We were all snooker loopy in the 80s, remembers Jamie Jackson | Sport | The Guardian
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Spandau Ballet, leg-warmers, the Rubik's Cube, big hair, synthesisers, Yuppies, the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher. All of them, and plenty more besides, are currently being reformed, repackaged, reappraised or resold. The 1980s, the decade that began with Lady Diana falling in love with Prince Charles, are being reinvented.
The sporting landscape in Britain then was totally different. Football was suffering an image problem, mostly because of hooliganism and stadium disasters, and there was no Sky, and therefore far less televised football. Amazingly, snooker regularly drew a bigger audience.
The waistcoated men of the green baize were genuine superstars: Steve Davis, Jimmy White, Alex Higgins and Dennis Taylor were able to earn small fortunes while the country went as Snooker Loopy as Chas & Dave in their top-10 hit of 1986.
Step forward Neal Foulds, Eddie Charlton, Joe Johnson, Kirk Stevens, Cliff Thorburn, Willie Thorne, Bill Werbeniuk, Alain Robidoux, Jim Wych, Doug Mountjoy, Mike Hallett, Silvino Francisco, Tony Meo, Tony Knowles and David Taylor, aka the Silver Fox: all supporting acts who found their names suddenly lit up.
With football in the doldrums, the wall-to-wall coverage of snooker – 18.5 million watched Davis lose to Dennis Taylor on the final black of the 1985 World Championship final – revealed enough drama to keep lucrative ­sponsorship money flowing in, fill ­column after column on the sports pages, and fuel constant pub debate.
"It's difficult to look back to those days without smiling. All I remember is earning loads of money and laughing all the time," says Barry Hearn, the impresario who joined forces with Davis in 1975 before dominating snooker in the 1980s with his Matchroom sports management company, which looked after many of the prominent players.
"Nothing compares to those 10 years. It was led by these amazing characters – Bill Werbeniuk drinking 16 pints in a day, Terry Griffiths singing Welsh lullabies, Willie Thorne giving you the best price on the favourite, Dennis Taylor telling his jokes, Jimmy White the little urchin and Davis being boring," says Hearn, who tells his yarns like a prospector recalling the discovery of Klondike gold.
"I was in my office in 1981 and the telephone went. A voice said: 'Mr Bally Hearn? This is Channel 7 TV Bangkok. We want you to come here.' I didn't even know where Bangkok was. The BBC's pictures were going all around the place, you see.
"He said: 'Steve Davis is world champion, you're his manager. How much do you want?' I had no idea. I said: 'Twenty thousand dollars.' When he agreed, I thought 'Bollocks! I could have done better than that.'"
Davis won the first of his world titles in 1981 when he beat Doug Mountjoy, yet snooker's "Gazza 1990" moment might be traced to Alex Higgins' tears when the errant Irishman won a second world title the following season.
That was the sixth year the World Championship had been played at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre. The arena's atmosphere for the showpiece event was another vital ingredient in the sport's allure. And when the chain-smoking, argumentative Hurricane broke down clutching his baby daughter on live television, Box-Office Snooker was born.
That same year Tony Knowles was a 26-year-old former Bolton art college student with good looks and a mullet haircut. In his second appearance at the Crucible he trounced the defending champion Davis 10-1 in the first round. It was big news. As were his tabloid revelations about his bedroom exploits with snooker groupies the following season.
"It was all a long time ago now," Knowles tells Observer Sport. He was fined £5,000 by the WPBSA, the governing body, for bringing snooker into disrepute. "But beating Davis by such a score was a career highlight," he says, before also picking out his two tournament wins. The first of those was in the Scottish Open of 1982 against David Taylor. Now 65 and a hotel owner in Cheshire, Taylor says: "The biggest moment of my life was reaching the semi-final of the World Championship in 1980. And, I also commentated on Steve Davis's 147."
