Snooker Badboys

Baize of Glory

This year’s World Snooker Championship may be filled with new levels of potting and ‘unrivalled standards’ of safety play, but we ask: where are the characters? The chronically bland Graeme Dott has all the personality of a light fitting, and Peter Ebdon looks like a confused bird. Frustrated, we present a past gallery of rogues, drinkers, and snooker oddballs… 

Bill Werbeniuk

The man described by promoter Barry Hearn as ‘a soap opera with balls,’ big Bill was the epitome of the pub sportsman. A 20-stone giant, Werbeniuk regularly put away a stack of pre-match beers before continuing to sink lager at an average rate of a pint per frame. Afflicted by an inherited tremor in his arm, the drinking helped him keep a steady hand – an argument he made to the Inland Revenue when successfully writing off his alcohol costs as a necessary overhead. And due to being a hypoglycaemic, Werbeniuk was capable of burning off alcohol at a startling rate. During his last professional match, a World Championship qualifying round in 1990, he said: ‘I've had 24 pints of extra strong lager and eight double vodkas and I'm still not drunk.’

Living out of a converted bus based at Worksop, the Canadian-born Werbeniuk embraced Britain as a second home. In the early 1980s he became an Ipswich Town fan after a boozing session with the players. ‘Bobby Robson wanted to ban me. I’d turn up at Portman Road on the night before a match, which meant we’d be out drinking until early in the morning.’ His lifestyle finally caught up with him in 2003 when persistent heart problems eventually took his life, leaving an extra-large void in the snooker world. 

Kirk Stevens

The Canadian playboy announced his arrival to the sport by pitching up at the Crucible in a garish white suit in 1982. One of the sport’s first genuine pin-ups, Stevens wasn’t as wholesome as his fans thought. Following the final of the 1985 British Open, his opponent Silvino Francisco accused him of being ‘high as a kite’. Sure enough, it emerged Stevens had a raging cocaine addiction, his career going down the toilet soon after. Returning to Canada, he went on to make a living flogging second-hand cars.

Alex Higgins

Snooker’s original bad-boy, ‘The Hurricane’ was so named after his lightening quick playing style and his even quicker temper. Never overly concerned by the sport’s authorities Higgins famously headbutted an official in 1986 after being asked to take drug test. Unsurprisingly he was banned for a year and slapped with a £12,000 fine. He would be banned again for most of the 1990/91 season after threatening Dennis Taylor, snarling: ‘Look, you, if I had a gun in my hands, I'd blow your brains out.’ He hasn’t mellowed with age either. During a 2007 exhibition match with Jimmy White, Higgins punched the referee after he pulled him up on a foul (he was eventually restrained by spectators and the match was abandoned). A paid-up boozer and gambler, Higgins is rumoured to have earned and spent a three million pound fortune across the last two decades. A bona fide lunatic.

Tony Knowles

The former World Number 2 was a notorious ladies man, and wasn’t bothered who knew it. In 1983, there weren’t many people who didn’t, with Knowles selling a string of lurid tales to the tabloids of the various groupies he’d slept with, and his partiality to the odd threes-up. He was fined £5,000 by snooker’s governing body for bringing the game into disrepute, prompting Crucible audiences to sport cut-out badges saying, ‘I said no to Tony Knowles’.

Dennis Taylor

Fairly dull as a player, but at least he wore his glasses upside down. And compared to today’s bland brigade, that is fucking mental.