Читать книгу Life in the Frame - Ken Doherty - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

ILFORD

By the time I was 18 I recognised that if I wanted to reach the level required to have a successful professional career then I would need to play better players more regularly. I had achieved what I could in Ireland, so I would have to move to the UK where there was a vibrant pro-am scene at the end of the 1980s. It made sense for another reason: all the main tournament qualifiers were held there.

The big step for me wasn’t moving to England but telling my mother of my decision. She didn’t want me to go. In fact she was horrified. She wanted the family to stay together and didn’t believe snooker was a proper job, never mind a career I could earn good money at. I reasoned with her. I said I wanted to go over to give it my best shot. I didn’t know if it would work out or not but I knew I would regret it forever if I didn’t at least try to make a go of it. I said if it didn’t work out I’d come back home. At the time I was on the dole, 35 quid a week, and it wasn’t a lifestyle I enjoyed. I couldn’t keep living like that and snooker was in my blood, so I tried to make her understand that it was my dream and it could be one of the most important steps I would ever take.

My mother cried her eyes out but the rest of the family were supportive and managed to talk her round. She knew deep down that I’d made my mind up because this was my great ambition in life and eventually she gave me her blessing, cautious though it was. I didn’t blame her: she had fought so hard to keep the family together through the hard times and now one of her children was telling her he wanted to go and live in another country. But it wasn’t a betrayal: I was trying to make good on the start she had given me in life and make something of myself. I didn’t want to leave my family but it was a sacrifice I knew I had to make and I couldn’t delay it any longer. Time was ticking on and it was a question of taking a leap into the unknown or staying in Ireland and standing still.

I chose Ilford in Essex because Eugene Hughes lived there. Eugene was a successful Irish player who reached no.17 in the world rankings and won the World Team Cup three years running with Alex Higgins and Dennis Taylor. I went over with a friend of mine, Anthony O’Connor, who was also trying to make it as a professional. I stayed with him at his auntie’s house in Turnham Green, west London. We’d get the tube to Barking and then hop on the bus to Ilford Snooker Centre, where Eugene arranged free practice through the owner, Ron Shore. So we could play to our hearts’ content. We couldn’t have asked for anything more.

It was a fair way to travel each day but Eugene very kindly let us stay in his house nearer the club. He was a great personality, always full of fun with a similar sense of humour to us. We were on his wavelength and he kept our spirits up when we were feeling homesick. I learned a lot about snooker as well through playing Eugene. He was a very clever player with bags of experience behind him and he helped my game to develop. Without his support I may not have lasted in England, because despite having been so excited to go over, it was a huge wrench for me and I missed my family like crazy. Irish families are often very close and I phoned mine all the time. It was painfully difficult to be separated from them but at the same time it was a great adventure for me. I was standing on my own two feet and starting to experience the world outside Ranelagh.

Myself and Anthony were joined by Stephen Murphy, Damien McKiernan and Finbar Ruane, Irish snooker lads who came over to try their hands at the game, although Finbar had by then stopped playing and just fancied a change of scene. We shared accommodation for a couple of years and although there wasn’t much money knocking around it was some of the best fun I’ve ever had. We stayed mainly in bed and breakfasts or rundown rented places. There was one B&B run by an Irish couple. We paid them £50 a week and they did our washing and gave us our meals, so it was like a home from home. The only problem was that she was mad and he was even madder.

There was one time when he tried to kill himself – and the rest of us as well. He’d had some argument with his wife and decided to end it all by turning on all the gas rings on the cooker in the kitchen. He went up to bed and waited for the house to blow. I was in the room next door to him and his wife but, luckily, Damien used to work for Ronnie O’Sullivan’s dad in his sex shop in Soho and would come home late, at around three in the morning. When he came in through the front door that night he could smell the gas so he didn’t turn the lights on. He went to the kitchen, turned off the gas and opened all the windows. If he hadn’t, the whole house would have been blown apart and us with it.

For some reason we decided that we had to find somewhere else to live. We stayed one more night and this time the guy got completely drunk and had another argument with his wife. He was so drunk that he fell down on the landing, totally naked, while his wife was screaming, ‘Help me! Help me!’ By now we’d had enough. It was another in a long line of domestics and we didn’t want to get involved because we didn’t know what he was capable of, but we plucked up the courage to drag him to his bed and locked the door behind him. His wife was in bits crying, saying he’d been having an affair, that she’d walked past an estate agent and seen that the house was up on the market, that she’d come home and found him hanging from the banister and had had to cut him down, and that on New Year’s Eve he’d filled the bathtub and tried to drown her in it. None of this made us feel like changing our minds about leaving. I’d lived there for three months and I had put myself in danger. If it hadn’t been for Damien, I could have died under that roof.

