Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  One great favourite, for example, was Ray Reardon, a Welsh miner’s son from Tredegar who followed his father down the pit, survived being buried alive in a rockfall for three hours, served as a Staffordshire policeman and turned professional at the age of 35. An immensely affable man, Reardon cut a memorably vampiric figure: thanks to his trademark widow’s peak, most people called him ‘Dracula’. Yet not even he could compete in the public imagination with the rebellious Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, a Belfast boy whose father had never learned to read and write, and who had first sailed to England as a teenager in a doomed effort to become a jockey. Higgins, said his first manager, had only three vices: ‘drinking, gambling and women’. To the tabloids, he was the ‘People’s Champion’. ‘He gets sacks of fan mail,’ remarked Mike Watterson in 1981, rather ungallantly adding: ‘God knows why women are attracted to him. He’s got a face like five miles of unmade road.’ But despite his natural talent, Higgins’s record was pretty disappointing. By the spring of 1982, struggling to kick his addiction to vodka, he was crying himself to sleep in a private clinic in Lancashire. Yet he still found the energy to pour scorn on Steve Davis’s habit of sipping water during his matches. ‘He’ll be haunted by me’, Higgins said contemptuously, ‘till I’m carried out in a little brown box.’11

  It was entirely typical of Higgins’s story that, having apparently hit rock bottom, he arose from his sickbed to defeat Reardon and win the 1982 world championship. Equally typical was the fact that he won it on a diet of ‘vitamin pills, milk and Mackeson’s [stout]’, surrounded himself with ‘sacred hearts, mementos and good-luck charms’ and greeted his victory by bursting into tears. In his own words, he was a ‘bit like George Best, only my fairy story has a happy ending’. The comparison with the ill-fated Best was only too apposite. In the years that followed there were so many lurid headlines that it was impossible to keep track. Higgins was accused of lying, cheating and fighting; of snorting cocaine, punching and head-butting tournament officials; and even of threatening to arrange the murder of his fellow Northern Irishman Dennis Taylor. ‘I come from Shankill and you come from Coalisland,’ he reportedly said, ‘and the next time you are in Northern Ireland I will have you shot.’

  Yet none of this dented his popularity. Like Best before him, and like Paul Gascoigne and Ronnie O’Sullivan afterwards, Higgins seemed all the more human precisely because he was so flawed, an attention-seeking man-child adrift in a multimillion-pound industry. Like other ‘troubled’ sportsmen, he was a one-man soap opera, with more sex and violence than Crossroads, Coronation Street and Brookside put together. ‘I’ve been waiting for Higgins to be destroyed for years. He’s looking worse and worse,’ the promoter Barry Hearn remarked. ‘But the fact is: people like watching the process. This is what I think is one of the biggest things in the game.’12

  If snooker needed Higgins, it also needed his antithesis. That was where Steve Davis came in. Right from the start, Fleet Street presented him as everything his rival was not. Higgins was the brilliantly talented but disastrously wayward Irishman, Davis the politely reserved but devastatingly effective Englishman. ‘His potting is now remorselessly exact, his manner calm and reassuring,’ declared The Times in December 1980. ‘Like his play his dress is neat and tidy. His intellect is sharp but tempered with modesty.’ At this stage, most readers had probably never seen him play, yet already his image was established. ‘Immaculate and quite unmoved’, the Express called him. It might have been talking about a Victorian officer facing down a native rebellion.13

  To some extent, of course, this was a caricature. Despite Davis’s reputation as the most boring man in Britain, he was, as Clive Everton recalled, a ‘wry, self-deprecating and shrewd’ man, as well as a future president of the British Chess Federation. Yet there was a kernel of truth in the caricature, too. What made Davis a household name was not just that he kept winning but that he did so in such ruthlessly methodical style, a metronomic champion for a metronomic game. Every sip of water, every chalking of his cue, every purse of his lips seemed perfectly calculated. Like other national sporting icons of the early 1980s, such as Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson, Davis had an insatiable appetite for self-improvement. ‘If I had to choose between sex and snooker, I’d choose snooker,’ he once told Woman magazine. ‘Snooker is my justification, my fulfilment.’ Alex Higgins would never have said that.14

