On January 1, Ronnie O'Sullivan (Wordsley, 1975) won the Eurosport channel's British Sportsman of the Year award ahead of Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford and seven-time Formula 1 world champion Lewis Hamilton.
The name of the rivals surpassed gives the measure of the relevance of a player who in 2020 won his sixth World Cup.
However, what led the Spanish news to talk about him at the end of last year was a wind that the absence of the public due to the Covid-19 restrictions made audible during the Northern Ireland Open.
The indiscreet sound made many hear for the first time the name of one of the best athletes in history.
A charismatic guy with an excessive life that includes drugs, assault, depression, pigs and a father sentenced to life in prison.
The Briton has won thirty-seven titles, including six world championships.
His earnings reach 11 million pounds and he has received the Order of the British Empire.
Due to his track record and the longevity of his career, he has been compared to athletes such as Federer, Schumacher or Messi, but his main reference is the golfer Tiger Woods, with whom in addition to an enviable career he shares a biography dotted with scandals and emotional ups and downs.
Ronney O'Sullivan grew up in an environment typical of a Guy Ritchie movie, among criminals, porn movies and gambling houses.
His father, the manager of a chain of
sex shops
in Soho, took him to the
snooker
halls
since he was less bulky than a taco and told everyone who wanted to hear that his son would one day be world champion.
At the age of six she would carry him onto boxes of oranges so that he could reach the table, and at the age of seven she built his first game room for him in a shed in the garden of the family home in Essex.
It was a wise investment: At twelve, little O'Sullivan was making $ 25,000 a year, and at seventeen he became the youngest player to win a qualifying title.
But his father had to listen to the game on the radio from the cell where he was serving a life sentence for murder.
The origins of chaos
“My father and a friend were in a nightclub arguing over who should pay the bill.
Then two black boys, two brothers whom Charlie Kray (brother of the Kray twins, London's most feared gangsters) had hired that night, they screwed up and thought that dad and his friend weren't going to pay and the mess started.
My father said, 'Let's talk about it,' one of them took an ashtray and went to hit him on the head.
Dad raised his hand, the ashtray broke and cut off two fingers.
The other guy grabbed a bottle of champagne and hit Dad over the head with it.
So my father took a knife that was on the side of the bar and that was it ”.
The aggravation of racial hatred, which father and son continue to deny, led to the sentence being life imprisonment.
He turned eighteen.
That event that O'Sullivan recounts in his autobiography
Ronnie: The Autobiography of Ronnie O'Sullivan
, has marked his life.
It was not the only blow he suffered while still a teenager.
Four years later, it was his mother who ended up behind bars for tax evasion.
Too much for any young man and much more for one who was under unbearable pressure to become the best in the world in a professional sport.
It was impossible that these events did not affect him mentally.
“I thought I had made it.
He had made a little money, he had a nice house, a nice car, he was single.
He could do whatever he wanted when he wanted.
I probably picked the wrong company, but I really lost myself.
I took my eye off the ball.
I wasn't really focused on snooker and I probably wasted five years of my career, ”he stated on the Euronews podcast.
“First thing in the morning I would wake up, have a drink and smoke a joint just to function during the day.
Until I thought, 'I don't want to have to depend on this kind of thing.
But it got me too hooked and that's when I decided to seek help. "
He found her at The Priory, the prestigious London rehabilitation center where stars like Kate Moss, Sinead O'Connor and Amy Winehouse have passed.
His fight against addictions and depression has been a constant in his life and he has spoken about it on many occasions.
He has turned to psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and even a hypnotist.
Its ups and downs during the more than two decades that it has been in the forefront have been followed live by the media.
"I was the king of sabotage," he told
The Guardian
in 2020. In 1996 he assaulted a member of the World Championship organization and received a two-year suspension and a fine of £ 20,000.
Two years later, a positive for marijuana caused his Irish Master to be withdrawn.
And in 2005 came the definitive collapse.
Just as Britney Spears would do a couple of years later, she shaved her head in the middle of a tournament - she claimed, she did it to "look tougher" - after several days of erratic behavior.
During the final, his rival Peter Ebdon unhinged him simply by taking time between hits.
Onlookers could see how O'Sullivan covered his head nervously, laughed madly, tried to annoy his rival and lost point after point playing as an
amateur
.
"Few athletes have disintegrated so publicly being the world number one and the reigning world champion, having far more talent than all their rivals and using the field as a psychiatrist's chair to vent their confusion," wrote columnist Nick Harris in
The Independent
.
