Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  On the Westminster front line, this kind of talk was unthinkable. Not only were Labour publicly committed to reducing ‘unemployment to below a million within five years of taking office’, a target no serious observer thought remotely plausible, but even Mrs Thatcher never admitted that full employment had gone for good. Yet few people were fooled. When Mass Observation asked correspondents about their expectations for the future, almost all thought mass unemployment was here to stay. ‘I think it will still be 2½–3½ million in 1990,’ wrote Chelmsford’s Stephen Berry, an architectural technician. Higher unemployment was ‘inevitable in this day of micro chip electronics’, agreed Sheila Parkin, who worked in a camping shop. ‘I hope that unemployment will decrease,’ wrote Carol Daniel, a supermarket shelf-stacker, ‘but to be honest the robot will put more out of work, because it is cheaper to run machines than pay men … The only thing that will reduce unemployment short of a mirical [sic] is another war, and if that is a nucular [sic] war then unemployment will be a luxury.’46

  Even the Basildon depot supervisor Peter Hibbitt, a great admirer of Tony Benn, agreed that Britain was ‘going to live with a steadily rising amount of unemployment’, whether people liked it or not:

  There is no ‘if’ about large-scale, long-term unemployment. Structured unemployment will be as essential a part of the economy as jobs …

  The Empress of Westminster only wants ‘real jobs’, so that rules out a new set of Hell Fire Caves or a British Hoover Dam. The chances of retraining a shipyard plater, a coal miner or a foundryman into micro-electronics seem at best remote and the sort of brain which can accept eight hours a day on the assembly line is not ideal for a crash course in quantum mechanics or atomic physics: ergo structured unemployment …

  Before we can go any way along the road of providing for the unemployed, the politicians must admit that there is nothing they can, or want to, do about unemployment … Only then can we look at the workforce and find out who really wants to work and who would be prepared to be left to their own devices with adequate financial provision.

  Intriguingly, Peter thought the government should arrange for the unemployed to do part-time jobs that ‘make Britain unique for the foreign tourist … bell-ringing teams, Morris dancing sides, village bands, cottage gardeners, pub piano players, darts teams, singers, comedians’. This was, to say the least, an unconventional view, though no less realistic than many politicians’ solutions. ‘The future of Britain’, Peter wrote, ‘lies in the Tower of London, Stratford on Avon, Widecombe in the Moor, assorted cathedrals, Morris dancers and Ye Olde Worlde Tea Shoppes.’ He was exaggerating, of course. But he was not entirely wrong.47

  20

  Potting the Reds

  As soon as I got a cue in my hand, I knew I was the business at something. And it changed my whole life … I went from being an also-ran, you know, a clerical worker or something.

  Steve Davis, interviewed in the Daily Mirror, 26 June 1981

  We went to Bangkok with Steve Davis and they went mad there. Mad. There was 40 foot high posters of Davis all over Bangkok. It was like being in Romford High Street.

  Barry Hearn, interviewed in The Times, 29 April 1983

  The date was Monday 20 April 1981, and at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield a pale young man from south London was poised to seize his destiny. On television sets across the country, the picture showed him sitting in his starched white shirt, trim black waistcoat and wide bow tie, his thin face apparently lost in thought, as the referee prepared the table for the decisive frame. ‘Steve Davis sits there,’ said the BBC’s Ted Lowe, ‘waiting for the most important frame of his young career.’ Sixteen utterly hypnotic minutes later, the stillness of the crowd almost suffocating in its intensity, he was almost there. ‘Can he slam this blue into the top pocket?’ whispered Lowe, and as the ball disappeared, the spectators let out a great roar of relief and triumph. ‘He’s breathing heavily’, said Lowe, with just a hint of excitement, ‘as he comes down to this final pink’ – and then, almost casually, Davis swept it into the corner pocket. ‘And that’s it! The world snooker champion 1981 – Steve Davis!’

