Has any sport ever produced playboys, mavericks and charlatans at the same rate as snooker?
Don’t let the waistcoats and polished shoes fool you, the pristine world of the baize is in complete contrast to the depravity explored by some of the legends who made their living with cue in hand.
Sex, drugs and potting balls were the order of the day when the nation was snooker-mad during the boom of the 70s and 80s.
These days, betting scandals aside, the game has cleaned up its act and lacks the showmanship of the golden age, Ronnie O’Sullivan aside.
From the lothario Tony Knowles, who called himself ‘the hottest pot in snooker’ and larked about with Page 3 models, to the absurd drinking of big Canadian Bill Werbeniuk, some of the tales are extraordinary.
And with the World Championship starting on Saturday at The Crucible, there’s no better time to look back on some of snooker’s wildest characters.
Snooker has had its fair share of wild characters including Alex Higgins (top) and Oliver Reed
Alex Higgins is pictured with a drink and cigarette in his hotel room after playing in 1981
As the World Championships return, Mail Sport takes a look at snooker’s biggest personalities
The legendary playboy – Tony Knowles
Stephen Hendry, arguably snooker’s greatest player, recalled playing Knowles in a tournament when he was just 14.
He said: ‘I remember I played him in an exhibition in Scotland and I can remember all the women going mad! All the women were like, “oh look at him, he’s gorgeous”.’
And Knowles is perhaps snooker’s most famous Casanova, once pictured on the front of The Sun newspaper with a topless Page 3 model sprawled across the table, one hand on her midriff and the other behind her head, looking seductively into the camera.
He called himself ‘the hottest pot’ in snooker and was labelled ‘The Ladies Man of Bolton’, selling tales of his sexual escapades to the tabloid, even cashing in to the tune of £25,000 for one interview.
The playboy once hit the town after one session of a match with Steve Davis, went on a bender in the nightclub and returned to win the match the next morning.
That £25,000 expose saw Knowles get into hot water with the snooker authorities and they fined him £5,000 for bringing the game into disrepute.
There was one particular kiss-and-tell story where it was claimed he liked to wear women’s underwear but it was all the attention that Knowles puts down to his career taking a nosedive after 1984.
He previously told the Metro: ‘I came back in ’85 but I was still surrounded by a lot of bloody publicity and everything.
Tony Knowles famously cavorted with a Page 3 girl on a snooker table in his heyday
Snooker’s poster boy poses for a photo in American Football gear back in 1986
‘I wasn’t playing well, nowhere near my best, and I got to the semi-final and lost to Dennis Taylor.
‘1986 I lost in the semi-final not playing me best either, then I started to drift away. I couldn’t recapture my natural game and play the way I was playing way back in ’82 or ’83, it stopped me winning those titles around that time.’
‘The Hurricane’ – Alex Higgins
When anyone speaks about snooker’s wild golden age of stars, debauchery and excess, Higgins is the player who springs to mind.
The Northern Irishman’s first title in 1972 came as he was living on a row of abandoned houses. Each day one was demolished, he’d move into the next along.
He once rocked up to the World Championship with three women he’d hired from a local escort agency.
And wherever Higgins went, controversy followed and the heavy-drinking, chain-smoking maverick twice fought officials at matches, shoving one and head-butting another.
He was once given a five-tournament ban and £12,000 fine for the headbutt after being asked to take a drugs test.
He also pushed a press officer came after he turned up to a press conference to announce his retirement while drunkenly ranting.
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT
Alex Higgins (left) once turned up to play in its most high-profile competition with three female ‘guests’ recruited from a local escort agency
Higgins made headlines in 2010 when he was stabbed by his girlfriend Holly Haies
He was given a one-year ban but it mattered little as he would not play again.
His drinking, womanising and gambling became the stuff of infamy and by the end of his life he’d been arrested 17 times and said he blew career earnings of around £4million.
On one occasion he reduced Dennis Taylor to tears by threatening to have him shot if he ever went back to Northern Ireland
The demons that plagued him during his career continued later in life when he was convicted of assaulting a 14-year-old boy, who he ‘kicked for interrupting a family conversation’.
A year after that in 1997, his girlfriend Holly Haise stabbed him three times and the police persuaded him to go to hospital after losing a significant amount of blood.
He had been staying outside her house in a caravan at the time of the domestic dispute and declined to give evidence against her.
