Snooker

I love Snooker. It's by far my favourite sport. I'm not into team games. As the bloke in Snow Angels says, 'I am Collingwood's.' He is the shipyard. Okay so behind every successful person lies a whole load of other people propping them up but to see the snooker players at the table is just bliss. They are so clever and yet so unworldly. That sounds awful and patronising but it isn't meant to be. That's what I'm like. All I know is my trade and I understand how it works and how when the book is finished or when you are facing the camera you have to be the best  because people are sitting there taking pot shots at you. Luckily they are all former snooker players so you stand it.
There is nothing more delightful than a mind against a mind. The commentators are stars, they really are. Even at their most critical they are calm and soft voiced and just, well, the sort of men you'd have a drink with.
And there are all so different and they all seem to be married and to have children. Maybe I'm glazing this over a bit but the whole world of snooker seems encapsulated in what we see on screen. I know it isn't, I know I'm rose petalling it but the tension is just so exquisite. You play the table and it's a game of nerve and skill and endurance of every kind and there is nowhere to hide, just like when your book is published and people pour scorn on it. I know, I do it. I criticise books and television. I don't criticise sports stars, I just marvel that they do it. How do they do that?  How do they come back again and again?
Two of them this week, Ronnie O'Sullivan was the first and the implication was that he doesn't care about the politics any more. He has a good life, he has made it for himself and he doesn't have to worry about the money and so he plays and he enjoys it and he has a life.  And then Mark King. They are so frank and he said on camera that now he has made enough money to pay his hotel bills he plays differently and yes, of course you do. It takes tremendous character to get to that stage, huge guts and then they can concentrate better but it's different than when they started out and were all enthusiasm and couldn't see the pitfalls. The joys of being young. You don't worry, you just want the prize so there is joy and problems in all of it. Some people live for this.
Ronnie O'Sullivan said, 'you drive your own car.' Well I just hope his car is a Ferrari, at least one of them, just for the hell of it. There is nothing more elating than watching a good snooker player work several steps ahead so that they know what is going to happen. It's one of the joys of life watching people perform magic and it happens all the time in so many different places. Sport is the top of how things should be. Men and women competing instead of fighting, it's gladitorial in the best possible sense, and that's how it should be. Always.