The real people’s champion

They say that the true definition of fame – real fame, blanket fame, the genuine thing as opposed to a couple of appearances on the cover of Heat – is when people who have no interest in what you do for a living, nonetheless know all about you and who you are.

By all reasonable standards, Jimmy White met this criterion a long time ago. There are people who have shag all interest in snooker, who don’t know the difference between John Higgins and John Parrott, who couldn’t pick Mark Williams out of a line-up if their lives depended on it, yet whose eyes instantly light up when Jimmy White’s name is mentioned.

At the start of his career, he cornered the grannies’ vote by sidling around the table like some refugee from Grange Hill, looking even younger than the late-teenager he was.

But those days are long gone. With the endorsements for hair-loss-treatment having seemingly dried up, Jimmy now resembles one of those prematurely bald footballers you might see playing for some Eastern bloc team at the World Cup.

So now people take to him because of his inherent frailty, his permanent underdog status. Whereas Alex Higgins was too nasty, too poisonous, to ever be genuinely loved by all but a few true believers, White has always been cherished by those who like their sporting heroes with, shall we say, plenty of seasoning.

The number of decent books about snooker can be counted on the colours of one table. The Hurricane, Bill Borrows’ recent study of Higgins, is one. Jimmy’s autobiography, Behind The White Ball, is another.

It’s all there: the truancy, the years spent learning his trade under Dodgy Bob in a pigsty of a South London snooker hall, the drink-driving, the marital problems, the gambling (he earned £114,000 for a 147 break and lost it all on the horses the next day), the binges, the bereavements (his mother and brother), the battle with testicular cancer, and all the rest of it.

One entire chapter is given over to an anecdote which involves a drunken Higgins (plus ça change) going through a car windscreen, getting up unscathed, and challenging Jimmy to play him for £30.

Unsurprising, then, that the sight of Jimmy pulling off one of the best and most spectacular snooker comebacks in recent memory, last Wednesday against Peter Ebdon at the Benson & Hedges Masters, should have elicited an euphoric reaction in so many quarters.

Trailing 5-1 in a best-of-11 match, he proceeded to rattle off five frames to sink the understandably stunned Ebdon and march into the quarter-finals. And, hilariously, it’s not even as if it was technically one of his best nights at the table, with a top break of only 77.

As I write, Jimmy is limbering up for his quarter-final assignment against Stephen Hendry at The Crucible, which began a few hours after this piece was finished. At the risk of getting it spectacularly wrong (not for the first time), Foul Play must presume that he got a whipping, because Hendry, quite apart from being probably the best ever exponent of the sport, appears to have decided at an early stage in his career that he would make it his mission in life to inflict as much misery as possible on Jimmy.

The whey-faced Scot has beaten him in no fewer than four world championship finals, as well as on five occasions in the B&H Masters, including three successive semis between 1990 and 1992.

The 1995 world final in Sheffield represented the nadir of Jimmy’s one-sided rivalry with Hendry. At one stage, he was ten – ten!! – frames ahead, until it all unravelled like an old newspaper in the wind.

An eminently pottable black inexplicably went begging, Hendry saw his chance, tidied up the rest of the table, and surged on to inflict probably the most psychologically damaging defeat of Jimmy’s career.

“I’m used to being bashed about,” Jimmy said last week as he prepared for his latest meeting with his nemesis. “I see shots too quickly. Sometimes it’s the wrong shot and that’s cost me in the past. My problem is that I’m a natural player.”

And that’s why we love him. Rarely the bookies’ favourite, but always the crowd’s. The true People’s Champion.