  On screen, the new champion just stood there, his eyes closed in private contemplation, the cheers echoing around the Crucible. Then he caught sight of someone coming from the crowd, and broke into a boyish grin as the newcomer wrapped him in a bear hug and punched the air with delight. ‘Congratulations for the Embassy world champion from his manager, Barry Hearn!’ said Lowe. ‘His friends, of course, climbing around – Barry Hearn’s wife gives him a big hug and a kiss. The young man, just 23 years of age, coming from Plumstead, London, is now, I believe, crying with joy at taking this title.’ The television pictures showed Davis brushing away tears before taking a small sip of water. A moment later, when the BBC’s David Vine asked, ‘Has it sunk in yet?’ he shook his head in shock, and murmured: ‘Jesus Christ.’ But even amid the heady rush of victory, Steve Davis never forgot where he came from. His first thanks went to the sponsors, the tobacco firm Embassy, and the event’s promoter, Mike Watterson, and then there were warm words for ‘all the people from Romford and from Plumstead’ who had supported him. ‘But most of all,’ he said, ‘I’d like to thank me mum and me dad, and Barry and Susan’ – and it was then that his voice cracked, and emotion overcame him.1

  Outside the snooker world, Steve Davis had been relatively unknown before the spring of 1981. But now all that changed. With the back pages full of the violent excesses of England’s football supporters, here was the perfect antidote: a polite, good-humoured young man whose meteoric rise had been a monument to the virtues of hard work and self-improvement. As The Times’s snooker writer Sydney Friskin put it, Davis’s ‘boyish freshness and enjoyment’ had already ‘made him one of the more popular players in the world’. Even his astonishing self-control, which later encouraged people to mock him as boring, seemed excitingly novel. For the Express, he was ‘the kid from Plumstead with a nerve as impenetrable as Don Bradman’s’. Indeed, the papers in April 1981 regarded him as distinctly interesting, lapping up stories about his reassuringly ordinary fondness for bacon sandwiches or his addiction to playing Space Invaders in his hotel suite, ‘in which he knocks down all the green mutants with the same accuracy as he applies to the snooker ball’.

  Even Davis’s biography became a kind of morality story, a parable in the virtues of hard work and filial duty. Born in Plumstead, south London, in 1957, the son of a London Transport depot worker, he had been given a toy snooker table as a Christmas present when he was 2. After Davis started school, his father bought him a half-size table, which they installed on top of the dining table. But even then, as one profile noted, ‘Davis’s father insisted that he cued properly and played by the rules, which probably accounts for his self-discipline and perfect cue action’. By Davis’s teens he had become a regular at his father’s working men’s club, where he immediately stood out. There too, observed The Times, ‘parental influence taught him to play the game in the right spirit’. It was no coincidence, the paper thought, that in his victory speech at Sheffield, ‘he did not forget to thank his parents, as well as his manager, Barry Hearn’.2

  Nobody doubted that Davis would become a superstar. He had piled up some £50,000 in prize money since the beginning of 1981, and the only question was whether he would ever stop. ‘Now that he has won the title he’s going to be very hard to beat in anything,’ remarked his vanquished opponent, the gallant Welshman Doug Mountjoy, who thought Davis was ‘at least a black ball better than any of us’. The snooker writer Clive Everton went even further. ‘In his dedication, temperate habits, appetite for his chosen game, temperament and, in match play, his ability to reduce avoidable mistakes to a minimum, Davis resembles Bjorn Borg,’ he told readers of the Guardian, explaining that his ‘sharp brain’ meant there was a ‘sense of inevitability’ before his matches had even started.

  The only thing that could stop him, Everton thought, was the commercial pressure that came w
ith his newfound prominence. After all, the young man was already the registered owner of three limited companies and had been deluged with inquiries ‘regarding television commercials, sponsorship and other spin-offs’. Within hours of Davis’s victory, Barry Hearn was openly boasting that he could make his client £200,000 in the next twelve months. ‘We’ve got it geared up to the ceiling,’ he said gleefully. ‘Davis’s manager does not want him merely to be the world champion,’ explained The Times. ‘He wants to turn him into a living legend.’3

