glimpses, getting some clarity in me life, in me mind."

His genius?

"I might wake up and have a crazy day and start potting balls off the lampshades."

More tea?

At 26, O'Sullivan has lived a number of lives. The current one is the best he's had for 10 years. It is the one that has finally rewarded his ability with the cue, one that made him world champion for the first time last year, one that has partially opened the blinds after years of clinical depression.

The money has always been there. But the money somehow always had order. It only went one way. Up. Bigger. More. All the time. The money looked after itself as O'Sullivan's portfolio grew to the 20 properties he now owns. But O'Sullivan couldn't look after himself.

Brooding, unusually candid and bent on making chaos from order, his effortless mix of surgical choreography on the table and bull-charge at life off it has occasionally beaten him, but it has always hot- wired his appeal.

Two months ago, O'Sullivan found himself walking through the gates of Wandsworth Prison to play an exhibition match. Trips behind bars for him were nothing new. He's been going for over 10 years since his father, Ronnie senior, who was running a successful chain of pornography shops, was involved in a stabbing outside a London nightclub. The knife wasn't his. Drink was involved and the other man died.

O'Sullivan junior had, the previous year, become the youngest player to compile a maximum 147 break during the English Amateur Championship and, at 16, was about to turn professional. Back then, O'Sullivan and his father travelled the country as a double act: one driving, the other collecting prize money. Peas in a pod.

But in 1992, the judge said his father should serve a minimum of 18 years. His family life zeroed. His career curve arched skywards.

His mother took over the running of the porn shops and "The Rocket" played the baize. Chaotically, brilliantly. That summer he won 32 consecutive matches.

In 1993, the UK Championship title made him the youngest winner of a ranking event at 17 years and 11 months. The WPBSA handed him the Young Player of the Year trophy and, not for the first time, he adorned the cover of Snooker Scene.

In 1994, the trophy mountain grew, then a year later, when he was 19, his mother was imprisoned for 12 months for fraud. The aspiring world champion and his 12-year-old sister were left parentless.

"I didn't want me mum and dad coming out and finding they'd lost their business. I tried to be a responsible adult but I was a bit too wayward. It was too much for me to handle, 'cos I was trying to concentrate on me snooker.

"When I went into Wandsworth for the exhibition it was terrifying. I've been in so many prisons and everything, visiting me dad and obviously me mum too. You go into a waiting room, see them and get shifted out.

"This time, I went through with the Gov' and all the doors closed. It was different. I'm glad I went in 'cos it makes me feel even more proud of how he's handlin' it. He's still together. He knows what happened was wrong and he's admitted it, that there was a victim involved. Goin' in that prison was horrible."

It is an issue he has at least once had to contemplate in a career that up to recently has been punctuated with "misbehaviour an' that". Peerless when it was just him and the balls, occasionally the circuitry was muddled. Sometimes "The Rocket" went out of orbit.

At the 1996 world championships, it was press officer Mike Ganley who took the brunt of O'Sullivan's meltdown. Ganley had asked the player to request his friend and driver, Derek Hill, known as Del Boy, to leave the press-room for a breech of the dress code. For a shocking moment, O'Sullivan the son became the father as he punched Ganley in the testicles and bit his lip. He was fined £20,000, beating the record set by Alex Higgins of £12,000. Ganley did not press criminal charges.

"I know I'm far from perfect. I've tried to moderate myself over the last year and a half. The reason things have got better is because I decided to speak to people. It's been a long time coming. I still struggle, but it's worth it. It's worth it. The best thing was when I knew I wasn't on my own," he says.

O'Sullivan didn't just speak to people. Over the last 18 months, he has spoken to experts. He walked the celebrity walk through the gates of the infamous Priory Clinic. But there was no swaggering self pity. The experts told him he lacked "seratonin" and that on a scale of one to 10, where 10 was normal, he was two. He now takes Serazac, a drug similar to Prozac. Last year he told a newspaper in the UK that he doesn't like Prozac because people say he's "a madman".