His health deteriorated rapidly in his later years and he died after a battle with throat cancer and various other illnesses aged 61.
Former policeman Dave Moorhouse, who housed the snooker legend at his hotel on more than one occasion, encapsulated the chaos of Higgins’ life in telling the Guardian: ‘Alex suffers from great highs and great lows. He has sung love songs outside my window at 3 o’clock in the morning, woken me up and asked me if I wanted a sleeping tablet.’
‘The Hurricane’ smoked relentlessly and lamented that he had not been adequately warned about the health affects of cigarettes later in life after contracting throat cancer
The Northern Irishman could be charm personified but also had a temper and addiction issues
‘The People’s Champion’ – Jimmy White
One of the central characters from snooker’s golden age, White has been frank about his wild partying.
‘I always liked cocaine – whether drunk or sober. It was no one’s fault but my own,’ he said.
‘I’d just become famous, because we only had four channels in those days and, instead of queuing round the block to get into a West End nightclub, I was getting the treatment. I had such fun, even though I can’t remember much.’
Snooker head honcho Barry Hearn even put a minder on White in a vain attempt to keep him out of trouble and he said he spent his life trying to ‘give him the slip’.
White made a fortune during his heyday but his spending more than matched it. At one point he had a Ferrari with the personalised number plate CUE 130Y.
Jimmy White was named ‘the people’s champion’ by fans and is dating former darts walk-on girl Jade Slusarczy, who is 24 years his junior
He told the Telegraph: ‘All of a sudden girls, beautiful girls, girls who wouldn’t even look at you if you didn’t play snooker, were all over you. Everywhere you went, you’re getting all the treatment. You look back and you realise that it’s all nonsense but I just went with the flow and it was great fun.’
Despite taking various illicit substances, he never failed a drugs test, explaining: ‘I knew all the tricks: cocaine takes 72 hours to get out of your system, it’s like a month for cannabis. I thought I was so clever, told myself no one knew what I was doing.’
White was also a massive gambler and believes he lost £2million to the habit, racking up around £200,000 on cocaine, too, which he called ‘the devil’s dandruff’.
And he told a BBC documentary: ‘The cocaine days were beginning to become in two and three days – it was getting crazy. I tried smoking it and got completely addicted to it.
‘I remember I had £35,000 in a like moody account, no one knew about that, and I just drained that banking account on the crack.’
White is one of snooker’s original hell-raisers and has now kicked his bad habits
White was never far from the headlines even in the latter stages of his career and in 2005 even changed his name to James Brown as part of a sponsorship deal with HP Sauce.
One of the wilder stories involved his dog Splinter being dognapped and held for ransom, which White paid. The dog was safely returned to him and lived for another three years.
These days, he’s living clean and has kicked his gambling and drug habits, only allowing himself to play poker.
And the old charm is clearly still working too, in 2018, he started dating darts walk-on girl Jade Slusarczyk who was 32 at the time and 24 years his junior.
Big-drinking Bill – Bill Werbeniuk
Another Canadian now, with the instantly recognisable Bill Werbeniuk, who was ‘able to get tanked up with 10 pints before a match and still win’.
He famously claimed before the final match of his career: ‘I’ve had 24 pints of extra strong lager and eight double vodkas and I’m still not drunk.’
He would drinking during the matches themselves and even had a drinking contest with Scottish player Eddie Sinclair while they were in Australia.
It was said that between them they drank 85 pints during a mammoth session and Werbeniuk won 43-42.
Bill Werbeniuk would consume six pints of lager before a match then at least one more per frame, even consuming 43 pints during a drinking contest in Australia, which he won
The big Canadian said he had to drink to calm a tremor he had since birth in his arm
His drinking exploits were legendary but took their toll on his health later in life – here he’s pictured with 30 pints, the amount of beer he supposedly had before and during a match
Hendry later said of the infamous occasion: ‘Sinclair was on his back, unconscious. At that point Werbeniuk gives it: “I’m away to the bar for a proper drink”.’
But there was a tragic element to Werbeniuk’s drinking prowess.
He said he had a tremor in his arm and the booze was the only thing that stopped it shaking enough for him to play.
Doctors told him to replace the drink with the drug Inderal but that was on the banned list by the snooker authorities.
He was suspended on multiple occasions before retiring back to Canada where he died aged 56.
