Amazing O'Sullivan is the last of snooker's colourful characters

Published on Sunday 4 May 2008 21:40

SPORT is a broad church that encompasses many creeds that some might find trivial or ephemeral. The commitment and skill of the truly great sportsperson can elevate their pursuits by sheer force of charisma and performance.

Consider the easy charm and peerless competitive brilliance of Chris Hoy, who has made track cycling so compelling. Remember Paula Radcliffe in her pomp five years ago, turning the remorseless plod of a marathon into a breathtaking spectacle. Most of all though, devote your bank holiday to the otherworldly cue skills of the greatest snooker player ever to chalk a tip: Ronnie O'Sullivan.

It may be a signifier of our decadent post-socialism 21st century existence that the May holiday is now a time to listen to the hushed raptures of snooker commentary, but it isn't too far fetched to think of O'Sullivan as a people's champion. Any success he achieves is a victory over his own family background, his restless nature, his love-hate relationship with his sport, his dangerous obsessions, his self-destructive streak. With opponents like that, Ali Carter is the least of his worries.

O'Sullivan transcends his sport, is a far bigger personality than a snooker scene that has shrunk alarmingly. Snooker's cast list was once sufficiently colourful to provide four verses of a Chas 'n' Dave singalong. Now its luminaries are mostly a forgettable, un-loopy, crew of accomplished but unspectacular players, untroubled by personal demons, addictions, or even the habitual adipose or cue-thin physiques that characterised the best players of the Ray Reardon/Alex Higgins/Bill Werbeniuk era. They all live in suburbs with nice wives and chubby babies, like bit-part characters from a Kinks song. The only challenge to their inexorable annexation of the sport's fragments of interest comes from Chinese players sadly imbued with the reticence and discipline encouraged by the Chinese state.

In this land of the bland, even the dull-eyed Stephen Hendry can seem like a king. Hendry's career has a long tail, and at 39 he is still a credible force in the sport, while never threatening to recapture his old dominance. During the glory years Hendry was the Kenny Dalglish of snooker, capable of breathtaking shots, but almost deliberately bland or evasive in interviews.

His play could be mesmeric in its flawlessness though. Which is why it was so astonishing to see the way O'Sullivan destroyed him in that whitewash session of the semi-final. Steve Davis, not a man prone to hyperbole, unless he is talking about obscure jazz-funk albums from the 1970s, described O'Sullivan's display against Hendry as "the greatest genius I have seen in any sport".

Hendry admitted he had never been so completely outplayed in his career. His chosen adjective to describe O'Sullivan's performance was "awesome", a word somewhat debased by teenage coinage, but Hendry meant it in its true sense: you could only gape at the feats O'Sullivan was producing at the table.

O'Sullivan's talent should make him world champion for as long as he wants it. The second clause of that sentence is the giveaway though. Hendry points out that he and Steve Davis lived and breathed the sport when they were accumulating their strings of titles. Neither of them had anything like a life outside of snooker. O'Sullivan might not want to be back at the Crucible year after year. He has mentioned a desire to pursue his love of running to see how good he could be. A year or so ago, he was wondering about American pool. His restless mind sees the limitations of snooker, perhaps because he is the first player ever proficient enough to exhaust its challenges.

Making O'Sullivan a 1-6 favourite to secure his third world title tonight seems generous if you go on ability alone, perhaps a little less so if you put temperament into the equation. O'Sullivan is capable of conceding a frame because he cannot be bothered to scrap for a few points in an unseemly and unaesthetic fashion. He is capable of imagining that the Sheffield air is inauspicious, of inventing a fictitious flaw in his cue-tip, of wishing he was out on the moors running rather than shackled into a waistcoat stalking the green baize.

Given that O'Sullivan's genius may be strictly limited edition, the armchair viewer must hope that Carter puts his fellow Essex boy under some pressure tonight, forcing O'Sullivan to play his best snooker. If only because O'Sullivan's best snooker can make the sport seem briefly beautiful, a geometric art-form, and hypnotic entertainment.