Running: The Autobiography

by Ronnie O'Sullivan

  There’d be times when I’d look around at the people I was with and the places I was in, and think, what am I doing here? I’d go to the toilet and tell myself, you’ve got to get out of here, and I’d get a cab home and be full of self-loathing. I’d have been hanging round with the local knobheads from Chigwell, who’d smoke dope and talk bollocks and think they were smalltime criminals. We’d go to Charlie Chans and Epping Forest Country Club, and now and again we’d go into the West End, but it was all rubbish. I never fitted into that world. I always told myself: ‘Hold on, Ron, you’ll begin to like it at some point because everybody else seems to be having a good time’, but it didn’t work out like that.

  I didn’t understand the discipline you needed to be a good sportsman, despite everything Dad had told me. In my mind I thought you could do all this stuff and still have a successful snooker career. I thought everyone did this with their lives. Eventually I realised they didn’t; that it wasn’t so normal. I was always happy doing my run, playing my snooker, going out for a nice little Chinese or kebab.

  I was in a hotel in Thailand when I was told that Dad had been charged. Mum phoned me in the middle of the night so I knew it had to be serious. Just not this serious.

  ‘Daddy’s been arrested,’ she said. ‘He’s in police custody. He’s been involved in a fight and someone’s been killed.’

  I was in shock, and burst out crying. It turned out Dad had been arrested the previous week. At the time Mum thought it was all a big mistake, and to protect me they shipped me out to the World Amateur Championship in Thailand. Mum thought by the time I got home it would all be sweet and he’d be out. It must have been obvious that the press was about to pick up on it, so Barry Hearn said to Mum, you better tell him before the press does. When she told me, I just collapsed. I was gutted. Desperate.

  Dad hadn’t really been in trouble before, despite working in the porn industry. When he got bail I was convinced he wouldn’t go down – why would they let him out if they thought he was guilty? I was told that if they thought he was guilty they’d be scared he’d do a runner so they wouldn’t give him bail. So all the signs were that he was going to be alright; that it wasn’t a murder, it was just something terrible that happened when two people were in the wrong place at the wrong time. All the signs were that he would get off, but he didn’t.

  Dad pleaded not guilty to the murder of Bruce Bryan, a driver for the East End gangster Charlie Kray. He didn’t only plead not guilty to murder, he said he’d not even stabbed him. Now we obviously know he was there in that Chelsea nightclub and he did stab the fella and attack his brother. He should have just held his hands up, admitted to it, and I think he would have got a few years for manslaughter. What seems to have happened is that Dad and his mates were arguing about who was going to pay the bill (they all wanted to pay!). Bruce Bryan and his brother got the wrong end of the stick and thought they weren’t going to pay at all, and it ended in a row. Dad went round to talk to them, said, let’s sort it out, when one of the fellas lifted an ashtray and went to smash it on his head. Dad put up a hand to protect himself and two of his fingers were severed. That was when Dad picked up the knife on the other side of the bar, and that was that.

  He told me the prosecution offered him manslaughter, and he said, no, he wasn’t taking it. It was stupid, really; pigheaded. He went against the advice he was given. Once he gets something in his head he doesn’t budge. He sticks to his guns. He’s so stubborn. At the time I didn’t realise how the law worked and the significance of his decision not to take a manslaughter plea. But eventually I realised there were people he went down with who’d done worse crimes and who were out within five years. I’d ask how come they got out earlier than him and I’d be told, well, they took a manslaughter, or they pleaded guilty. I thought, Jesus he’s got to do 18 years because he said he wasn’t there and didn’t do it; he’s mad.

  In the end, he was given a longer sentence because the judge ruled it was a racist attack. But that was nonsense – Dad’s always had loads of black friends. It just turned out that the fella he killed was black. Dad says time and again he can never forgive himself for taking a man’s life and causing so much pain to another family.

