Running: The Autobiography

by Ronnie O'Sullivan

  When she went down it was mad. Everybody kept saying, they won’t put her away because she’s got two kids, and one of them’s a young girl, and she’s paid the VAT. Then, bang! She’s gone down. We were in court and I still couldn’t believe it when they found her guilty.

  I felt so sorry for Mum. She was brave – she just looked at me. I was crying. She’s a strong old girl, like a tiger. She didn’t show any emotion.

  Dad is tougher physically, but I think mentally Mum has become a much stronger person because of having to live in a man’s world. She changed when he went away. She realised she had to be tougher, and I’ve seen a difference in Mum these past 10 years. She won’t take any bollocks from anybody whereas before she’d be so sympathetic to people – too sympathetic. After Dad went down we were a powerful team. She had her business and I had mine.

  Mum had always been willing to help people. Then I noticed the change. And I understand why, perfectly. She’d had enough of running around for me and Dad, and she thought, sod this, I’m getting on with my life – I’m running my business, going on holidays. If they need stuff they can look after themselves.

  She made a conscious decision that a lot of the stuff I was asking her to do I could do for myself. And that was fair enough. She decided to become more selfish. She just got fed up with being a single mum always doing for others, and thought: ‘I need a life of my own.’ I agree with her. In recent years I’ve put my children ahead of my career, and when I look back I think that is probably not the advice I’d give other people. Don’t be held back from what you want to do because you think it’s the right thing to do. In hindsight, I should have just played my snooker and hopefully things would have just worked out over time. Just as I put my life on hold for three years, so did Mum – only for far longer. And she just got sick of it.

  Before she went to prison, Dad had been calling her lots and they’d been having conversations about everything. Then when she went down she saw the big sign on the prison walls saying, all your conversations are being recorded, and she got the hump with Dad then because he’d been telling her all the time on the phone what to do with the money, and where to put it. And when the police came in the house they knew exactly where to look. I think she did blame him partly for the fact that she went down. He couldn’t contain himself, he was so desperate to run his business even when he was in jail, and he ended up implicating Mum. She was angry, and when she was released she reconsidered her life.

  When she came out we were like a couple. We were very close. She had the big house in Chigwell, and loads of people were waiting for her to fall and be forced to sell up. And I thought, no, we’re alright, I’m playing snooker, she’s got her business, we’re doing alright. And that drove me on. I said to Mum, whatever I earn and whatever you earn we’ll buy properties together and expand. Originally, of course, snooker was my business and sex shops was hers, but with the profits we thought we’d build up a little empire of properties and see where we’d go with it. I said, we’ll invest our money cleverly and do it together. And that’s what we did. We always put our money together. I said, what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is yours, and I was probably doing better than she was, but it didn’t matter. She took care of business, managed the company, and I just pumped money into it. We’re still business partners. Obviously, there’s not as much money there now because property prices went up and snooker prize money went down, so my buying power was drastically reduced years ago. Properties were too expensive to buy for what I was earning. So I’ve not really bought anything over the past decade and recently, because of the custody battle, I’ve had to sell a few properties to find money for the lawyers.

  I always know if I need anything Mum will bail me out tomorrow. I trust Mum with my life.

  11

  ME & DAD: OUTSIDE STORY

  ‘In the gym with Terry. He worked me very hard. Was nearly sick.’

  One of the first things Dad and I did when he was home on day release was go for a run. Well, not so much a run, more a jog. It reminded me of all those times he made me pound the streets when I was a kid. But back then he wasn’t keeping me company on foot, he was chasing me with a car!

  When he came out on day release he was overweight – had a belly on him and was a bit jowly. I’m not sure why. For so much of his time in prison he was fit as a fiddle, ripped, and didn’t have a spare ounce on him. Maybe he allowed himself to go to pot in his final months inside.