‘The Rocket’ – Ronnie O’Sullivan
Snooker’s last remaining renegade? O’Sullivan is cut from a similar cloth to his wild predecessors of the 70s and 80s but is perhaps the most naturally gifted of the lot.
In 1996, when he was 20, he followed in Higgins’ footsteps by assaulting an official and was slapped with a two-year suspended ban in addition to a £20,000 fine and £10,000 to charity.
Almost a decade later in 2008, he was in hot water for making crude and suggestive remarks and gestures while his answers were being translated at a press conference in China.
In footage he was seen pointing to his penis and asking: ‘Do you want to suck that? Do you want to come and suck on that later?’
He went on: ‘F*** me, how many more questions are they going to ask?’ While it was being asked, O’Sullivan appeared to refer to the size and shape of his penis.
O’Sullivan is perhaps the only maverick left in snooker and is chasing an eighth world title
The snooker star has landed himself in hot water with various controversies over the years
O’Sullivan later apologised, saying: ‘I was upset with myself because everything I did was the exact opposite of what my dad had taught me.
‘He would be embarrassed to know how unprofessional my approach was in China.’
On the Stick to Football podcast with Sky Bet he opened up about struggling with depression and addiction, saying: ‘I was going out all the time. Every day and every night constantly for six years. There would be a time when I’d need to get clean as I had a tournament coming up, where I’d lock myself at home as I couldn’t say no.
‘When I was going out, I couldn’t play a round of golf without having a few drinks and a couple of spliffs in my pocket because I didn’t have the confidence to be myself. That is when I thought that I was in trouble.’
There has been plenty of verbal sparring and mischief from O’Sullivan across his career.
He has deliberated left the black on the table in protest at there being no prize money for a 147 break – the holy grail for snooker players.
He asked if anyone had spare shoes for him to wear at the World Championship because his own were uncomfortable (eventually taking the referee’s).
O’Sullivan has blasted referees for ‘being against him’ and barged into Ali Carter during their 2018 showdown, reopening old wounds last year by saying: ‘He needs to sort his f***ing life out. I’m not going to skirt around it anymore, tip-toeing on eggshells around someone like that. He’s a f***ing nightmare.’
The British superstar is said to be the wealthiest player of all time with earnings exceeding £10million and his triumph came out of a difficult start in life.
‘The Rocket’ has been drawn against his old foe Ali Carter in the World Championship
O’Sullivan’s father was sent to prison for murder when his son was 16 after stabbing the driver of notorious gangster Charlie Kray (brother of Ronnie and Reggie), Bruce Bryan, to death in a nightclub.
He served 18 years of the sentence and was released in 2010.
‘The healthiest thing for me to do was probably to stop playing snooker,’ Ronnie said. ‘But I didn’t, I just felt compelled to stick with it.’
O’Sullivan will be competing at the World Championship this weekend yet again and has been drawn to face old nemesis Carter in a tasty first-round clash.
The flamboyant Canadian – Kirk Stevens
From one playboy to another. Stevens was known as perhaps the flashiest dresser in snooker history.
He donned a bright white suit that he became known for his impetuous style. But living life in the fast lane proved to be his undoing.
Jimmy White recalled one particular episode where he invited Stevens to his hotel room at the Irish Open to smoke crack cocaine.
He recalled: ‘There were two of the best snooker players in the world, holed away in an Irish hotel room, smashing up chairs and ripping up a duvet so we could make an indoor fire and smoke some crack.’
Kirk Stevens was one of the most flamboyant players and known for his showmanship
In 1985, the following year, South African opponent Silvino Francisco accused of him being ‘high as a kite’ during their match at the British Open.
Stevens later admitted to blowing £250,000 on cocaine over the course of a six-year period.
The addiction curtailed his impressive career and he went back to Canada for rehabilitation before launching a new career as a car salesman.
The ‘Silver Fish’ – Silvino Francisco
The aforementioned star who accused Stevens of being high during a match went on to endure disgrace of his own.
He lost to Jimmy White in World Championship match and an investigation was launched after a strangely high number of bets were placed on the outcome (10-2).
The game was suspended and Francisco was then banned from the sport for five years for the alleged match fixing.
Nicknamed, The Silver Fish, he actually ended up working in a fish and chip shop in Nottinghamshire while struggling to make ends meet having lost his £350,000 house following divorce after his ranking fell off a cliff.
He was caught trying to smuggle £155,000-worth of cannabis through Dover in 1997 and was sentenced to three years in prison.