  At least I was doing well with my snooker. It gave him something to hang on to. In a way, it felt that we did the sentence together. Dad was on the phone a lot, still keeping me in check – what was I doing, who was I practising with, who was I hanging out with? So we still had our relationship when he was in prison. He couldn’t boss me around as much as if he was out, of course – he couldn’t knock on my door and go: ‘Oi, what you up to?’, but there was a respect for him that meant I didn’t want to embarrass him or piss him off.

  ‘Every time you’re on telly, Ron,’ he’d say to me, ‘it’s like I’m getting a visit.’ And I thought, if my playing snooker is the most important thing in his life, I can’t stop playing because that’s all he’s got to hang on to and all he’s got to look forward to.

  So it was always a big motivator for me. That’s his currency, I thought; that’s what’s getting him through; me and my snooker. Even if he was down in the block, segregated for bad behaviour, he could go: ‘Well, I know the UK Championship is on now, he’ll be in Preston, he’ll be doing this’, and he felt that he was doing time with me; I was still there for him. And he would think that when he did finally get out at least he would have known what was going on in my life – there wouldn’t be that much catching up to do. The snooker was Dad’s motivation and mine. Perhaps if he hadn’t been in prison I would have lost my enthusiasm, or sense of purpose.

  Dad used to tell me about the good times in the nick. ‘It’s marvellous, three meals a day, lots of exercise, watching plenty of telly, reading my papers, fantastic,’ he’d say. ‘It’s not all bad, this prison.’ But he was putting on a front. He hated being away from the family – especially the first 10 years of his sentence when he often got himself in trouble for being mouthy. The other day he admitted it for the first time.

  ‘The trouble with me, Ronnie, was that I couldn’t do my bird. Couldn’t accept it. I had verbal diarrhoea towards officers and towards authority in general because I had my life taken away from me. I lost my wife, my kids, my business, my liberty. The fact that I was so verbal wasn’t a sign of my confidence, it was the opposite.’ What he said next touched me. I’d never thought he really listened to what I said to him, but he told me that just wasn’t true. ‘When I had eight or nine years left you came to me and said, you’ve got to slow down a bit now, things are good. Then the penny dropped. I became institutionalised, didn’t challenge everything, and I could do my prison a lot earlier.’

  Dad says it took him a long time to learn how to talk to people and how to approach them, but once he worked it out it made doing his time so much easier. ‘You can’t make people feel uncomfortable, and if you want something done you’ve got to persuade them rather than tell them. If you’re going to talk to somebody who’s a bit of a bully on the wing you don’t walk into a cell with a pair of trainers, a top and a hat on because you’re looking for a fight. But if you walk in with your dressing gown and your flip-flops and sit down and chat, as soon as they spin round they see you’re not dressed for a fight. So I learnt that over time. If you stick your chin out in jail, they’ll whack it. And I had my chin whacked loads of times in there, but then I grew up. I read books and stuff. A lot of psychology books.’

  Even now, he’ll say: ‘We had some great times in prison’, and he’ll tell me some of the stories and I’ll think, come on, Dad, they don’t sound that great to me. He’d talk about the times down the block when they’re trying to pin a fag to a piece of string and throw it over the line, and there’s this great excitement when one of them gets it. ‘All this for a fag! And that’s what got you through – after 10 days down the block nothing matters. Everything goes. You don’t bother about your appearance, brushing your teeth, your telly’s gone. Your papers have gone.’ He sounded nostalgic when he
talked about it. ‘I ripped all my photos up. Even pictures of you,’ he’d say. ‘If I’ve not got photos up, nobody can rip them up, and they can’t do you emotionally. You just go, fuck it and put it out of your mind. When you get through it and you’ve been moved on you come out feeling jubilant that you’ve got through.’ It’s a test of mental endurance down the block. I could understand the satisfaction he got from that, but I thought, I’d rather be out here having a bad day than in there having a good one.

  For his first decade inside he was a rebel, never one for accepting rules or bowing to authority. It was always: ‘No, this is what I’m doing, take it or leave it.’ You’ve got to stand up for yourself in prison, fight your corner now and again, but I think he had more of a reputation for looking after people. He’d take the new boys aside, and advise them – ‘Do this, don’t do that, don’t do that, do this, and you’ll be alright.’ And things tended to run pretty smoothly after that. He wasn’t a piss-taker; people said they could rely on Dad inside.