  Davis was not, however, unbeatable. When he returned to the Crucible to defend his title in 1982, he crashed out in the first round, humiliated 10–1 by Tony Knowles. The snooker sages gave knowing nods. Just as they had feared, Davis had burned himself out on an exhausting commercial treadmill, which had reportedly earned him a staggering £600,000 in just twelve months. A year later, though, he thrashed Cliff Thorburn in the final to regain his crown, and in 1984 he secured a third title by narrowly defeating Jimmy White. Yet something had changed. It was the swashbuckling White – a man, in Simon Barnes’s words, with ‘the air of the second underfootman given to taking crafty swigs from the Madeira bottle’ – who was the popular favourite now, not ‘boring old Steve Davis … as inexorable as death’. As the Express reported, ‘there is a belief in snooker that the sooner the 26-year-old millionaire loses his aura of invincibility the better it will be for the game’.15

  There was, of course, another reason the public were turning against Steve Davis. Snooker had made him rich. Within a couple of years of winning the world title, Davis had graduated from an old Austin Maxi to a Porsche and a Cadillac, the latter fitted with ‘colour TV, quadraphonic stereo, refrigerator and dark tinted windows’. He was not merely an exceptional sportsman but an exceptional business, cashing in on the transformation in snooker’s image. Even before Davis’s first world title, Alex Higgins was making an estimated £5,000 a week and routinely demanded £500 for newspaper interviews. By 1982 international firms such as Yamaha and Lada had joined the rush to sponsor snooker, while Davis had signed a £300,000 deal to promote Courage bitter. Three years later, he was raking in three times as much from endorsements, an estimated £600,000 a year, than he was from tournament prize money. For personal appearances he charged £4,000 a night; by contrast, the increasingly unreliable Higgins was stuck on £400. And to every engagement, Barry Hearn sent an employee in the ‘Stevemobile’ to sell pens, posters, key rings and videos. Nothing was left to chance; no opportunity was turned down.16

  Even in April 1981 almost every profile of Steve Davis mentioned his manager. As journalists invariably pointed out, Hearn was a walking advertisement for Thatcherite entrepreneurship. Born on a council estate in Dagenham, Essex, in 1948, the son of a bus driver, he had started his working life washing cars and selling vegetables before training as an accountant and investing in a string of run-down billiard halls on the north-eastern fringes of London. It was at his Romford hall that Hearn first came across the teenage Davis, becoming his manager and mentor. It was Hearn who persuaded Davis’s parents that their young prodigy could make a career in professional snooker. From that moment on, this competitive, ambitious, immensely ebullient man never looked back. When The Times interviewed Hearn at the 1983 world championship, it found him planning a move into the Far Eastern market, his face ‘ruddy with costly tan’, his suit ‘richly heavy’ and his silk tie ‘too new to make a tight knot’. Why had he just accepted a huge bid for his London snooker halls? ‘I got greedy,’ Hearn said, ‘I couldn’t resist.’ Was he enjoying life on the road? ‘It’s fun,’ he said. ‘We have a fabulous time.’ His clients, he said, were ‘going to gross a million quid this year. That’s fabulous, isn’t it?’17

  Hearn’s importance to Steve Davis, and indeed to British snooker, can hardly be overstated. For although Davis’s drive came from within, his image was largely his manager’s creation. As Davis remembered, Hearn persuaded him that ‘courtesy, politeness, smart presentation and always being on time for an appointment would help me get to the top’. Under Hearn’s direction, he cut his hair, changed his car, ditched his pr
og-rock T-shirts and even changed his handshake, previously ‘very weak’, but now firm enough to ‘let ’em know you’re gonna be the guvnor’. It was Hearn who persuaded him to dress in black away from the table and advised him to ‘work on his facial expressions’ to show no emotion, even when under intense pressure. Some people, wrote Gordon Burn, saw Davis as a puppet, his every remark ‘rehearsed and, if possible, scripted in advance’. But he always knew exactly what he was doing. In Burn’s words, Davis and Hearn were ‘equal partners in a business they have built up from scratch’. Given how much money they were making, the analogy was perfectly chosen.18