That was the first televised maximum break, but it was overshadowed by Thorburn pulling off the same feat at the Crucible a season later against Griffiths, which was one of snooker's key moments as the sport built towards a critical mass. "It was purgatory because my wife had just lost a baby and she'd told a friend not to tell me," says Thorburn, now 61 and living back in Canada. "Then I made the 147, was having a glass of champagne and it slipped out. When I called my wife there was a press photographer saying, 'Come on Cliff, smile, smile!' because of the 147, while my wife's sobbing."
Thorburn, the 1980 world champion, headed a five-strong Canadian contingent at the time. Robidoux, a former World Championship semi-finalist who still plays in Canada, arrived in 1988 as a 27-year-old "with only my suitcase and not even speaking the language". Jim Wych, now 54 and a commentator, reached the quarter-finals at the ­Crucible in 1980 at his first attempt "which is still the record for an overseas player", he proudly says, and "Big" Bill Werbeniuk, who drank 16 pints of lager to settle his nerves, reached four World Championship quarter-finals. He died six years ago.
In 1985 Stevens, who in his pomp had a penchant for wearing all-white suits at the table, was involved in the era's most notorious episode. Francisco, a 39-year-old South African, defeated him in the British Open final before accusing the 27-year-old of being as "high as a kite."
Francisco was fined and docked ranking points before Stevens admitted to a cocaine addiction. It proved to be a final contested by two cursed players. While Stevens' career never recovered, Francisco was later forced to work in a fish and chip shop to survive and in 1997 was caught smuggling £115,000 worth of cannabis through Dover. He served three years in prison.
When Observer Sport caught up with both men they were reluctant to speak. On the phone from Toronto, Stevens, who is the current Canadian Open champion but no longer plays the professional circuit, was asked about his experiences. "No thanks, I'm all right," he said.
When Francisco's son was contacted in Leeds the Observer was told that his father had mellowed with age. "I'll give him a ring and tell him [to call]." But the player once known as the Silver Fish never rang back.
Davis was back in the World Championship final the year after losing to Taylor, but Joe Johnson, a 33-year-old from Bradford who had never before won a match at the Crucible, beat Davis comfortably 18-12. "It was a fairytale," Johnson says. "But I had no fears. Everybody treated Steve Davis as God, but I'd played him as an amateur – we'd never met as professionals – and beaten him 10-1."
Johnson put down his cue when he was 53 and is now a commentator for TV channel Eurosport, alongside Hallett, who turned professional in 1979 with Jimmy White and Tony Meo. "It was family – we used to travel to Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia and Thailand. One year I played 21 events," says ­Hallett who, at 49, is still competing, having won close to £1m.
Hallett describes himself as fortunate to have played during what Foulds, who did become a millionaire and is now a BBC commentator, says was "the best time for snooker. There was less sport on television, less to do if you were indoors. And, there were a few charismatic people around."
White, the loser of six world finals but always the crowd's darling "because I took on shots", certainly had personality. Now 45, he has not given up the dream. "It's a bit of a sickener that I've never won a world final, but I believe I can still win it," says the Whirlwind, who will be watching the final tomorrow.
White also believes that despite the loss of sponsors – the 2004 ban on tobacco advertising hobbled many tournaments – and the lowering of snooker's profile in a modern era that offers myriad leisure choices, the game retains robust health. He points to the World Championship's new sponsor (Betfred.com) and the fact that more than 100 million viewers in China watched Ding Junhui and Liang Wenbo play in the first round a fortnight ago. In a sense White is right. But, it is hardly the same.
"Fucking hell, it was only a game of snooker," is Hearn's closing reflection on his and the sport's golden period. "But we were introduced to state governors and ambassadors.
"In China in 1983, Steve Davis did a billiard exhibition in front of the top man and his government. They all came in with these little girls helping them – basically the game had to be stopped every 10 minutes because they were all incontinent and had to keep going to the loo.
"People who weren't around then can't understand what it was like. Terry Griffiths said to me recently, 'The only problem with those days was I didn't appreciate them enough at the time'.
"But I think most of us did."