‘I hear it all the time. Not a tournament goes by without it being mentioned. I don’t think mid-forties is particularly old, mind. Seems it is in sport. Even our sport. Although it isn’t particularly strenuous. A bit like darts. I have a couple of mates who rib me saying it isn’t really a sport. Cheeky bastards!
‘It starts to play on the mind after a while, though; all this talk of getting old, still winning competitions after twenty odd years. “Where are the young pretenders?” they ask. “Who’s going to come along and knock him off his perch?” There are a few younger players regularly winning tournaments. Not too many, mind. Appears I might be around for a few more years.
‘I haven’t got a clue what I’ll do after, to be honest. The house is paid for, and we’ve got plenty of money in the bank. It should last me and the wife through retirement, and we’re not particularly extravagant. No, no holiday apartment by the Mediterranean, just a caravan in Wales. Our kids love it there and that’s the main thing.
‘It’s what keeps me motivated, the family. The boys are still young. Me and the missis started later than most, particularly those where I come from. A mining village, although the pit’s closed now. It was a close-knit community when I was a kid. I suppose I would have been expected to work down the mine if it had stayed open long enough: like my dad and his dad. But Mrs Thatcher had other plans and it was gone by the time I left school. I had to find something else to do.
‘A few of my mates found a way out, but I didn’t really fancy joining the Army. It was tempting when they came back on leave and told us stories of where they’d been and what they’d been up to. But I wasn’t one for discipline and couldn’t imagine being shouted at and told what to do all day. I decided I’d wait to get married for that!
‘No, I had other plans. I’d been playing down the local working man’s club for years. My dad played a bit, messed around in the local league, but I really got into it; started taking more interest in snooker than doing my homework. Well, families didn’t place much importance on education back then. Our parents thought that if you could read and write and count to ten, you’d know enough to get yourself a job covered in grease or caked in soot every day.
‘Most people would think it was my grandad who got me into the game. He took me down to the club all the time. Dad wasn’t so keen, but I could rely on Grandad. I knew if I got down to my grandparents’ house by 7 p.m., I would see him behind the frosted glass of his front door, putting on his flat cap and wrapping his scarf around his neck. He was never surprised to see me waiting when he opened the door. Just his gentle smile. It was so routine, often we wouldn’t talk during the whole walk up to the club. He’d reach the bar, order his regular drink, and pass me a glass of lemonade on the way to his seat. There he’d sit, watching me play on the worn baize, refilling my glass with lemonade as he passed to buy himself another pint.
‘The time with my grandad enabled me to put in the practice and learn how to play the game. But it was Nan who kept my interest going. She loved watching snooker on the telly. Mam was deadly for watching the old black and white matinees on a Saturday afternoon. There was little chance of me seeing a snooker match after she came back home from picking up the shopping. Nan, on the other hand, was a snooker fanatic.
‘Every match, every televised tournament, Nan would be watching it. A cup of tea in hand and biscuit tin on the table, we watched as Grandad slept, snoring through the afternoon in his chair. Fiercely supportive of any Welsh player, she’d say to me, “You carry on practicing, son and you could end up on the telly like Doug, Ray or Terry.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Nan I wanted to be more like Steve Davis.
‘As the world changed around her, the future of the village uncertain, I guess Nan took comfort in seeing these gentlemen on the TV, smartly dressed, their shoes polished; something familiar to her. Grandad said she just liked looking at their bums as they leant over the table. She never denied it.
‘Funny thing though, although my grandparents have been dead for ages now, they’ve never really left me.
‘It was during that last match, during that final frame, the break to win the championship. I was amongst the reds and potting colours, building the score, when out of nowhere I started to think about Nan. You see, what people tend not to realise, is that snooker is as much a mental test as it is a game of skill. The hours of concentration that players endure are tough. The thoughts we have out in the middle are only known to ourselves; the crowd can’t see them in the way that they can follow the action on the table. If my opponent is playing, I’m sitting in my chair waiting, trying to keep focused, trying to stop myself becoming distracted. It’s a constant battle.
‘Any of the usual thoughts you might have whilst at work, it’s the same for me: wondering how the kids got on at school today, what I’m going to have for tea tonight, whether the missis is still upset with me for not cutting the grass at the weekend. Mundane things, really. Family things.
‘And as I was lining up a shot on the black ball, the lights of the arena reflected on its surface, I found myself thinking of sweets. Yes, sweeties that I’d buy from the shop at the bottom of my nan’s street after she’d pressed a fifty pence piece in my palm. They we’re bigger coins back then, seemed massive in a child’s hand. Every Saturday, I’d run down the road and Mr Edwards would hand me my regular on arrival: a mix-up of penny chews and lollipops. I had a long-standing arrangement with the shopkeeper. Mr Edwards would pre-prepare my little bag of goodies. The deal would last if he didn’t try to pass me too many duplicates, too many of the more expensive things like gobstoppers and lollipops. I was more interested in quantity as I was in quality, back then.
‘Purchase complete, I’d bolt back up to my nan’s and settle down on the sofa next to her to watch the telly. I’d offer her a sweet, but she never took one. Nan was big into toffee, mind. Her and grandad seemed to get through slabs of the stuff. They both had false teeth, so I was always amazed at how they managed it.
‘I dreaded Uncle Owen arriving. My dad’s brother, Owen would visit about once a month. He never turned down the offer of one of my sweets. Regularly ate more than twenty-five pence worth, I reckon. I hated sharing them with him. He was an adult and should have stuck to grown up things like beer and cigarettes. But I knew Nan was watching, and she would be proud of me sharing, even though she knew I didn’t really want to.
‘I liked to play lucky dip with the bag, pulling out each sweet and seeing what it was. Anything black was my favourite. Jelly Tots, Fruit Pastilles, Wine Gums, if they were black sweets, they just seemed better. Ironic really. At the time, we didn’t see too many black people around, especially in our village. Only if you travelled into Cardiff, you’d see some then. My dad took me down to watch Wales play at the Arms Park once. He said that if we were lucky, we might see Shirley Bassey doing her shopping. We didn’t, but it felt like we’d seen everybody else in the world that day.
‘And now I’m playing snooker and spend every match trying to pot the black ball as much as possible. Somebody setting the rules once decided which was the most important colour, the highest value. Odd that, when you consider that we were often suspicious of those with a darker skin than our own, especially when I was growing up.
‘And this is how it is during a match, streams of endless chatter. All in the mind. For me it’s family concerns, for other players it might be… well, God only knows. All that internal noise going on in a silent room. Absolutely bonkers!
‘I’ve learnt to cope with the distractions. Comes with experience, I suppose. I’m not as self-conscious as I once was. I tend to ignore the crowd, take no notice. Although I occasionally think I’ve spotted my nan in the audience. Daft, she’s been dead for years. Sometimes it’s just another old lady: grey hair, glasses, wearing a knitted cardigan. Tends to happen less often; even the grannies are far more glamorous these days. And then at other times, I see her out of the corner of my eye, smiling from the back of the arena. Then, when I look across, she’s gone.
‘She was here tonight, during that last frame. I had to stop briefly and compose
myself; took a sip of water from my glass by my seat. It helped. The ice-cold water soothed me. It was refreshing. I returned to the table to finish the break.
‘Then I thought of lemonade…’
© 2022
Jolyon Walford 