Ronnie O’Sullivan the single star who eclipses his sport

Sport never stops, sport never gets hurt, it never retires. Sportsmen, on the other hand, come and go. Many we do not even notice. Then there is Ronnie O’Sullivan and the grand sport of snooker.

Ronnie O’Sullivan says he practises ‘two hours a week’ and has found other things to fill up the hours in a day. Jordan Mansfield / Getty Images

Every now and again we love comforting ourselves with the maxim that no player is bigger than the sport.

It happens usually when the player is at some basic dispute with administrators of the sport, his own teammates or maybe even at odds with the sport itself.

At some really obvious level it is true.

Sport never stops, sport never gets hurt, it never retires.

Sportsmen, on the other hand, come and go. Many we do not even notice. A chosen few live on forever, tiny footprints in the history of their sport.

It has to be true. At least we tell ourselves that. Because the sport is the thing, and the sportsmen exists merely in his duty to it.

Then there is Ronnie O’Sullivan and the grand sport of snooker.

Ronnie O’Sullivan, about whom the fact of being a snooker player is merely a minor inconvenience to the real, important fact of him being Ronnie O’Sullivan, the most compelling man alive right now.

Is that a bit much, especially in a world that houses Donald Trump and Mike Tyson?

Maybe so, but how can anyone deny that O’Sullivan, right now, is not bigger than snooker, or that he has been for several years?

For the passing follower he is the only reason to tune in. For the hardcore nobody is better to watch.

He began another world championship campaign yesterday looking for a sixth world title that would bring him alongside Steve Davis and one behind Stephen Hendry’s all-time record of seven wins.

In truth the numbers are redundant. Hendry and Davis played at a time when snooker was, in its own nerdish way, pretty mainstream.

They were dominant, but their spheres of influence were forever being nudged by a diverse, competitive field beyond them.

By contrast, today snooker is, whatever might be its protestations, dwarfed by O’Sullivan. Last December he won the UK Championships with a broken ankle, capping a stellar year. Generally, when he bothers turning up, he wins.

As a figure, he has grown beyond the pair and the sport, so much so that his default setting now is of boredom with the sport. A month ago, he was unsure if he even wanted to play in these championships.

He told The Guardian that he was practising just “two hours a week”, finding all kinds of ways to fill up his day instead: he runs daily and has taken up boxing.

It is a strange predicament he and the sport find itself in. O’Sullivan is indifferent to it, yet cannot help but be its best player.

And it still needs him.

“I just use snooker rather than letting it use me,” he said.

In any other sport we might tut-tut: “he is not bigger than the game”.

That interview, and a long and wonderful profile in The New Yorker – imagine any other snooker champion getting that, by the way – are revelatory of the many essences of O’Sullivan.

Snooker has never been populated by bland automatons.

Something, in fact, about its numbing solitariness and its stringent demands for order and process, ensures that it produces intriguingly damaged men who are impossible not to like; Alex Higgins and Jimmy White, to name but two.

But O’Sullivan has managed to run that inner frailty and struggle side by side with the sporting flawlessness of, say, a Hendry.

It is remarkable how he has managed to produce such straight-lined, zoned-in brilliance on the table while his life away from it has been so non-linear, zig-zagging this way and that.

Ultimately that is probably what is so endearing, that he has no filter when discussing his life and its travails.

That and the fact that his backstory helps him pass off as one of the many rogues of a Guy Ritchie film, come to life inside a snooker hall.

It is a frankness, or actually a humanness, that elevates him beyond today’s athletes who strive forever to hide from us who or what they really are.

O’Sullivan does not care if we know.

He wants us to know just as much as he wants us to celebrate his genius.

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