The sport has been in steady decline since the 1980s, with even champion Ronnie O'Sullivan declaring it ‘boring'. But Chinese interest in snooker could be the cue to its long-term survival as Zhao Xintong becomes China's first world champion.
Ronnie O'Sullivan shared a photo with Zhao Xintong as a child
The air in Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre was thick with cigarette smoke as ‘Big’ Bill Werbenuik sank the black ball in the corner pocket to win the frame, then stepped triumphantly away from the green baize to sink a pint of lager.
This was snooker at the height of its popularity in 1983 when the giant Canadian – ranked eighth in the world – would famously drink at least six pints before a match and then one pint for each frame. It was even said, with a sense of admiration among the snooker players in Britain’s working men’s clubs, that he had successfully claimed the cost of his pre-match booze as a tax deductible expense.
And larger-than-life Werbenuik was by no means the biggest name in the sport.
Hard-drinking, heavy smoking Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, who had won the previous year’s World Snooker Championship, and Jimmy ‘The Whirlwind’ White were the heroes of working class snooker amateurs up and down the country.
Fast forward 40 years and a new and very different hero has taken by storm a much-changed sport.
Zhao ‘The Cyclone’ Xintong, the first Asian to win the World Snooker Championship – after beating veteran Mark Williams 18-12 in Monday’s final – had walked, like other snooker stars, into a sold-out Crucible arena to the sound of soul music and the smell of money.
Energy drinks rather than alcohol are the fuel for today’s players, smoking has long since been banned, the television audience is now global and Xintong’s £500,000 winner’s cheque easily eclipses the £30,000 Steve Davis won for the 1983 title.
What perhaps hasn’t changed is a whiff of controversy.
Fresh-faced Xintong, 28, might not have the notoriety of ‘The Hurricane’ or Ronnie ‘The Rocket’ O’Sullivan in his wild days, but the left-handed amateur, who had to win four qualifiers just to reach the first round of this year’s tournament, is still banned from playing in his native China – and would not have been playing at this year’s tournament were it not for his early guilty plea over his part in the sport’s biggest ever match-fixing scandal.
A child prodigy from Xi’an in north Central China, Xintong won the UK championship in 2021 but a year later was one of 10 Chinese players charged with match-fixing, though he was the only player who did not directly throw a match and tried to dissuade others from doing so.
He received a 20-month ban from the sport in 2023, so his return won’t please everyone.
Zhao Xintong of China with the World Snooker Championship trophy
Nevertheless his victory will only turbo-charge interest in the game, which is already huge in China, and more big money sponsorship is sure to follow.
So how did a game so long associated with Britain’s smoky northern working men’s clubs, and so closely associated for nearly 50 years with the steel city of Sheffield, become a glitzy global event dominated by a Chinese prodigy?
The truth, of course, is that snooker has felt the wind of change many times before the arrival of The Cyclone. Invented by Lieutenant Neville Chamberlain and enjoyed by British Army officers stationed in India in the second half of the 19th century, snooker took its name from a derogatory term used by the likes of Chamberlain to describe inexperienced recruits.
It remained for years a game played mostly by military officers and the gentry and many gentlemen’s clubs would refuse entry to non-members keen to use their snooker tables.
In response, working men’s clubs, providing social activities, education and recreation for working class men and their families, particularly in the North of England, Midlands and South Wales, provided their own snooker tables and the popularity of the sport among ordinary Britons grew steadily.
Indeed the winner of the first Professional Championship of Snooker in 1926 – and all of the subsequent 14 annual tournaments – was the son of a Derbyshire miner-turned-publican.
Joe Davis, who hit his first century break aged 12 and turned professional aged 18, dominated the sport until his retirement in 1946 and is the only undefeated player in World Snooker Championship history.
But snooker’s popularity declined after the Second World War and the 1952 World Snooker Championship was contested by only two players.
It was arguably the advent of the BBC’s colour television service in 1967 which rescued the sport. Sir David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC2, commissioned the Pot Black TV snooker tournament – with its green baize and different ball shades – to showcase the advantages of colour TV. For a time Pot Black was the second most popular show on BBC2 after Morecambe and Wise.
Snooker received another boost when the World Snooker Championship moved to Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre in 1977 and the following year’s tournament was the first to receive daily TV coverage.
Snooker was now a mainstream sport and in 1985 a third of Britain’s TV audience stayed up beyond midnight to watch the conclusion of the World Championship final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis.
The sport’s big name stars still generally honed their skills with hour upon hour of practice in smoky working men’s snooker halls and tobacco advertising was the game’s lifeblood.
Cigarette brand Embassy sponsored the World Snooker Championship for 30 years from 1976 to 2005, by which time a ban on tobacco advertising had seriously reduced the number of professional tournaments.
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