  The paparazzi managed to get shots of us having our little jog, and it got into the papers. The tabloids love any opportunity they get to tell Dad’s story. In February 2009 the Daily Mail showed him in all his tubby glory with his blue Hackett’s shirt on, blue gloves, shorts and woolly hat under the headline: ‘Snooker champ Ronnie O’Sullivan’s father celebrates freedom after 17 years . . . by going jogging’.

  They reported that Dad was now out on his rehab scheme and that he was due back in jail at the weekend. Dad didn’t give them a quote, of course, but Mum issued a statement through World Snooker saying: ‘We prefer to have our privacy at this time. We just want to be left alone.’

  After day release came weekend release. Then, in 2010, he was finally given his full release on licence – this means that he’s a free man, but if he commits any crime, or doesn’t report to the police station when he’s supposed to, he can be recalled to his life sentence at any time.

  That was a fair old day when Dad was allowed to leave the prison premises for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect. I turned up at Sudbury prison in the East Midlands, pulled up outside, walked over, got Dad and boom! We’re off in the car. It was 2009.

  I could probably play Through the Keyhole with Britain’s prisons, I’ve visited so many of them. At least a dozen, probably more. Sudbury is my favourite – it was open, which meant they were on their way home. It was a lot more relaxed than other prisons. Sudbury was so different from the likes of Long Lartin and Belmarsh, high-security prisons that were prisons within prisons within prisons. As you walked through one set of barriers, you were met by another, then another. For 15 to 16 years I visited Dad in that kind of prison, and you’d feel you were never going to get out of there – even if you were just visiting!

  At Sudbury, there were no gates, no nothing. You could walk out and you’d be on the road. So when I visited him there for the first time it made me realise, if he behaves himself he really is coming home. It was so much more relaxed than anything he’d been in before.

  For me, the worst prison was Brixton – that was proper nasty. They wanted to strip-search me when I went in. I wasn’t keen on that, to be honest. It put me off the place. It felt that they were humiliating me deliberately; just making a show of me.

  Fast forward to Sudbury, and he gets in the car, and I can’t believe it. We’re together again, on the road. Or in the prison car park anyway.

  ‘Well, where d’you wanna go?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I don’t fuckin’ know,’ he said. ‘It’s my first time out in seventeen years!’

  ‘I know a nice hotel where I’ve stayed before. We can go and get a bit of breakfast, read the papers.’

  ‘Yeah, that’ll do,’ Dad said. ‘Let’s go!’

  But we had all day to kill. A day’s a long time, and we didn’t know how to fill it. So we got there, and spent the whole day in the place. Both of us cried. Neither of us cries easily. I’ve only ever seen him shed a tear twice before. The first time was when I came back from Bangkok and he’d been charged with murder. I was crying, and he got choked up when saw that. The only other time I saw him cry was when he got bail, and we were driving up the motorway going to a tournament the day after he got bail. There was a song playing in his car by Deacon Blue, one of those that makes you well up, and I looked at him and he had a tear in his eye. The song was ‘Real Gone Kid’, and it must have felt so personal to him at that moment. It was all about old photos and records, memory and loss – and I suppose at that moment I was his real gone ki
d.

  When we got to the hotel, and he was speaking to Mum for the first time on the phone, he was shaking. Then he let it all go. Mental. I was gutted for him. I thought, this is what prison has done for him – he’s got his freedom, but he’s shaking, crying, an emotional mess. But, then, how else would you be, banged up for the best part of 20 years and your first day out?

  It was tough for me to see because he was my dad and my hero, and all I could think was, it’s me driving the nice car now, it’s me buying the breakfast, it’s me supporting him. It was role reversal, and it didn’t feel right. The last time we’d been together like this was at Blackpool when I was 16 and qualifying for the World Championship, and he was certainly in charge back then.

  After breakfast Dad went and had his hair cut and got a manicure. Then we got a room, and spent the day there, watching the footy, chatting.