  His currency was phone cards. He’d see a fella wearing a T-shirt he liked. ‘I want that T-shirt, here’s twenty phone cards,’ he’d say.

  ‘Lovely, sweet!’ they’d say. And it was a deal.

  He bought phone cards, he sold phone cards and most of all he used phone cards to call home.

  People would send him money in prison and he’d buy up all the phone cards with it. He’d buy the cards off people who didn’t want them – lots of people didn’t have anyone to ring, and they’d much rather have a bit of money sent off to their mum or sisters. He said: ‘I’ll have everyone’s phone cards in here, and there’s nothing nobody can do about it.’

  Dad’s always been sociable, a talker. Whenever he rang anybody it wasn’t a quick hello or goodbye, you got the full 20 minutes. He phoned me when I was in Thailand and he had 40 phone cards on the floor. The screws saw him, and he was putting one in after the other, and they said, right we’ve got him, and sent him off down the block.

  It was a little business really. He’d get people’s phone cards, and say to the people working in his shops: ‘Okay, take this address down, send a few quid here, send a few quid there’, and that’s what we did. The shops were still going so there was plenty of money about. ‘Tony put that there, Darbo put that there’, and they’d just do it.

  At one of the prisons his nickname was Chairman Ron. It meant we didn’t have to send anything in for him. He’d just see things he liked and buy them – tops, jeans, radios. It was a good way of doing business and saved us time. Whenever he saw anything he fancied, he’d just go: ‘I like that. How many d’you want for it?’ So he’d barter phone cards as well as stock them up for his own use.

  Prisons fill me with dread. I became so used to them they were like a second home. But not a happy home. I always hated them – as soon as I went in on a visit, I felt trapped. It was like the end of the world; doom and gloom, end of freedom, nowhere to go. Horrible.

  I also did a few exhibitions in prisons. They would never let me do an exhibition where Dad was because it could be seen as favouritism, so now and again I’d do it for one or two of the other boys he knew. One time I was doing an exhibition at a young offenders’ prison in Doncaster; they showed me round the wings and I was stunned by how quiet it was. They were having their breakfast and there wasn’t a sound. Eerie. Other times on the wings it was so loud and echoey that it sounded like a madhouse.

  I did one exhibition at Wormwood Scrubs with Jimmy White. We were there for one of Jimmy’s mates. They all loved Jimmy of course, but I was new on the block back then. That was mental. It reminded me of the film Scum. Really intimidating. There were all these screws, but even more inmates and I thought, any minute now this lot could overthrow this jail. There must have been about 100 prisoners watching me and Jimmy play. I kept thinking of that scene in Scum when Ray Winstone smacks another inmate in the face with the pool ball hidden in the sock. I was a bit scared, I have to admit. You just don’t know what could happen in a situation like that. Charles Bronson might think: ‘Hey, here’s my next victim!’ Don’t think I’d fancy making the front pages for that reason.

  But when I went in there, they were like: ‘Go on, Ronnie!’ I had great support from the prison world. I felt I wasn’t just playing for Dad, I was playing for most of the fellas in the nick. ‘When you won the world title that first time, Ron,’ Dad said, ‘every prisoner was banging on the doors.’ When he told me that, it really hit me. Even though they were in their cells, they were rooting for Dad, and me. They felt like I was one of them; that Ronnie’s done it for us. He said the wing was buzzing for weeks after my victory. Months even. It was the talking point for so long afterwards.

  Jimmy was great in the Scrubs, but then he’s great wherever he goes. They all love him – he’s got that charm, everyone just wants a piece of Jimmy, he’ll fit in everywhere. We played about an hour in the Scrubs and they were all buzzing. They were quite far away from the table – I wasn’t sure if that was for safety reasons or it was just the way it had to be done. I looked round me and thought again, there are fewer screws than prisoners and they’re taking a bit of a chance here. This lot could overrun the jail if they want to. I was just there to do a good deed for somebody, but a good deed could always turn into somebody else’s opportunity. In the end, things were fine, and I was glad we’d gone in.