He took a break, which he claimed could be final, and asked for help.
A (literal) flight forward
After the birth of her last child (she has three out of three relationships) she abandoned the medication because it affected her personal life and made her lose patience easily.
"I'm not going to let the medication turn me into an irritable old man," he told
The Guardian.
He chose to increase his serotonin in a natural way: running.
Running became more important than billiards.
"I'd rather run at Woodford in October on mud than be in the final of the Northern Ireland Open in Belfast," he argued.
When mid-distance running weren't enough to maintain his mental stability, he sought an unheard of alternative: He volunteered at a pig farm, as recounted in the recently released Eurosport documentary
The Joy of Six
.
After a season with no fixed hours and no routines, he forced himself to find his balance and spent six weeks volunteering on a farm in south London.
“I've been doing it about three days a week and I really enjoy it.
It has been the opposite of what was happening in recent years in snooker.
The farm has sheep, pigs, cows, goats, chickens, horses ... and I have worn old wellies.
I have cleaned stables and pigs, removed fences, put garbage in barrels and trucks and cleaned mud ”.
It was another of his many escapes, away from the stress generated by the mat.
These scares, added to the many occasions on which he has threatened his definitive withdrawal, have caused some to accuse him of not respecting the sport of which he is a symbol.
There are colleagues who also think so.
When in 1996 he surprised everyone by playing Alain Robidoux with his left hand, the Canadian accused him of disrespect and refused to greet him after the game.
He said he could simply play better with the left than his opponent with the right.
It was not the only time he was insolent.
Ronnie is called "The Rocket" (The Rocket) for the speed of his game - he has achieved the highest score more times than anyone else in less time - but the vertigo with which he dispatches points with the cue rivals his ability to find himself problems on and off the mat.
When asked why older players like him kept winning, he said it was due to the low level of the youngsters.
“Most of them would do well as half-decent fans, not even fans.
They're so bad ... I'd have to lose an arm and a leg to fall out of the top 50 ”.
Nor is he short when it comes to gauging the successes of other athletes, for example those of the also British Lewis Hamilton, who recently left out of the group of greatest: “It is fantastic for Lewis to win seven world titles, but if your car goes faster, you can afford to make a few mistakes and get away with it.
It's a bit like driving smoking a cigar with one finger on the wheel!
I wouldn't have felt so good about my billiards career if I had been playing at a table with pockets bigger than my opponent's.
At least in billiards everyone has the same material ”, it was published in the
Daily Star
newspaper
.
Long tongues, pink nails
O'Sullivan is not afraid to attack one of his most admired compatriots because his social relevance is also enormous and the public forgives him everything.
Although outside the United Kingdom he is almost unknown to those who do not follow snooker, there he is an absolute celebrity and any of his acts have transcendence, such as when he played the English Open with pink nails last year to raise awareness about breast cancer .
As Simon Hattenstone writes in
The Guardian
, "In a sport where charismatic players are rare, he has been the snooker personality for a quarter of a century."
Let's nail breast cancer @futuredreamss.
I'll be getting my pink nails out tonight in support of Breast cancer.
Please donate £ 5 if you can text LNBC5 to 70500 who is going to join me?
pic.twitter.com/ecOIFa8was
- Ronnie O'Sullivan (@ ronnieo147) October 12, 2020
That has caused him to be the snooker ambassador for Eurosport since 2014, with whom he recorded
The Ronnie O'Sullivan Show
, which included his knowledge of the game and interviews with other professional players.
He is also the protagonist of the Sky History miniseries
Ronnie O'Sullivan's American Hustle,
in which he travels around the United States showing the difference between snooker and American billiards.
Its popularity also serves to sell books.
She has written two autobiographies, healthy cooking books, and three crime novels inspired by her family memories in collaboration with writer Emlyn Rees.
But when he thinks of that retirement that seems to always come - and never comes - he does not mention writing or
show business
among his occupations, but care, such as those that saved his life during his rehabilitation.
“It was tough, but it was what I needed.
Without the 12 steps, without leaving society, without going to a treatment center, I might not have got to where I am today, ”he declared.
And he ends: “When I finish playing pool, I want to learn to be a counselor.
I want to understand the mental health sector.
When I see so many asylum seekers who just want a roof over their head, three meals a day, a job to do, and care, I think I've had enough
dog eat dog
.
I just want to be in a business where you take care of people ”.
The Rocket never fails to amaze.
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