  Snooker was not, of course, the only game to seize the public imagination at the turn of the 1980s. Darts had emerged from much the same working-class world of pubs and clubs, and was similarly rebranded as a clash of colourful personalities. The first world darts championship was held in Stoke-on-Trent in 1978 and sponsored, like the snooker championship, by Embassy. By 1980 some 10 million people were watching as Eric Bristow, the famously crafty Cockney, beat Bobby George to win his first world title. But darts remained firmly working-class; the players, who would have looked absurd in snooker’s waistcoats, wore short-sleeved shirts and drank beer, not water, between throws. To some extent they never escaped from their caricature in Not the Nine O’Clock News, in which Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones play two darts players, Dai ‘Fat Belly’ Gutbucket and Tommy ‘Even Fatter Belly’ Belcher, who compete by downing pints and shots. (‘That’s a good start for Fat Belly,’ says Rowan Atkinson’s commentator: ‘two doubles and a pint.’) As a result, darts never came close to competing with snooker for sponsorship, endorsements or prize money. When Bristow won his final world title in 1986, the prize money had risen to £20,000. By this time, though, snooker’s world champion, the unheralded Joe Johnson, was picking up £70,000, the equivalent of £250,000 today.19

  As a working-class game that had supposedly sold its soul to television producers and advertising men, snooker made an obvious target for those who thought modern Britain knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Even the entrepreneurs behind the snooker boom – Watterson, a former Vauxhall car distributor, and Hearn, an Essex-born accountant – might have been chosen specifically to infuriate the kind of people who lamented that the country was being run by a shopkeeper’s daughter and a Cabinet of estate agents. Even so, it is astonishing how quickly critics began complaining that snooker had sold out, especially given how downbeat it had been before Watterson hired the Crucible. By 1983, wrote the journalist Neil Lyndon, ‘middle-aged men in shabby suits could often be overheard … condoling with one another and saying, “All the pleasure’s gone, hasn’t it? It’s all so serious now. There’s too much money involved.”’ Many of them, Lyndon thought, were men who had fallen in love with the game back in the days of beer crates and mobile generators. They felt ‘unhappy about the speeding changes’ and pined for ‘the vanished innocence in which they were more comfortable’.20

  Among them, surprisingly, were some of the biggest names in the sport. ‘All they want to do is make money. They don’t want to enjoy their life or see anything,’ the former miner Ray Reardon told Gordon Burn. The Welshman’s glory days had come a little too early for him to profit from the boom, yet he seemed almost relieved to have missed out:

  If going round chemist shops autographing boxes of aftershave is what you want to do, then fine. You should sign with Barry Hearn. But I’m glad I did it when I did, before they turned the game from a game into a business. I wouldn’t like to do it now. There’s no fun in it now. It’s too ruthless. It’s a different phase of the game today. It’s all money. But you can’t stop, can you? You can’t pick up where you left off something, and go back to something that was nice. Life isn’t like that. Nothing goes backwards now. You’ve got to go forward. Onward! … Onward!

  He was talking about snooker, but he might easily have been talking about so much more.

  Even men who had more obviously gained from the snooker boom shared some of Reardon’s fears. For his fellow Welshman Terry Griffiths, snooker had brought almost unimaginable riches. Born in Llanelli, Griffiths had been a miner, postman, bus conductor and insurance salesman before turning professional in 1978. The following year he won the world championship, and for the next decade he remained one of snooker’s most popular personalities. Yet when Burn interviewed him during a tour of the Far East, Griffiths confided that money and fame had changed him. He used to be more open, he admitted, ‘more of a giver … I don’t really like the person I’ve changed into.’ Partly this was because he was homesick. But the commentator Ted Lowe, one of the fathers of the snooker boom, diagnosed a deeper problem. The players might be ‘richer than ever’, he wrote in the Daily Express, but they were ‘not as relaxed or happy as the old players who struggled to pay the rent’. Snooker was ruled by ‘sheer greed’, and even Lowe wondered if it had been worth it. ‘The fun has gone out of the games’, he thought, ‘since it was taken over by big business.’21

  Barry Hearn, however, made no apology for his pursuit of success. ‘There’s so many opportunities,’ he told Gordon Burn, ‘an’ if you can take ’em, why not take ’em? ’Cause some other bugger’s gonna do it.’ In this, as in his designer watch and alligator shoes, he seemed the personification of Thatcherite materialism, the embodiment of entrepreneurial values, the ultimate Essex Man. Where, after all, had Hearn bought his first snooker hall? In Romford, where east London meets Essex, classic upwardly mobile working-class territory, home to thousands of ‘East Enders who made good and moved out’, as a contemporary profile put it. Here was snooker’s heartland, a world of small businessmen and self-improvers, leather jackets and lock-up garages, working-class patriots and first-generation owner-occupiers.