  The more you go into prisons the more you realise that a lot of those in jail are not bad people, they just get caught on the other side of the law, often because of the way they’ve been brought up, lack of education, or just the world they live in. Don’t get me wrong: some of them are lunatics who would be a menace out on the streets, but loads are just unlucky or made one stupid decision in life.

  As for me, I’m terrified of breaking the law. Maybe it’s something to do with what happened to Mum and Dad. I’m scared to breathe sometimes in case I get done for it. I just don’t like trouble. In general, if I get a gas bill and don’t pay it straightaway I start to panic and think I’m going to have the bailiffs around.

  World Snooker threatened with me everything for not turning up to tournaments – you’re in breach of this rule, in breach of that rule, we don’t believe you’ve got glandular fever, we need another doctor’s letter; no, that one isn’t good enough, we’ve got our own independent doctor we want you to go and see. In the end, I got panic attacks every time I had to meet up with World Snooker. I felt they were out to get me, and in the end I thought, I don’t want this in my life; it’s causing me too much stress.

  All the legal stuff in the custody battle terrified me as well. If I could avoid that, whatever the cost, I would. Again, I got to the point where I just wanted to get away from it all. And I did just that by staying at home for a year, running, cooking and becoming a hermit. One of my greatest pleasures in life is cooking – a nice spicy Indian or a Chinese. I’ve learnt so much about cooking from two friends in particular – Django and Damien Hirst. When I wasn’t playing the lawyers seemed to lose interest in me, as well. Their attitude seemed to be, well he’s not earning, he’s got no money, he’s no good to us.

  The truth is I’m not built for conflict. I know I seem to have found plenty in my time, but I don’t think I ever seek it out. It’s not me. Having said that, I’m not built for being nailed down either. You nail me down, you kill me. You try to squeeze me, and I’ll run away. Sometimes I feel as if I’m being suffocated – often by people who haven’t got my best interests at heart (lawyers, hangers-on, certain agents) and sometimes by people who genuinely do love me. I feel like so much of my life is running – running from lawyers, agents, hangers-on, running from World Snooker, even running from the family at times. I’m running from everything.

  There are times when I feel alone, and I think I need Mum. So I’ll go there, and it’s all good for a couple of weeks, then she gets on my nerves and I get on hers. She won’t have hot water or the heating on ’cos she’s always trying to save on bills. After a week of freezing a
t Mum’s I start to think I need my own home. Then I’d go to stay with Dad and run away because he’s always telling me what to do. In the end I’ll be thinking, right, time for a break, I’m going to Sheffield where I’ll do my runs, get left alone and do my snooker. Whenever I want to get away from stuff, I go up north because the people are so much friendlier and you’re out of the rat race. ‘Have a brew, duck!’ As soon as I hear that I think, I’m in safe hands.

  I suppose it’s that classic thing – can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Yet as a family, we couldn’t be closer. The fact that we can’t bear to live more than a mile apart says it all. Mum, Dad, me and Danielle, all in different houses in Chigwell, down the road from each other.

  I often think of me and Dad as a team. But perhaps me and Mum have been an even closer team because of circumstances. When Dad went down, she was in effect a single mum and Danielle was still a little girl. Then, a couple of years later, when I was 19 and Danielle was 12, disaster struck.

  Weirdly, I was in Thailand again when I heard what had happened. My mate gave me a ring.

  ‘Ron, I’ve got some bad news for you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your mum’s in nick. They’ve taken her away for tax dodging.’

  ‘You’re having a laugh, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not. Little Danielle’s with us, and they’re holding your mum at Lime Street police station.’

  When I discovered Mum was going down I couldn’t believe it. The investigation into Mum took place just after Dad went down. They watched our house for 18 months, and by the time they raided it they had everything they needed. I remember thinking, they really are out to get the family. It was like, right, we’ve got him, let’s now destroy her.