Читать книгу Life in the Frame - Ken Doherty - Страница 6
ОглавлениеPrestatyn, 5 August 2009
I’m sitting in Pontins holiday camp in North Wales. The sun is shining and the place is full of holidaymakers enjoying a summer break on the windswept coast. Kids are having fun on the karting track and gangs of lads are playing football on the sliver of grass that separates the chalets.
Why am I here? Well, not by choice. I’ve had such a poor run of results these past two years that I am no longer ranked high enough to receive an automatic place at the main venues. I have to pre-qualify and that means coming to Prestatyn, where most of the qualifiers are staged. I’ve just played Rod Lawler in the third qualifying round of the Shanghai Masters in one of eight small cubicles used for these early rounds of tournaments, which most people never witness. There were seats for around 20 spectators but it was by no means packed. To get back to the players’ room from the arena you pass Captain Croc’s Adventureland, which is full of young children being entertained by, among others, a seven-foot tall furry creature by the name of Zena the Hyena. The Crucible it isn’t.
It’s a humbling experience. A man came up to me earlier, all friendly, and said, ‘How are you doing, Ken? Do you still play?’ I can forgive the question. I only played twice on television last year and failed to qualify for all but one of the ranking tournaments. I had dropped out of the elite top 16 – the group who are seeded through to all the venues – in 2008 but last season was an even bigger disaster. I fell to 44th in the official rankings, which is worked out over two years. On the provisional list, which is just last season’s points, I’m 55th. If I fall below 64th by the end of the campaign next May I will be off the tour. I’ve come here in full knowledge that I am now fighting for my professional survival.
Prestatyn holds happy memories for me, or rather it did until last year. I first came here as a teenager in 1988 for the huge spring festival, which featured something like 1,000 players. I just wanted to give it a go and see how I would get on. I loved it. The snooker boom was still in full swing and the camp was crawling with people of all ages, every one of them with a cue in their hand, getting stuck into what was in every sense a festival. Wherever you looked there were matches going on and the craic was fantastic. It didn’t have the serious edge that inevitably comes with proper professional tournaments. I got through to the last 32 and played Mike Hallett, who at the time was one of the best players in the world. I was in my torn jeans, T-shirt and trainers and he came in wearing his pristine suit, freshly ironed shirt, patent shoes and dicky bow, looking a million dollars. He gave me 21 points start per frame and I beat him and went on to win the tournament. I’d brought £500 with me, thinking this would last me a long time. That’s how naive I was. For winning the title I picked up £2,500 and it set me up for my amateur career.
So I had been looking forward to coming back to Prestatyn because it’s where it all started for me, but the one thing I was fearful about was the difference in atmosphere between the big arenas that I was used to and the cramped cubicles the qualifiers are played in. You get accustomed to the TV cameras and the crowd and that gets the adrenalin flowing but here there’s hardly anyone watching and it all feels flat, as if you’re not involved in a professional event at all. I think any player – even Ronnie O’Sullivan or Stephen Hendry – would struggle if they had to come back to playing in this sort of set-up after all those years in the limelight. You don’t realise just how spoilt you’ve been until it’s all taken away from you. Coming here feels like starting all over again.
I was slightly in denial about it all last season. I thought, ‘Well, I only have to win one match in each tournament to qualify’ so if I could just get off to a good start then I’d be OK. I told myself not to worry about it but as the first match approached I found myself becoming nervous. The nerves grew and grew and I hardly slept the night before because I was full of trepidation. I was playing Jimmy White and, as much as I like him, I didn’t want to play him because he’d already won three matches and was in good form, plus he had vast amounts of experience and wouldn’t be overawed playing me, like some of the younger players might have been. It felt like all the pressure was on me. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t settle down. I could barely hold the cue.
As I sat watching Jimmy take advantage of all my mistakes I was thinking, ‘How has it come to this?’ Two years previously, I was in the World Championship quarter-finals against Marco Fu. If I’d beaten him I would have been world no.1. As it was, I finished second in the rankings and yet here I was, mired in the qualifiers and unable to cope with the new environment. It had been such a sudden decline that I was completely unprepared and didn’t know how to feel about it or get my head around how to stem the slide.
