RONNIE O’SULLIVAN has made the extraordinary admission that taking huge
amounts of drugs and alcohol helped his playing career, we can reveal today.
The five-time world snooker champion binged on up to 15 pints of Guinness
in a night and smoked pot — but then performed “brilliantly” with his cue.
In his new autobiography Running, the 37-year-old also explains for the
first time the negative thoughts that have dogged his professional career.
“EVERYBODY was saying to me, when you stop drinking and taking drugs your life
gets better — and it does in some ways.
“But when I was having my weekly benders and my private life was in bits, I
had a brilliant year professionally.”
Rocket Ronnie has flirted with Christianity, Buddhism, and converting to
Islam. He is a Narcotics Anonymous member, a perfectionist, a manic
depressive and a running-club obsessive.
But he says that, while relaxing in his home town of Chigwell, Essex, he has
at last come to terms with his impulsive character and negative thoughts —
as well as the out-of-control partying which had the strange side-effect of
boosting his professional career.
Ronnie admits that some of his biggest benders came nine years ago —
ironically just AFTER he had left the Priory rehab centre.
“I was world champion at the time but not in the best of spirits,” he writes.
“I’d been in the Priory, come out, been clean for nine months, which was
wonderful. I went to meetings every day — drug addiction, alcohol addiction
— and I was feeling fantastic.
“I was reborn. I couldn’t believe it. I was getting up in the morning,
running, eating healthy food.
“But I knew I didn’t have the strength to say no to drink and drugs for ever.
I was always tempted, and after nine months I gave in to that temptation.
“After that, every so often I’d go on a bender. I’d do a lot of puff
(marijuana), and get through 15 pints of Guinness a night.
“I loved a joint. The only problem with a joint is that one spliff follows
another, and another.”
He goes on: “I don’t actually like alcohol, I just like the effect. It
obliterates everything nicely for me. At the time I’d be on the vodka and
orange, about ten of them, then get home at 3am and the wine would come out.
“Any old drink, it didn’t matter. Throw in a few spliffs. Then at 7am the
sun would come up and I’d think, ‘Oh, Jesus, I’ve done it again’. The birds
would start tweeting and I’d think I’m bang in trouble.
“Then it gets to 11am-12 noon and I’m sunbathing on the floor, just thinking,
what have I done?
“At my worst I had to have a joint first thing in the morning to function.
“But loads of the time, the snooker got in the way of my benders rather than
the other way round.”
Ronnie admits he still does not know how he avoided getting caught by the
sport’s drug-testing authorities. He says: “I remember getting to every
World Championship and thinking, ‘I can’t wait til this tournament is over
’cos then there’s no more drugs tests, I can go out and smash it’.
“I’d got caught once early on in my career, but that’s all. I’d get tested
between events, and I was just trying to judge it perfectly so there’d be no
drugs left in my system, but I was pushing my luck. My mum said to me, ‘You
are going to get caught soon. You can’t carry on like this’.”
Ronnie admits he would later go out with his mates every week on all-night
drinking sprees that would last from 9pm until morning — before resolving to
finally quit.
He says: “I learnt that about myself when I went in the Priory. I knew however
much I wanted to continue caning it, I couldn’t.
“Yet even though I had been smashing it once a week I had my best year on
the snooker table — so how does that add up?”
At the time Ronnie had defended his Welsh Open title, defeating long-time
rival Stephen Hendry 9–8, and completing ten century breaks, including one
of 146, the highest of the tournament. He followed it up by winning his
second Masters title, beating John Higgins 10–3. Higgins later described him
as a “total genius” at the table.
Ronnie confesses drink and drugs actually provided stability for him for much
of the first half of his career after his father was jailed for life in 1992
for a nightclub murder (he was released in 2009).
But his book reveals he switched to his new addiction — running — seriously in
2004, joining an athletics club and eventually completing a 10k race in 34
minutes, making him one of the UK’s fastest 1,500 runners of the distance.
He writes:
“The more I ran, the more obsessed I became. Now I had a new dream. I wanted
to represent my county at cross country. To do that you had to get into the
top six in Essex, and I thought that was doable. I’d come 27th in my first
year running, and I thought if I could just devote more time to it, give me
two years, maybe three.
But that was the problem. I couldn’t devote more time to it. I was still a
full-time snooker player and everyone in the game was telling me I
was mad giving so much to the running.
But I learnt so much from the training regime and started applying it to
snooker.
If you run all the time you end up physically exhausted. I’d always thought
you had to give your all to training in the build-up to a snooker
tournament. Six hours a day for a month building up to, say, the World
Championship.
But the running taught me you can overdo it. Sometimes you can do half an
hour, and that’s just fine. The week before a tournament your practice
should be done and you should have started winding down.”
Quietly-spoken Ronnie’s obsessive nature and moods have previously seen him
suffer cruel jibes about “the two Ronnies”.
But his new-found happiness has come about through a working relationship with
one of UK sport’s top psychiatrists.
Dr Steve Peters, a former psychiatrist at Rampton high security hospital, is
credited for helping forge the success of cyclists Sir Bradley Wiggins, Sir
Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton.
Ronnie says: “Steve taught me that I don’t have to be like the old Ronnie.
I don’t have to come off the table and feel it is a matter of life and death
any more.
“In a match, if things weren’t working previously I would think: I hate this
game, I’m sh*t, I can’t put a f****** ball in, what a waste of time. That’s
where Steve would make me realise these are emotional issues, but it is not
you.
“You do have these faults, which is your ‘inner chimp’, the emotional side of
yourself talking.”
He adds: “Steve helped me rediscover my passion for the game.”
Faking it as a sex ‘addict’
RONNIE reveals he joined help groups for food AND sex addictions.
He writes: “AA is Alcoholics Anonymous, but I did all the As. I did NA
(Narcotics Anonymous), FA (Food Anonymous), all of them.
“At one point I tried SA – Sex Anonymous – for sex addicts.
“I thought there might be a few nice birds there. Some wouldn’t even hold
hands because their addiction was so bad — or they thought it was.
“It was so mad there I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here. I don’t want to
end up like that mob’.”
He adds: “I never actually felt I was a sex addict. The opposite. I’m not a
sex addict at all.
“If I’m with a girl and I’m attracted to her, great. But I’m not craving it. I
can go without.
“I knew at heart that I wasn’t a sex addict.”
Sad we had to split
RONNIE revealed how his constant battles with addictions led to his split with
girlfriend Jo Langley.
He goes on: “I accept that I wasn’t easy to live with. Sometimes I go into
myself and shut down. I come home and don’t talk and I would imagine that
must be hard for most women.
“But in other ways you could do worse than me as a partner. I was happy to
settle down and be a dad. I wasn’t out trying to get other girls. I was
faithful. But in the end Jo and I were simply incompatible. It was
desperately sad that we couldn’t make it work.
“I moved out in 2008 after we’d had a big row. We couldn’t agree on me seeing
the kids so I got a solicitor. It was the last thing I wanted to do but I
couldn’t go without seeing them.
“I did feel angry. I’d worked hard earning money for the family and it was
being p***ed away on lawyers’ fees. But slowly we realised Jo and I needed
to work together and make it work.”
He also admitted considering quitting snooker. He writes: “After my kids
Lillie, seven, and Ronnie Jnr, five, were born I was thinking of giving up
the game.
“With my first child Taylor (from a previous relationship), now 16, I never
had any involvement and I regretted it. In the end, though, I decided I was
too young to give up.”