  I was nervous because I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know what to do. I was used to him telling me what to do, so it was weird for me to say, well, we’re going here and we’re going to do this and that.

  Ever since he first went away I’d been looking forward to his release. It was what kept me going. Friends, journalists, everybody had spent 18 years asking me when Dad was coming out, and finally the day was drawing near. I suppose my vision of how things would work out was rose-tinted. I thought everything would return back to normal – Dad would be at home, Mum would be cooking for us all, everybody would feel secure, he’d be back running the business, we’d all go up the West End, it would be fun, the house would be busy again, he’d say the right words to me which would make me start playing better. But none of that ever happened.

  The whole family had fantasies about life after prison. Not least Dad, of course. When he wasn’t dreaming of a happy home life, his alternative vision was that he’d go off to Brazil when he came out. ‘You can come to visit me,’ he’d say, ‘but I’m going to have a huge pair of binoculars here, and when you get off the plane if you’ve got any women with you I ain’t seeing you. But if you come on your own, you’re alright.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said. For the final four or five years of his sentence that’s all I heard – when I get out we’ll do this and that. None of it has materialised. Brazil? He’s got a house round the corner in Chigwell.

  Mum made it clear she’s moved on. She changed so much when he was in prison – became an independent woman – that it was always going to be hard to try to resume life as if nothing had happened. Mum was happy with her life, in control of it, and she didn’t want it being disrupted again. Dad had to accept that, and to be fair he did.

  Now he’s started telling me what to do again, and that can also cause problems because I’m used to being independent too, just like Mum. I’ve been self-sufficient for the past 20 years, and even though I make plenty of mistakes I don’t necessarily want anybody to tell me where I’m going wrong. I don’t feel I need to explain myself, yet I find myself doing just that because he’s my dad. He does it all for the best reasons, but it doesn’t always come out the best way.

  Dad doesn’t see the logic in the way I live my life. Maybe because there isn’t that much.

  ‘You’ll always be all over the gaffe,’ he says. ‘You’ll always be a mess. You’ll always have money problems, you’ll always have this . . .’ I suppose I could say, I’m a multiple world snooker champion, I can’t have made that much of a mess of my life, but I don’t bother. Dad likes to rattle cages. I don’t say anything, just go quiet, get out of the door, turn my phone off and go on the missing list for three or four days, get back to my running, play some snooker and get my freedom and sanity back. I know Dad loves me, cares about me and understands me, but sometimes it just all gets a bit too intense.

  Occasionally I think he tries to put me down. And that guts me because I think the world of him, only want the best for him, only try to support him. He knows he can have the shirt off my back. I’ve told him that whatever I’ve got he can have, but sometimes I feel I’m just caught in the middle of him and my mum, in the middle of him and one of my managers when he’s got an issue with them, in the middle when he doesn’t get on with my friends. Dad always makes his feelings known, and it can create tension. The bottom line is, these are my friends, these are the people I work with, this is my mum, and I don’t want to be in the middle. My family mean the world to me, I love them to bits, but I’ve had it with being the middleman. If I can get on with my graft, make my own way, then I can begin to make sense of life. If I’m expected to step in for everyone else, fight their battles, I’ll make a right pig’s bollocks of it, or simply look for the exit door. Push me too far and I’ll run. Or, as Dr Steve says, I’m prone to flight mode.

  My sister Danielle gets on great with Dad. She and Dad are very similar, and it’s been great for her that he’s come out because it’s given her back the father she never really had.

  After Dad was let out for the first time, it became a regular thing. The first time he came to see me was at the Premier League. He was okay that time, but next time he appeared I realised that Dad being at a snooker tournament wasn’t going to be the best thing for me. I had got so used to going on my own, having friends there supporting me, doing my own thing; suddenly having Dad there reminded me of when I was 10 or 11, and he kept telling people what to do.

