Two writers face off in a grudge match of snooker: the fanciful, ludicrous game of punished error and forced embarrassment. Róisín Lanigan cues off first...
I was raised on snooker. Where most families had tribalism and football teams, we had snooker. When most children were idolising David Beckham and begging for replica Manchester United jerseys, I was lusting after Ronnie O’Sullivan and becoming deeply odd in the process. We followed the World Championships in Sheffield and learned about 147s. After school we watched Big Break, which sadly was hosted by Jim Davidson, for some reason. All this is to say that when Orlando Whitfield challenged me to a match my first thoughts were: this will be an absolute piece of piss.
We agree on two rules, and I quickly break both of them. This, I can admit, is unsportsmanlike of me. The first rule is that we will each prepare for our debut frame by enrolling in ‘Ronnie O’Sullivan’s Ultimate Snooker Course’, in which the sport’s most famous star will teach us, over 100 hours of video content, how to embrace and perfect the ‘Rocket Method’. In theory, this is exciting. In practice it’s a sort of bizarrely constructed reality programme, like if someone on Keeping Up With the Kardashians was trying to teach you how to pot a corner black in between promoting their latest tequila venture.
Still, I am entranced – at least for the first of those 100 hours – as Ronnie imparts wisdom on mental and physical resilience while talking intermittently about how bang into China he is (the course is also offered in Chinese). ‘Anyone can play pool’, Ronnie tells us. Pool is just a parlour game. Snooker is a ‘mind sport. He calls it, with reverence, ‘chess with balls’. When Orlando and I arrive to square off against each other, in King’s Cross’ Hurricane Rooms, our meeting of minds does not feel like chess with balls. Instead I feel as rattled as the bar staff appear when I ask them for a gin and slimline tonic.
The second rule is that we should become temporary nemeses. Over 30 years ago, Martin Amis did the same when he played a grudge match with Julian Barnes. In 1991, the pair wrote up their exploits in two separate columns for Esquire magazine. This is supposed to be our inspiration for The Fence, a magazine which has never copied an idea from another publication in its life.
Orlando has the edge on me, as I expect Barnes had on Amis. ‘Hurricane Amis’, he called himself – Martin, not Whitfield. I keep using the rest extender to reach the cue ball, and because I think it looks funny. Orlando, despite showing up in jeans, expertly sprawls across the table to make his shots. Amis prepared for his match with an early night, a breakfast rich in carbs and a low-ABV lager. He practised alone to get the spasms out of his cueing arm. I come straight from the office, stopping at Five Guys for a strawberry Fanta.
Although we’re in the midst of a sticky heatwave, the Hurricane Rooms are chilly and dark. O’Sullivan said his first cue was over 100 years old. Amis and Barnes got theirs as presents from their respective wives. When I was growing up my dad kept his in his own case, and polished it before every game. Orlando and I liberate some sticks from the wall and tie our first game at 44 points each. Given the 100-plus breaks I’m used to being fed straight from the maw of Sheffield’s Crucible, this feels like a miserable outcome, made more miserable still by the fact we got there mainly by forfeiting points. Four points to the other player for an accidentally potted white. Four or more points awarded to them, too, for hitting a colour instead of a red, or not touching a ball whatsoever. We pot one ball each, and the other points are forfeits.
We are not graceful. I would like to blame this on the gins (Orlando’s on Guinness), but that would be disingenuous. This sacred place is named, after all, for Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, one of the snooker world’s legends, known for drinking, smoking and partying. He’s from down the road from me. I met him once in The Crown bar in Belfast, actually, before he died. He was very nice and he gave me his autograph. I can’t help but feel that I’ve let him down.
‘Snooker frames with Julian last about twice as long as they do with everyone else’, Amis wrote for Esquire. When Orlando and I play we talk about writing. I tell him I tend to write fast and fix the mistakes later. That I don’t like to look at it for too long. That I forget about it as soon as I’m done. Orlando is the opposite. He values care and attention. He’s just spent a full week on a closing paragraph. I submitted a column on Wednesday in which I misspelled the word ‘Wednesday’.
‘There are so many talented people out there in the world who just don’t work hard enough,’ that was another one of Ronnie’s rules. ‘Hard work trumps talent.’ Amis has plenty of wisdom too. He said that snooker felt like writing. Orlando considers his shots, I squint and point the stick. Neither of us get a break longer than one ball. By our second frame we decide to stop counting. I think he won. Maybe. You shouldn’t lie in print.
