Men of the Quaff 1: Bill Werbeniuk

Eight pints before a game...

	Werbeniuk was without doubt the Gazza of the Green Baize

Along with legendary snooker bad boys Alex ' Hurricane' Higgins and Jimmy ' Whirlwind' White, 'Big' Bill Werbeniuk was the cult face of snooker in the Eighties. At a time when the game was awash with tight grey suits, overflowing ashtrays and where the most anticipated shots were the ones guzzled in the bar afterwards, Werbeniuk was without doubt the Gazza of the Green Baize.

Looking like a cross between an out-of-work northern comedian and an unappreciated Italian plumber, Werbeniuk was the kind of over-the-top character that today's game rarely produces.

His weight fluctuated around 20 stone and he was the first ever recorded player to actually split his pants during a match. He was also that guy who was peering round the wall when Cliff Thorburn was building the first ever televised 147 break.

Big Bill occupied the top 16 for seven out of his eight competing seasons and reached the quarter finals of the World Championship on four different occasions, hitting the highest breaks of 143 in 1985 and 142 in 1989. The highlight of his career came in 1984 when he reached the final of the Lada Classic, which he lost 9-5. But it was his copious lager drinking and good humour which he will be most remebered for.

He used to drink six to eight pints of lager before he played just to stop his arm from shaking, continuing on an incredible pint-per-frame ratio until the match's conclusion.

On one occasion at The Crucible he broke wind at the table and then turned around to the audience and said: "Who did that?"

And famously, after his last ever professional match against Nigel Bond in the preliminary rounds of the 1990 World Championship, he declared that: "I've had 24 pints of extra strong lager and eight double vodkas and I'm still not drunk."

What's even better about the Werbeniuk legacy is the fact that he offset the cost of his enormous daily beer consumption by successfully arguing that, because snookered demanded a steady arm and lager would help him achieve that, drinking was essential to his job. It's without doubt the greatest tax dodge in history.