We would get to Ilford Snooker Centre at ten in the morning and leave at ten at night. We basically lived at the club. We’d have all our meals there – pie, chips and beans; scampi, chips and beans; roast chicken, chips and beans; fish and chips. Chips came pretty much as standard. We were at the age when people go to university and that’s similar to how it was for us, only we were playing snooker. We were living cheaply, eating cheaply and drinking cheaply. I didn’t go out as much as some of the other boys at the weekends because there was always a pro-am to play in and some good money to be won. The standard of opposition was high. Some more Irish guys came over to play, including Stephen O’Connor and Joe Swail, and Ronnie O’Sullivan’s dad would send a taxi for me to go to his house and play his boy, who would have been 12 or 13 at the time.

Stephen Murphy and myself joined King’s Cross Snooker Centre’s league team with Frank Maskell and a lad called Peter Ebdon, who would go on to become world champion. To be honest, we only joined the team because they were guaranteeing us free snooker and free steak and chips. It was £3,000 for the winners and we did win the league title but never saw the money. There was some dispute because we weren’t members of the King’s Cross club and we never got a penny.

The weekends would be focused on pro-ams, mainly the ones in the south of England, although we did sometimes venture up north to places like Leicester and Manchester. It was a learning experience. Coming up against different players gave you a different perspective of how the game was played. I’d been brought up to play quite a cautious game, making 30 or 40 and then putting colours safe, leaving the cue ball on the back cushion. I’d learned the game against older guys who had that experience but the pro-ams were full of players my age and they all had their own approach, their own way of playing.

I could never play like Alex Higgins but I loved his attacking style. However, people forget what a brilliant safety player he was as well. He had a great snooker brain and you could learn a lot about the tactical side of the game from watching him, although people don’t tend to remember that so much. It’s true I always erred on the side of caution because when I was learning my trade I had twenty quid in my pocket and I was playing for double or nothing, so I wasn’t going to go in with all guns blazing. I had to be careful otherwise I’d lose the lot. But I’ve made more than 200 century breaks as a professional and there’s only a dozen or so players who have done that, so it would be wrong to call me a grinder. If the balls are there I will pot them and I found that the open snooker being played in a lot of these pro-ams suited me.

I decided to stay in Ilford after I joined the circuit and started achieving some success. I bought my own flat there in the end, which we’d been renting for a year. It was a good place to be based, because Essex was a strong snooker area and there were always high quality opponents to practise with. It’s important to keep your game sharp between tournaments and in any case I liked the environment and most of the people. There was always a buzz in the club. Plus, it was close to London and easy to get back home to Ireland from there.

I remained in Ilford until I won the World Championship in 1997. I’d been going out with a girl in Ireland and she moved over to Essex in early 1996 but I discovered she’d been messing around with one of the Ilford guys while I was away at tournaments. It completely did my head in because I saw it as a betrayal, not just by her but by the people at the club. I thought I had friends there but some of them were laughing at me behind my back. I took the trophy to the club, mainly to thank Ron Shore for all he’d done for me, and then went back home. I was in a terrible state. I felt let down and humiliated. I’d been in love with this girl but she’d cheated on me with one of my mates and the Ilford crowd were telling other guys on the circuit about it. It broke my heart and affected my confidence, but when I won the World Championship it felt like sticking two fingers up to the lot of them. I’d achieved my dream and nobody was going to sour it.

Ilford Snooker Centre has closed down now, which makes me sad because it was a great place full of characters and competitive snooker. Many clubs in the UK and Ireland have also shut down – Jason’s did in 2005 – for a number of reasons. Interest in snooker has declined from the enormous levels it reached during the boom years of the 1980s, which were always going to be impossible to sustain, plus the smoking ban has seen many members drift away from them. A lot of people don’t realise that snooker clubs are not just about snooker. They are also social hubs where people congregate for a drink and a smoke, a chat and a bit of banter, an evening out of the house. That’s now been lost from many areas, which is a shame but perhaps a reflection of the way society has changed.

Snooker clubs are like families and a place to meet and chew the fat. When they close down, as with Jason’s, everyone goes their own way and you miss the craic and the laughter. You miss the mix of people and the community aspect of everyone having a gathering point. It’s gone now from Ranelagh and from Ilford too. I’m just glad I had both at the time when I needed them.

When I left Ilford I came back to Jason’s and installed a Riley table I’d been given for winning the World Championship. They built me a match room and put pictures on the wall celebrating moments from my career. I had enough money to buy a three-bedroom house and it was like I’d never been away. I was back in Ranelagh and it felt like nothing had changed.

Nobody treated me any differently. I was welcomed back with open arms and a lot of the old characters were still there, like Scobie Murphy, who brushed and ironed the tables and couldn’t bear to eat anything hot. His diet was basically ice cream. He once got a sausage from the fish and chip shop and put it in a puddle in the street to cool it down. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed the likes of Scobie until I moved back home. They always treated me as just one of the lads in Jason’s, before I moved to Ilford and when I came back to Dublin as world champion. The one difference was that I no longer had to clean out the ashtrays and sweep the floors.

But moving to Ilford had definitely been the right decision for me. I think even my mother recognises that now. It not only helped my snooker but assisted my development as a person and made me more independent and worldly wise. In many ways it was a gamble but it paid off, although when I first moved there I had still to get on the professional tour, and that proved to be a frustratingly difficult process.