"I'd friends around me. They'd seen me at 17 and quite content, then spiral down and down. I felt optimistic for the first time after seeing the doctors. The best thing though was I knew I wasn't on me own. I used to think I was completely abnormal. I was scared of meeting people. I used to hear people say they were scared of their own shadow. I said to myself, that sounds like me. I had no confidence and I thought that anything I'd say, people weren't interested. I just had dead low self-worth.You think you've been dealt a bad hand and in a way you start feeling sorry for yourself, 'why me, why me?'

"I said to the doctor, I still don't feel right. I said I do everything I'm supposed to, but I still get these anxiety attacks, this panic. I don't even feel I can get off the settee. I'd sleep for hours in the afternoon.

"Then this woman got hold of me and said: 'You are worth something away from snooker.' My personality had been on the floor, and that's why I was so frustrated. I was like this robot where snooker dictated everything. Now, I have to check in with meself sometimes."

"The Rocket" is no Stephen Hendry. There is little chance he could ever wear Hendry's metronomic consistency. But the impulse of genius is more striking in the Essex boy than the Scot, and when it arrives it fills the stage like a lightning storm. Hendry takes on the opposition, O'Sullivan takes on everything else.

In 1997, sandwiched between the £20,000 fine and testing positive for cannabis in the 1998 Irish Masters, O'Sullivan compiled the fastest maximum break in history. His 147 took five minutes 20 seconds, a minute-and-a-half faster than the next quickest player in history - himself.

It was almost two minutes faster than James Wattana's 1992 record, which stood at seven minutes nine seconds, and almost twice as fast as John Higgins' maximum in Goff's two years ago (which took the Scot 10 minutes, 26 seconds). The only credible comparison to O'Sullivan's redefining feat was Bob Beamon leaping out of the long jump pit in 1968.

"Sometimes I've watched it and said: 'Whoa, that's really quick'. I didn't stop to have a sip of water when I should'ave done. My way of thinking was to forget about the 147, just clear the colours as quick as possible, 'cos the more you think about it, the more obstacles are going to come in your way.

"I don't think the 5.20 is going to be beat. I've had five maximums now and I haven't come close to beating 5.20. But my matches take a different pattern. Before, if the balls weren't there, crash, bang, wallop. I wouldn't win a frame. Now I'd win two and lose three. I wouldn't lose five.

Citywest Hotel, Dublin. Ronnie arrives four hours late, dressed head to toe in black. The errant maestro grinning from ear to ear. Scots-Irish blood, his father's side. Engaging. Candid. "My experience has taught me to deal with it, deal with whatever."

A waitress arrives with a triplicate docket book and asks for seven autographs, or 21 including the carbon copies.

He has a savvy, streetwise intelligence but his life remains scattered, if under control. But the present always seems to outstrip the past and maybe there are still as many hurdles to jump as have been cleared already.

It will be three to four years before they consider unlocking his father's cell door, while his sister appeared before Redbridge magistrates last year charged with dealing crack cocaine and possessing a firearm. The charges were dropped. O'Sullivan, too, was arrested and charged with drunk driving but was not convicted when he successful argued that the medication he was taking prevented him from providing a urine sample.

He has a daughter, Taylor-Ann, who he didn't see until she was four, having split with her mother before he knew she was pregnant.

"Maybe I don't have the relationship I'd like to have with her. But that's something I know will come in time," he says.

If such a thing as career symmetry exists then O'Sullivan is due some tempered years. It looked good last spring when he won the World Championships - "a massive weight off". But he still inhabits places most of us have never been. Last year at the World Championships in Sheffield, he lifted his phone and rang the Samaritans. Some of it is hard to explain.

"Some days are bad days, sometimes everything goes."

To be the most talented snooker player on the planet and current world champion seems sufficient grounds for optimism, but in adulthood he is book-ended by a father he has never really known and a daughter he has rarely seen. The baggage is as high as his property portfolios.

"I look at people who are content and I ask, why are they so content, and I think it's an inside job," he says. "Even if I win the world championship again this year, if I'm not in the right frame of mind I won't be happy."

He reaches across the table for a small bowl. His tight-knit anthracite eyebrows rise and join, his East London accent falling to a whisper.

"Suggah?"