  ‘Go on, son, get the balls out,’ he’d tell the fella getting the balls out, and it made me feel like a little kid again. It made me feel inadequate. I never said anything to him. I just thought, well, I don’t want him to come to a major event. If I get to the final, then he can come down for the final – he comes down Sunday morning, and it’s over by Sunday night. But having him there every day at a tournament was a no-no.

  I had my routine, my own way of doing things. Anyone who interfered with that I’d get rid of anyway. It’s non-negotiable. I’ve learnt over the years that I’ve got to look after myself first when it comes to the snooker. I don’t care if that’s my mum, my dad, my sister, my kids; if it doesn’t feel right for them to be at the tournament then they’re not going to be there. From the UK Championships onwards, I made the decision that it probably wasn’t best for my career to have Dad around when I was at work, and I thought I’d rather nip it in the bud sooner than later.

  We didn’t really have a chat about it. We didn’t need to because he came out with it first.

  ‘I prefer watching it on the telly anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Result!’ I thought.

  Maybe he knew how I felt and was making it easy for me.

  ‘Them snooker lot are not my cup of tea anyway. I don’t like them,’ he said.

  It’s true: they are a funny old bunch, but I like them. He’s just used to a different world. My dad likes to have a laugh and a joke and push a few buttons, but in snooker they’re not used to doing that. They’re just there to do their job, and that’s it. I learnt to fit in with that world, and it’s not one Dad’s used to. So it’s probably the best decision he could have made for both of us not to come to tournaments with me.

  He’s happy enough with it.

  ‘I can throw things at the telly,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing for the past twenty years, so why should I change now? When you miss, I just chuck something at the telly, and obviously I can’t do that if I’m there at Sheffield or wherever.’

  I think Dad actually misses prison a bit. When we used to have him at home at first, I’d take him back at the end of the day and he’d be back with his mates, and I’d be observing them, and thinking, he’s got a good little set-up here; they think the world of him. That’s not to say he wasn’t desperate to come out, but he had made it home. He had to make it home to survive, and if there’s one thing Dad is it’s a survivor.

  Then, after day release, he’d come out on weekend release. At the end of the weekend it was sad to see him. I remember crying one day when he had to go back because I’d got used to having him around. He was staying at my house, and I was in piec
es when he had to go back.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  ‘I’m just gutted that you’re going. I don’t want you to go back there now.’

  He gave me a big hug and a cuddle. It was difficult. I’d got used to not having him around over the years. Then I got used to having him around and he’d be off again.

  You hear of people who’ve done the kind of time Dad did who never make a life for themselves afterwards. They just don’t know how to live on the outside. Some of them even get themselves back into nick for the security of it, or to see their old mates. So I think Dad has done amazingly. It doesn’t surprise me because he is one of those fellas who will get on no matter what situation you put him in. It’s a fantastic ability to have. I could do with some of that.

  Sometimes I stay overnight at Dad’s and there are periods when I’ll see him every day. I’ve got a little bag there so I can stay over, brush my teeth, do my run from there. He makes me breakfast – boiled eggs on toast. That’s why I eat boiled eggs on toast every day because he started making it for me and the kids. If I don’t have boiled eggs on toast I’m done for; can’t make head or tail of the day. What I like doing with Dad most these days is sitting in his flat, having a cup of tea, watch a bit of sport and get a takeaway – Indian or Chinese. Just chilling.

  By the time Dad got out, Mum had got the old way of life out of her system. She couldn’t have been less interested in nightclubs. Me and Mum are pretty similar. Although she went out partying in the old days, she had Dad there and she was a young girl having fun. Now she looks back at it and thinks she was surrounded by so many vulgar people, and when he went away she saw all the people who’d come round and put drugs on the table and go: ‘Here, Maria, this will get you through your grief.’ She just went, ‘Fuck off with your drugs.’ Mum realised they weren’t the type of people she should be around; they’re rotten human scavengers who’d nick the eyeballs out of your head for a fiver, and she started to keep herself pretty much to herself.