The lights go out above our table when we run out of time – you book them by the hour – and although we’re still mid-match, we decide to give up and retreat to the pub. Orlando gets the first round in, and I force him to endure the indignity of ordering me an Aperol Spritz. Amis would be spinning in his grave. Ronnie would be deeply disappointed. Hurricane Higgins, I feel, would understand.
Orlando Whitfield mounts the table.
On the day in question, I’d had a head start. In fact I’d started quite a while ago, quite afar ago. Lunch in Manchester with Britain’s tallest journalist – a man to look up to both literally and figuratively – meant that I needed to get going early. And when you start early, you don’t want to stop suddenly. A jerky stop would throw a man off his game. It could throw something up anyway. My game relies not on ability, nor tactical prowess or even muscle-memory-mastery. I rely, always, on my head start.
On the post-prandial journey south – the stop-start march, as I saw it, towards certain victory – I was primed. Out of the train window, all the fields and forests spread out greenly either side of me. All of England was my baize. This would be my day of jubilee. Blake’s Jerusalem, that nettlesome roll-call of questions to which the answer is always ‘No!’, rang in my ears like existential tinnitus. After my victory I would be known as Orlando the Oracle, he who sees all angles, anticipates all stray balls. Snooker is a game of error-capitalisation, and none of the errors would be mine.
Róisín Lanigan – aka Róisín the Rockette – and I are equally good, by which I mean equally bad, at snooker. Venues are hard to come by these days. There are threadbare tables available in Lewisham and Tooting; Róisín and I chose instead to do our cueing at the Hurricane Rooms, in the ulcerated liver of the capital: King’s Cross.
The evening is warm, the air almost chewy with pollution and humidity. The busy streets around the snooker hall are filled with office workers fleeing to pubs or trains. Appropriately and indeed thankfully, the Hurricane Rooms is not a sunlit facility. Its windowless rooms house snooker and pool tables arranged as close together as polite play will allow. At the bar, where I stop to refuel my head start, various horse racing channels trample over each other. I retreat to the shadowy hush of the snooker hall where I find Róisín waiting, sports drink in hand.
I’d booked the table for an hour, supremely confident that one of us would deliver the other a thrashing fairly quickly and I could retreat to the nearest beer garden and file my report before my head start got out in front of me. But by the time the table lights flash the five-minute warning (marring a peach of an opportunity on the black for The Rockette) we have potted only a dozen or so balls, more than half of which were the cue ball. A hard-fought but mutually agreed loss is declared. Snooker is the winner.
A two-hour rematch is swiftly arranged and both of us do our homework in the meantime. The Rockette takes this rather more seriously than I, studying online with Ronnie O’Sullivan. I spend my time engaging with O’Sullivan’s social media presence instead – which as far as I can tell is being programmed by Xi Jinping himself. ‘Listen,’ Ronnie tells his one million Instagram followers, ‘if you’ve had enough of the UK and it’s smashed you to pieces, get yourself out to China… you will love it’. I ponder this advice for a while before taking myself off to New Loon Fung and getting smashed. Now I am ready.
Our two-hour session at the Hurricane Rooms is a more sporting affair. The Rockette flings the cue ball around with flair and flounce while I watch on, aghast, from behind my two-for-one pints. Soon though, swooping in on a fugue of dumplings and pent-up aggression, I even the score (pure guesswork: neither of us know the rules) and when the lights have their epileptic fit, we are both ready to declare victory. Snooker has lost, and it hasn’t been pretty.
Afterwards, The Rockette flees to the opening of a tapas fish and chip shop (it really is grim up north London) while I find time for a quintuple bacon cheeseburger at the local Five Guys. While I wait for my off-menu order to be prepared, I gaze at my fellow Britons in their natural habitat. There, among the indoor-tanners and the Ozempic-slimmers, I come to see snooker as a perfect metaphor for Britain. Snooker is a sport of both the working classes and the aristocracy. Only in a country as whimsical as this could an activity like this be thought up. This fanciful, ludicrous game of punished error and forced embarrassment may not be the unifying national pastime we need, but it is very likely the one we deserve.