Jimmy beat me 5-1. In the next tournament I had to play another of the old guard, John Parrott, and he whitewashed me 5-0. Judd Trump, a talented teenager, handed out another 5-0 hammering in the next tournament and, to complete the misery, Jimmy beat me in the last event, also 5-0. So from my four matches in Prestatyn, the place where my career had lifted off two decades earlier, I won one frame.
After that last defeat, I went to catch the train to Holyhead to get the ferry back home. I sat on the platform and just wanted to cry. In fact, I very nearly did. I was all alone and felt like I was deep in a black hole that I couldn’t see out of. I felt like throwing my cue in front of the train and possibly me along with it. I’d been world champion, I’d enjoyed success and acclaim in various parts of the world but right now I couldn’t win a match. I could barely win a frame. I didn’t know where my career was headed. I was 39 and I thought, ‘Is it all over? Is that it? Is it going to end here like this?’ I was thinking that I would drop off the tour and that would be it: I’d no longer be a professional snooker player. That’s how low my confidence had sunk. It didn’t matter what I’d done previously in my career. None of that seemed important now because my self-belief had gone and I had only dark thoughts. From enjoying such highs in the sport, I’d fallen to the lowest depths.
Things got worse when I failed to qualify for the Crucible. The qualifiers were actually played in Sheffield at the English Institute of Sport a few miles from the game’s theatre of dreams, but Gerard Greene beat me and that meant I wouldn’t be part of the World Championship for the first time in 16 years. It was horrible to know our sport’s biggest event was taking place and that I wasn’t in it. I love watching the game but it’s so hard when you’re not involved. I did go to Sheffield for the last five days to work for the BBC, which was great fun but it isn’t the same as playing. Nothing beats playing.
At that point I gave myself one more season. I knew I couldn’t bear much more than that because it was beginning to depress me and detract from the great store of memories I’ve amassed in my years in snooker. I didn’t want all that to be soured by me being unable to produce performances I could be proud of. I didn’t want to be in the position where I was just turning up at tournaments to make up the numbers. I’d rather not play at all than be in that position.
The season ends when the World Championship ends. When I got home after John Higgins’s victory over Shaun Murphy I had a long think about where I was going and told myself that I had to keep fighting. The only way to turn things round would be to put the work in, put the hours in on the practice table. The alternative was to feel sorry for myself, lie down and accept that my career was over. I just couldn’t do that.
I’ve never given in at any point in all my years in snooker so I decided to draw a line under that season. I had some alterations made to my cue, which gave me a new impetus, and tried to come into this campaign with a positive frame of mind. I made a conscious decision to play in everything that I possibly could, including small pro-ams, to get some match practice. I went to Sheffield to play at the World Snooker Academy, which is a great facility where the likes of Peter Ebdon and Ding Junhui practise. I needed to toughen myself and my game up. It’s been hard because I have a young son, and I’ve hated being away from him, but I needed to make the effort to rescue my career.
Slowly, my confidence has started to come back through winning matches in these events and today I beat Rod Lawler 5-2, my first win in a ranking tournament in eight months. The relief is overwhelming. I feel like I’ve won a title.
I came here determined just to play and not think about the fact that I’m at Prestatyn or where I am in the rankings. I had such a bad year that I now have to play two qualifying matches in each tournament, but you have to just accept that and get on with it. Despite that, I was nervous as hell for the match with Rod. My stomach was churning over all the way through. I pinched the first frame on the black by clearing up from the last red and I did the same another three times in the match with good clearances. It’s an awesome feeling when you win like that because I know I could easily have lost 5-2.
OK, it’s one win in a cubicle in North Wales in front of maybe a dozen people. It’s not a match that will live long in the memory or will be talked about in years to come. I haven’t got a trophy out of it and there was nothing about it that would stand out for anyone else. But this win may – just may – be the confidence boost I need to turn things around.