  A decade earlier, the notion of a snooker player as a ‘living legend’ would have seemed completely absurd. Footballers became legends. Cricketers, rugby players, tennis champions, racing drivers, even jockeys became legends. But snooker players? Snooker was an old man’s game, the game of seedy back-street clubs, down-at-heel holiday camps and shabby smoke-filled halls. The senior professionals were like ghosts trapped in a world of Brylcreem and blazers, while the first truly modern snooker tournament, the 1972 world championship, was organized in conditions of almost laughable amateurishness. Even the final, which took place at a British Legion club in Birmingham, was played in risibly ramshackle conditions. Thanks to the miners’ strike, there was no electricity, so the action took place under the gloomy light from a mobile generator. ‘Beer supplies held up,’ recalled Clive Everton, ‘but toilet facilities proved sadly inadequate.’

  Years later, the writer Gordon Burn remembered the scene: ‘hundreds of men’, clutching their pints in the near-darkness, ‘hunched forward on hundreds of chairs stacked on beer crates’, their ‘boilersuits, haversacks, kit-bags and overalls’ dumped in a huge pile in the corner. There were no cameras and no Fleet Street reporters, and to cap it all there was no serious sponsorship money either. The winner, the 22-year-old tearaway Alex Higgins, walked away with a mere £480. One evening during the final, which was played over five days, Higgins introduced himself to West Bromwich Albion’s star midfielder Asa Hartford in a local curry house. Hartford had never heard of him.4

  What transformed snooker’s fortunes was television. In July 1969 BBC2 had begun showing a single-frame tournament entitled Pot Black, designed to exhibit its new colour technology. The show’s presiding genius was the commentator, ‘Whispering’ Ted Lowe, who made the players sign contracts obliging them to wear dinner jackets. ‘That’s where the clean-cut came from and where the old ladies came into it,’ Lowe told Gordon Burn. ‘I brought the women and the children and all the other people who had never thought about watching a game of snooker, whatever your Barry Hearns and all the rest of them might claim today.’ There was a lot of truth in this. Even at this early stage, the Sunday Telegraph’s Philip Purser thought the sight of snooker players in their dinner jackets made for a tremendous ‘change from the hysterical pooves of the football field’.

  But there was more to snooker’s success than old-fashioned outfits. Crucially, it needed a television-friendly venue, and it was here that a Chesterfield car distributor called Mike Watterson came in. A former England amateur international who had since moved into snooker promotion, Watterson thought the game needed a more theatrical, upmarket image. If nothing else, he was sick of sitting on ‘planks on beer crates’. All he needed was the right place, and when his wife returned one night from the theatre, she told him that she had found it.5

  In April 1977 Watterson arranged to rent Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre for two weeks for £6,600. He then persuaded the snooker authorities to let him promote the world championship, putting up £17,000 in prize money and striking a deal with Embassy, who had already dabbled with sponsoring the event the year before. But there was one more element before the picture was complete: proper lighting. In the first half of the 1970s, the gigantic lights required for Pot Black’s colour broadcasts had been so intense that the players were blinded by the glare from the balls and the sweat pouring down their faces. Some even burned their hands on the tables’ Formica cushion rails. So when, in 1978, the BBC agreed to broadcast Watterson’s tournament live from the Crucible, it devised a ‘glare-free, shadowless canopy of lights’, so that the players would feel as comfortable as if they were practising at home.

  Showing so much snooker was a gamble; one writer joked that ‘it could be a subversive experiment in mass hypnosis’. But on the first evening, 5 million people tuned in to BBC2, far more than anybody had expected. ‘We opened the champagne when we got the first week’s viewing figures,’ the producer remarked. ‘But we were premature. As the tournament went on, the audience simply kept growing.’ Backstage, reported the Guardian, the players were thrilled that ‘the game is at last being shown properly’, and excited by the prospect of a ‘whole new future’. Even the veteran Fred Davis, who had played in his first world championship in 1937, shared their excitement. One of the greatest players in the game’s history, he had toiled in obscurity for decades. But now, he said, ‘what the public are getting here is the feel of what it is like playing under that pressure, hour after hour, for days on end’.6

