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Ronnie O’Sullivan

For this possessor of the purest natural talent ever known to British sport – or games, for those who believe that a sine qua non of any authentic sport is that it leaves the player needing a shower – lavish allowances must be made. He is the scion of a family next to which the kith and kin of John Terry, engagingly Runyonesque though they are, look like the Waltons.

Rocket Ronnie’s father remains a house guest of Her Majesty for murdering an alleged Kray associate in a restaurant in 1982, although he is up for parole, while the mother did a bit of bird herself for tax evasion. You needn’t have a doctorate in clinical psychology, or be a close student of the parental poetry of Philip Larkin, to appreciate the effects on a formative mind.

The extent of Ronnie’s confusion and vulnerability was spotlighted a few years ago when, flailing about to make sense of his life, a little (a very little, perhaps) like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, he turned for a spiritual guide to the boxer Naseem Hamed. Mr Hamed narrowly failed to shepherd Ronnie into the Muslim faith. He never did become Rahquet Rhani al Sull’ivan, but it was apparently a close call.

However unlikely the image of this tortured, saturnine figure being called to prayer by the muezzin, the external discipline might have helped a man who conceded a best-of-seventeen-frame match to Stephen Hendry when 0–4 behind with a terse ‘I’ve had enough mate’, and whose notion of good grace in defeat, at the China Open of 2008, extended to bragging about the girth of his penis at the press conference, and inviting a female reporter to fellate him, before giving her a helpful demonstration by mistaking the head of his microphone for a lollipop.

In the absence of that religious discipline, it becomes ever harder to overlook the contempt with which he treats his genius. At times, in fact, genius has seemed an inadequate word. Roger Federer is a genius, but always had to work devilishly hard to cope with the raging Mallorcan bull Rafael Nadal (and usually failed), and even the likes of Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.

At his best, O’Sullivan appears not to be working at all, potting balls at ridiculous speed and with absurd ease with either hand. Perhaps this explains why he seems not to value his gift at all. Often, in fact, he seems to resent it, and to wish it dead. As a fabled wit once observed – Oscar Wilde, perhaps, or possibly John Virgo – each man kills the thing he loves. Ronnie hasn’t killed it yet, but it seldom blossoms as gorgeously as it did, or as it should.

Still harder to excuse is the contempt he shows his public. Whether or not his lip-curling disdain for snooker is sourced in insecurity he tries to cloak in contrived diffidence, his concession of frames when he needs a single snooker to win them has been getting on the top ones for too long.

The disrespect he shows almost every rival other than John Higgins is more a comment on him, needless to say, than on them. Whenever the likable Mark Selby, who has the nickname ‘Jester’ for the compelling comedic rationale that he hails from Leicester, wins the last four frames to beat him, Ronnie makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t rate him, and hints at having thrown the match away because scrapping against so palpable an inferior is beneath his dignity.

As for the continual threats to quit, no public figure in history has announced their retirement so often – yes, Streisand, that includes you – and reneged. He knows he can behave as boorishly, lewdly and disrespectfully as he wishes without that retirement being forced on him because he remains the biggest draw, if not the only one, in snooker, and that without him the dangerous decline of the game (a world championship sponsored by Pukka Pies, forsooth) might well become terminal. But the little-boy-lost act ran out of whatever minimal charm it had long ago. There comes a time in every wounded lamb’s life when, however much they fucked him up, his mum and dad, the leonine thing to do is not to roar but stoically to hide the misery and behave. At thirty-five, that time is now. If not, the next time he announces his retirement, he might find that the majority reaction isn’t a plea to reconsider, or even a weary shrug, but a sigh of relief.