  This was Mrs Thatcher’s heartland, too. In the 1960s it had been Harold Wilson country, but like neighbouring seats such as Norman Tebbit’s Chingford, it was turning increasingly true-blue. From Hearn’s club in Arcade Place it was just three miles to the huge post-war Harold Hill estate, where in August 1980 Mrs Thatcher handed over the keys to 39 Amersham Road. Those three miles were lined with suburban houses whose owners saw in her, and in Hearn, champions of hard work and self-improvement. And although Hearn sold his first club in 1989, the new owner was a man after his own heart: a self-made entrepreneur called Richard Willis, who later became vice chairman of the Romford Conservative Association. No wonder, then, that some people thought snooker had become a thoroughly Thatcherite game.22

  In this context, not even the most accomplished casting agency could have found a more richly symbolic protagonist than Hearn’s most famous client. As the son of a south London bus-depot worker, Steve Davis was the incarnation of the relentless self-discipline and restless social aspiration that Mrs Thatcher and her admirers talked about so often. With his sponsorship deals, his Porsche and his investments, Davis was no stranger to the new financial possibilities of the mid-1980s. And yet, even as he ploughed his winnings into land reclamation schemes in Scotland and property speculation in Mayfair, he never lost his populist instincts. He was still the same ‘peasant from Plumstead’, he said, though he would be happy to ‘be regarded as a machine for the rest of my days if that is the price I have to pay for winning’. As for the fans, he was not concerned about those who hated him, or even those who loved him, but ‘the floating voters in the middle. They are the ones who are going to be swayed by who wins and who loses. It is them I have to convince if I am to stay at the top.’

  Those words might sound oddly political. But in the intensely politicized arena of the early 1980s, even snooker players looked like political figures. In a much-quoted piece in the Evening Standard, the television interviewer Brian Walden argued that the ‘wholly disciplined, utterly determined’ Davis personified the virtues that Britain needed to survive the economic blizzard of the 1980s. ‘Though he has flamboyant elements in his character,’ Walden wrote, ‘he suppresses them in the interests of a successful perfo
rmance … [He] behaves as the British must behave if they are to maintain any position in the world. Order, method, discipline, plus a stern control of eccentricity, is the passport to triumph in the modern world.’ Yet to Walden’s displeasure, the public only reluctantly applauded this ‘marvellously proficient’ performer. ‘Does this not prove’, he wondered, ‘what an essentially frivolous people we are?’23

  It was fitting, then, that when the Conservatives were seeking celebrity supporters to appear at Mrs Thatcher’s infamous youth rally at Wembley in June 1983, they immediately thought of Steve Davis. His manager’s answer, according to Gordon Burn, was ‘an automatic and unqualified “yes”’. Later, Davis rather regretted accepting, because it alienated a large section of the snooker audience, such as the Yorkshire miners who glared at him when he walked into pubs and clubs. Even so, he had gained something from ‘sitting up close to Margaret Thatcher and watching her perform … because she’s in performance the same as everybody else is. I learned a lot from that.’

  And at the time he certainly seemed to enjoy himself, sporting a large ‘MAGGIE IN’ badge and entertaining the crowd with a truly unforgivable joke. ‘I started playing when I was 14’, he told them, ‘and I didn’t realise how important it was potting reds then.’ The crowd roared with laughter, or pretended to. And at least one person found it funny, since Mrs Thatcher later used it herself. ‘Let me say how much I enjoy watching snooker,’ she told a group of electronics manufacturers two years later. ‘They spend so much time potting the reds!’24

  For her part, Davis’s political heroine claimed to be a great admirer of the green baize. ‘Do you watch snooker? You know, this weekend it was absolutely fantastic!’ Mrs Thatcher told her child interviewers on the show CBTV. Like so many commentators, she saw the game as an antidote to the violence and permissiveness that had seeped into Britain’s sporting landscape. So when the Sunday Mirror asked about her cultural favourites, she mentioned not just the inevitable Agatha Christie, Frederick Forsyth and Yes Minister (and, surprisingly, Cagney & Lacey), but televised golf and snooker. ‘I tell you something about both those sports,’ she said firmly: ‘the people who take part in them and the people who watch them have the highest possible standards … The highest possible standards. You know, there are no histrionics or anything like that. No histrionics … and that matters.’25