Extraordinary tales from the bad boys of snooker - punch-ups, drug addiction and womanising

Guinness and whisky shots fuelled legendary Irish snooker player explosive matches, but it was Canada’s “Big Bill” Werbeniuk who famously sank 28 pints and 16 whiskies to steady his nerves during a game.

Invented 150 years ago, snooker has always attracted bad boys with a fondness for drink, drugs, dolly birds and the bookies. According to top sports psychologist and coach Nic Barrow, the intense pressures of the game has driven many players to substance abuse. In the 1970s and 1980s, legends of the snooker like Hurricane Higgins and made footballers and hell raiser actors look like rank amateurs when it came to drinking, gambling and womanising.

Canadian Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn, 77 – who once punched Hurricane Higgins to the floor after a slanging match – was the first player to be banned for drugs after traces of cocaine were found in his urine. Kirk Stevens, now 66, admitted seeking help for his addiction. And six-times world champion, Jimmy White, now 66, was a crack addict!

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Booming in the smoky, dimly lit snooker halls of the 1970s, when the major tournaments were televised in colour and Pot Black became massively popular, the game made household names of players, who were often seen falling out of the nightclubs.

The 1985 World Snooker Championship final between Steve Davis and winner Dennis Taylor drew 18.5 million viewers. But, while Davis dominated the game in the 1980s, the people’s champion was Hurricane Higgins.

When Higgins won the world title in 1972 it wasn’t televised and the prize money was less than £500. When he won again 10 years later, it was £25,000, and now it’s £500,000.

Called the drinking man’s sport, the game was invented 150 years ago on April 17, 1875 by British Army lieutenant Neville Chamberlain in Jabalpur, India. The officer threw extra coloured balls into the game of Black Pool, which had 15 red balls and a black, creating snooker - which became a part of UK culture – for officers and squaddies alike.

Today, glasses of water, cups of tea and early nights have replaced the pints of beer and smoking ashtrays at Sheffield’s Crucible, as the World Championships begins this weekend.

But Nic says the type of personality needed to become a world champion hasn’t changed – they’ve just swapped substance abuse for self-care and hypnotherapy.

“It used to be a macho sport and people didn’t speak about their mental health, players now are more likely to seek help and use coping strategies, like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and hypnotherapy,” he explains.

Snooker is a quiet, intelligent game of precision, but Nic says it attracts addictive personalities because they need to be obsessive about the game to practice so hard. “Snooker attracts or creates obsessives. Players rib each other for being obsessive – we know we may be on a spectrum to play one shot thousands of times,” he says.

“Players need to say, ‘I have to be the best at what I do, I’m a little bit obsessive, I am very stubborn’.”

Former professional player, Nic, 54, of The Snooker Gym, coached Ronnie ‘The Rocket’ O’Sullivan for the 2023/24 season and actually suggested Ronnie should see psychologist Professor Steve Peters. “Ronnie’s gone on record saying, ‘I’m an addictive personality’ and he’s addicted to running now,” says Nic.

Ronnie, whose all-night binges saw him down 15 pints of Guinness along with other substances, is now such a reformed character, he’s even brought a recipe book out, Top of Your Game: Eating for Mind and Body.

You can never imagine old school legends like Higgins bringing out a recipe book. “Unless it was for custard, tea and cigarettes,” adds Nic with a chuckle.

Sadly, Higgins died aged 61 after a long battle with throat cancer. But he told Nic that he “used pressure like a jockey would use a horse,” which might in part explain why Higgins lost all his £4m earnings on the races.

Snooker world champs need two types of drive, according to Nic. “One is to win, which is what Stephen Hendry and Steve Davis have,” he says. “Their primary motivation was to win. They didn’t care if they played terrible snooker and won.

“The other is a drive to just practice this stupid game all day long. Alex, Jimmy and Ronnie are more motivated to play the game. I remember Jimmy said once his motivation to win a snooker match is so that he can get to play another snooker match tomorrow. It’s an addiction loop.”

Relentless winning machine Davis was called Mr Boring in the 80s. The 67-year-old was one of the few players then to be sober. Then along came the technically-brilliant babyfaced Scot Hendry, who caused Ronnie to famously walk out on him during a championship quarter-final in 2006.

Ronnie admitted that he “lost seven years of his life to drinking and smoking cannabis”, before he began working with psychologist Peters, who he said helped quieten “the devil inside him” by making him less impulsive.

But that compulsion is what drives players to greater heights – and also highs – in their game. Jimmy White has spoken openly about how, after his Masters win in 1984, his cocaine habit ended up costing him £10,000 a month and he went bankrupt after blowing £3million.

Jimmy was also a great drinking pal of Higgins and was pallbearer at the troubled legend’s funeral in Belfast in 2001. Scrapper Higgins not only got into fights with officials, and threatened to have fellow Irish player Dennis Taylor shot, his own girlfriend stabbed him three times during an argument.

Perhaps if those stars of yesteryear had the sort of support and help from the industry that’s available now, they wouldn’t have pressed the self-destruct button.

“In terms of cultural shift over the decades it is much more acceptable to say, ‘I’m weak, I’m scared, I don’t think I can do it, and I’m taking meds or I’m taking hypnotherapy to help me get through this’, than in the 80s and the 90s when people didn’t want to admit human frailty,” says Nic.

“There’s a strength in admitting and a lot of these psychological stress points can diminish in relation to our willingness to admit what we’re feeling. Mental health is more socially acceptable now – it’s not embarrassing to say I’m in AA or Overeaters Anonymous or whatever for addiction – whether it’s drink, drugs, sex.”

While bad boy snooker players hit headlines in the 1980s, one player Tony Knowles even sold his story to the papers in 1984, and posed with topless models. Now 69 and still playing in the seniors, Tony, was slapped with a hefty fine for bringing snooker into disrepute.

The game has also been tainted with players getting into financial difficulties and trying to solve the problem with match fixing. The late South African Silvino Francisco found himself not only banned for match rigging but he did three years in jail for smuggling cannabis! More recently, Aussie Quinten Hann, 47, was banned for eight years in 2006 for throwing frames.

But Stephen Lee was banned for 12 years, after being found guilty by a tribunal of influencing the outcome of seven matches. The ban only ended last year.

Despite hypnotherapy and other forms of self-help combatting the addictive foibles of past stars, not everyone has escaped the excesses once common within the game.

Welsh snooker ace Matt Stevens, 47, was done for drink driving just weeks after going bankrupt and splitting from his wife. Northern Irishman Mark Allen, 39, has given up his “shots and vodka” diet and turned his life around since his divorce and bankruptcy.

And even 33-year-old Crucible favourite Kyren Wilson has admitted that the constant travelling as a world champion has put a strain on family life.

But there is now a greater understanding of the pressure they are under. “A player needs to be able to concentrate fully on a two-hour match. These guys are practicing as if their life depended on every single ball,” says Nic. “The World Championship is like two ranking tournaments back-to-back – very gruelling.

“Every ball in the Crucible has pressure on it because if you miss, the inertia of a match can change, and then you’re on the back foot. Even if you win, you’ve expended energy you didn’t have to – that physical and mental stamina takes years to build up.

“But now there are coping mechanisms they can use – in Steve Peters’ book, The Chimp Paradox, he calls them autopilots – which is “if I feel panic or if I think I have no chance of winning, here’s a little thought mechanism that hang on to to keep me sane’ – they’re like a life ring in rough waters.’”

Now that the game has now moved well and truly out of the back rooms of pubs and onto the world stage, help is out there for the bad boys of snooker. About time, too, as the casualty rate has been far too high.