Ronnie O’Sullivan, Steve Davis & Barry Hearn have shaped snooker – now it is coming home at English Open

The year is 1986 and Steve Davis is the most famous sportsperson in Britain. He has just lost a second successive World Championship final but remains snooker’s leading player and a household name.

He sits quietly enjoying a meal in a Chinese restaurant in Ilford when a man comes over to him, wanting to shake him by the hand. This is so commonplace that Davis does not shrink. The man engages him in conversation, telling him his 10-year-old son is a promising snooker player and will be world champion one day. Would Steve mind having a photograph with him?

Davis has heard all of this before but duly beckons the boy over. This is his first meeting with Ronnie O’Sullivan.

They were in Essex, a corner of England that has long been a hotbed for snooker. On Monday, the English Open rolled into Brentwood. O’Sullivan is not only world champion but the greatest player the sport has ever seen. Like everyone else in the field, he is playing for the Steve Davis Trophy.

Davis grew up in Plumstead but became synonymous with Romford Snooker Club, where he attracted a huge following in money matches. He earned the nickname ‘The Nugget’ because he was golden for those who backed him.

The Davis supporters, led by his faithful driver Robbo Brazier, passionately followed him on his professional journey and the infamous Romford Roar accompanied many of his greatest triumphs.

O’Sullivan recalls watching the seminal 1985 world final with snooker club pals, who were calling out ‘Miss it, ginger’ as Davis stood over the last black. But young Ronnie did not join in the delight of Dennis Taylor’s victory. He admired Davis’s game, his tenacity and his winning mentality.

He was the perfect hero for a lad growing up in the thriving Essex snooker scene of the 1980s, with leagues, junior and amateur events and sundry professionals in the area.

Ronnie O’Sullivan senior persuaded several of them to play his boy as a way of improving his game. It worked: Ronnie junior quickly went on to beat most of them.

It’s worth remembering that long before greatness dawned, he was just a boy. There’s a moment in an interview with Danny Baker for Thames TV when the 11-year-old O’Sullivan is asked how big he would like to be. “Five foot ten,” is his innocent reply.

O’Sullivan can draw a crowd anywhere but the Chigwell man will surely receive a special welcome on home soil this week.

As well as producing a number of leading players, Essex has also drawn others to the area due to the opportunity for high quality practice.

Ken Doherty and several other Irish players made Ilford their home when they first turned professional. Judd Trump and Jack Lisowski based themselves at The Grove in Romford for a number of years.

Brentwood itself is the headquarters of Matchroom, the promotions business set up by Barry Hearn 40 years ago, which oversees snooker, darts and 9-ball pool, as well as promoting boxing and sundry other sporting events, from gymnastics to ten pin bowling to the annual angling challenge Fish O Mania.

The irrepressible Hearn’s influence was key to the Brentwood Centre being chosen to stage the English Open. His rejuvenation of snooker was certainly of help to one Essex man. Basildon’s Stuart Bingham was treading water before the Hearn takeover in 2010, but in the next decade became one of the game’s leading lights.

He won his first ranking title at the 2011 Australian Open and in 2015 defeated O’Sullivan, Trump and Shaun Murphy in successive rounds to become world champion.

Bingham’s pure love of snooker is legendary. In the bad old days when there were hardly any tournaments he would be on the motorway looking for a pro-am in which to play. He has a permanent reminder of his successes: each tournament victory results in a fresh tattoo on his back commemorating it in some way – a koala for Australia, a monkey for the Gibraltar Open etc.

Like Bingham, Mark King found success in the Hearn era. King learned his trade in Romford, often practising with Davis. He turned professional in 1991 and got in the top 16 after reaching a couple of ranking finals, but by 2016 seemed doomed to end his career without earning significant silverware.

In fact, he was arguably best known for participating in a notorious boxing match with fellow player Quinten Hann, dubbed ‘Pot Whack’ and doing about as much for the fight game as it did for snooker.

All that changed in Belfast when he won the inaugural Northern Ireland Open 25 years into his career. As his children ran into the arena at the end, an emotional King said, “I’ve been dreaming of that moment ever since they were born and I never thought it would happen.”

Ali Carter, the feisty twice Crucible runner-up, hails from Tiptree and can often be seen in the skies over Essex indulging in his other great love, flying aeroplanes.

Carter, one of snooker’s great competitors, has fought serious illness, including lung cancer, to continue his career. He has won four ranking titles and was memorably shoulder-barged by O’Sullivan at the 2018 World Championship during testy scenes during their second-round match, ultimately won by Carter.

Matt Selt, the 2019 Indian Open champion, is another player who hails from Romford, a part of Essex so synonymous with snooker that it had its own record, the follow-up to the no.6 hit Snooker Loopy. The Romford Rap was another Chas n Dave production and featured the original Matchroom Mob players plus Jimmy White and Neal Foulds, now on duty for Eurosport in a purely speaking capacity.

This was more an assault on the senses than the charts. The Matchroom Mob mercifully retired from the music scene soon afterwards.

Snooker’s popularity continued in the county, however. All they were missing was a major competition.

In the late 1980s, the World Matchplay, a Hearn-promoted invitation tournament, was held in Brentwood but the English Open is the 399th ranking event in snooker history and the first to be staged in Essex.

Hearn, Davis, O’Sullivan… These are the names who have shaped snooker for decades. This is their manor. It feels like snooker, at least, is coming home.

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