  The BBC’s experiment could hardly have been better timed. Snooker exploded into the public consciousness at precisely the moment when better-established sports were struggling, whether from falling attendances, crowd violence, boring play, abysmal sportsmanship or all of them at once. Only a few months before the BBC began its live coverage, England’s football fans had rioted in Luxembourg, the first major hooligan incident involving the national team abroad. By the time Steve Davis won his first world title, football’s terminal decline had become a staple of the sports pages. But Britain’s other team sports seemed in poor shape, too. The major rugby story of 1980 was the savage Five Nations clash between England and Wales at Twickenham, disfigured almost from the first minute by brutal fighting. Amazingly, only one player – Wales’s Paul Ringer – was sent off, but six more needed stitches for various wounds. ‘It was like war on the field and like M*A*S*H in the dressing room,’ said the England doctor afterwards, a remark quoted in the Mirror under the sensitive headline ‘SOMEONE WILL DIE’.7

  For The Times, petulance and misbehaviour were becoming all too frequent, not just in rugby, but in ‘tennis and even women’s squash rackets’, thanks to the influence of international superstars such as John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase. Even cricket, the paper lamented, had ‘fallen prey to barbarism, with umpires defied and reviled’. As it happened, the summer of 1980 brought the perfect example: the ‘bitter disappointment’ of the much-anticipated Centenary Test between England and Australia at Lord’s. That the game was blighted by driving rain was bad enough; the real story, though, was an extraordinary altercation on the third day, when frustrated MCC members, who had been drinking heavily during a rain delay, got into a fight with one of the umpires. Wisden called it a ‘disgrace not only to English cricket but to the game in general’, while The Times lamented that ‘the language and behaviour of the football hooligan has at last invaded the home of English cricket’. The great W. G. Grace, the writer thought, ‘would turn in his grave at the thought’.8

  Against this background, snooker’s administrators made great efforts to emphasize its courtesy and sportsmanship, symbolized by the players’ smart dark waistcoats. Indeed, for such a modern product it seemed to offer a soothingly old-fashioned antidote to the contemporary world. Hour after hour, day after day, the camera’s gaze was trained on a small rectangle of green baize, the silence broken only by the soft click of the balls or a rare burst of applause. Here, as the Guardian had predicted, was the stuff of mass hypnosis. Watching from his flat in Orkney, the writer George Mackay Brown waxed lyrical about snooker’s gentle rhythms: ‘the slight subtle touch of ball on ball; the wild foray that sets them in a scatter, helter-skelter’. You simply could not look away, he thought, from the shifting dots of colour on the bright green baize. ‘Exciting and soothing at the same time’, snooker had found the perfect television formula. Here was a sport built on stillness, an exercise in metronomic nothingness.

  The contrast with football’s restle
ss histrionics could hardly have been more glaring. ‘The atmosphere is quiet, there is a kind of gentlemanly approach which people like – no punch-ups or bad manners,’ explained one BBC producer. Even Ted Lowe’s hushed voice – ‘by turns sonorous and sentimental, laced with malapropisms and ancient locutions, redolent of dog-baskets and antimacassars over uncut moquette … a voice which the Queen Mother would be pleased to entertain to tea’, according to Gordon Burn – seemed a throwback to a slower, gentler age. Yet Lowe’s real gift was his willingness to say nothing at all. When he was taken ill during a match in the mid-1980s, the BBC simply carried on broadcasting for the next eight minutes, and nobody noticed.9

  What also made snooker a perfect fit for the 1980s was that it was a game of individuals. Even the way it was filmed – the novelist A. S. Byatt wrote of the ‘suffering and exulting faces briefly picked out by the cameras’ – emphasized the sense of personal confrontation. As The Times remarked, it was a producer’s dream, with two central characters and a ‘tight, intimate drama of competition’, giving millions of viewers the sense of being ‘grouped closely around the table, squinting at the angles over the players’ shoulders’. And, as luck would have it, snooker at the turn of the decade was blessed with a cast of immediately recognizable characters, each with his own easily caricatured style and personality, and often even with his own nickname.10