Snooker: 'Instead of visiting dad in prison, I could have been putting flowers on his grave'

The Interview - Ronnie O'Sullivan: Snooker's gifted one has emerged from the dark times. Nick Townsend hears a positive approach to life is taming demons

We are discussing a mutual acquaintance, "Tex" Hennessy, formerly snooker writer for the Daily Mail and one of the sport's great enthusiasts, with whom I used to work. It transpires that Ronnie O'Sullivan has known him since he was 15, when Tex and his wife took the then prodigy out for dinner.

In his recently published autobiography*, O'Sullivan made mention of how Hennessy's analysis of him when his life and career began to descend into the abyss of drugs, drink and self-loathing as "bang on". Great character, we agree. "Mind, you, I chucked him in a lake once," declares the world snooker No 1, apropos of nothing. "He once stitched me up proper."

"You did what?"

"A piece he wrote in the paper," O'Sullivan explains. "Turned me over." You attempt to support a fellow member of the sports-writing fraternity. Blame anonymous editors for putting spin on the article. O'Sullivan isn't unduly impressed. "He was out fishing on a lake, so I threw him in." Then he laughs, which is reassuring. "But we're good mates again now."

It tells you much about the character of The Rocket; essentially a man who has wandered through life's dark side too frequently to concern himself with harbouring grudges and pondering what might have been, if only... That becomes evident when you broach his autobiography. Had it been a cathartic exercise, an opportunity to denounce the demons for good? "It was very easy to do," he says. "I'm the type who is always open after matches, when most sportsmen come out with the cliches: 'Yeah, I played better on the day', crap like that. Whereas I'll say: 'I played terrible and I want to give up the game'.

"People say: 'You can't say things like that'. But that's me. I'm open, gullible, you name it." He pauses. "But it's all been fun, though it's been a learning experience, I wouldn't be the person I am now if I hadn't been through all that sort of stuff. I don't look at it as harm done, I look at it as fate having dealt its hand. I'm just going to see how great I can make the situation."

All that stuff? His early years make most of our lives appear mundane in the extreme. Inevitably, the offending newspaper item concerned his father, Ronnie Snr, who ran a chain of sex shops before his incarceration for murder 12 years ago. Just about everything written about the tortured genius of the green baize tends to be qualified by that fact. The fact that O'Sullivan's mother, Maria, is not unfamiliar with the inside of prison, either, because of tax evasion, adds to the intrigue surrounding the game's most acclaimed natural talent.

Maybe others would distance themselves from such family shame; specifically, that dreadful moment when his father stabbed a man during a fight in a nightclub. But that is not O'Sullivan's way. He has never done anything but confront the issue head on. Indeed, his candour on that subject and on his subsequent decline into a twilight world of self-abuse, from which he is now recovered, is almost frightening in its intensity. He has learnt to deflect the inevitable gibes; even when, as he recalls, the snooker referee Len Ganley, to whom O'Sullivan has never been well disposed, came up to him and said: "What's your dad's favourite meal? A carvery?" He just managed to restrain himself, and has rarely descended into violence. All his father's brothers – the Fighting O'Sullivans – were pugilists, yet Ronnie maintains: "I was never into fighting. I hated it. I had to be pushed a long way before I retaliated."

His canvas was the snooker table, as he ascended from the 10-year-old who made a century break to the 15-year-old who became the youngest player to compile a 147, and finally, to the zenith: the 2001 Embassy World Championship title. How he has succeeded against such a background of family dysfunction almost defies belief.

O'Sullivan is in a Bolton hotel, in transit from the Scottish Open to Liverpool, where he will prepare for this year's World Championship, which starts at the Crucible in Sheffield on Saturday. He has just come off the phone to his father. "Funny thing," he says. "Even my bad times have been good, looking back."

"You really believe that?"

"Really. It could have been the other way round. Instead of visiting him in prison, I could be going to put flowers on his grave. But I'm not. I've just been watching the TV pictures of those kids in Iraq, and you say to yourself: 'Dad may be in stir, but he's still there, eating three meals a day'. Let's get it into perspective, how bad have we got it? You've got to make something good out of something bad."

O'Sullivan Snr has served 12 years of an 18-year sentence, the judge's recommendation because of the alleged racist element of the killing. "That sentence was so over the top it was frightening," says his son, who has written to Tony Blair and to virtually every MP asking them to look into his father's case. "Maybe I'm biased, but I just think it's a bit severe. It was a one-off thing. It wasn't premeditated, which was clear. It wasn't racist, despite what the judge said. That's what I want to contest. They know that in prison, all the black people in there who've lived with him for 12 years. He was asked to be godfather to a black kid, and that was before he got into trouble. Terrorists go out intending to kill people and only get 16 years' recommendation."

For a time, he concedes, the desire to win was motivated more by his father's plight than by his own fulfilment. It was natural that he should want to make his father proud of him. Ronnie Snr had been his mentor from the beginning. "There must be times when dad thought to himself: 'If I hadn't gone to jail, Ronnie [Jnr] wouldn't have gone off the rails'. I was going out and saying to myself: 'I've got to win this for dad'. But I don't try to do well for that reason any more. I've tried that one, it didn't work. So now I just go out to play for the enjoyment and the fun, otherwise it just becomes a chore. You've got to do things for positive reasons, not negative."

O'Sullivan once said that financial reward didn't really interest him. He yearned for fame, and trophies. He has achieved both. And the money has been thrown in for good measure as well. Over £3m in prize money at the last count. He uses it wisely, investing in property. Despite occasional declarations to the effect that he never wants to see a snooker table again, the reality is that he is here for the long haul.

"I've got more hunger now than I've ever had. I feel like I did when I was 16. I'm 27 years of age, and I believe I've got at least another 10 good years in me where I believe I'm going to be challenging for titles. If I stay in shape physically, I could go on to 45, 50. Hey, maybe I'll be the first player to win a ranking event at 50! Why not? The way I look at things, I could be coming to my peak at 35. Jesus Christ, what would I be like then?"

Such an outlook compares radically to his mental state in the days when he was persuaded to book into The Priory. You sense he would rather keep those memories packed in the attic of his mind. "At that time I needed that support, but now I'm very strong in myself. I feel very content. I have a couple of drinks now and again, but I don't see any counsellors. I got beaten yesterday [in the Scottish Open, by Alan McManus], so I'm just having a couple of gin and tonics. I feel calm, relaxed. I'm enjoying life, my head's straight."

O'Sullivan, who names another Essex boy, Steve Davis, as his all-time hero, comes into the same category as "Hurricane" Higgins as a People's Champion. He doesn't quite see it that way. "I'm just an ordinary person who took up the game for fun," he says. "I haven't changed. I'm the same as I was when I was a kid. They [the public] like me because of my snooker, not because of me as a person. All I want to be now is champion of my life. And being a role model."

"You believe you are?"

"Yeah, I'll accept that mantle. If someone wants to come and look and spend a year in my life, I'd say come in and watch it all, because I'm not the kind of person who goes round beating people up and causing mayhem wherever he goes. I'm a professional, same as Beckham."

And with that, he is off to "chill out" in readiness for the major challenge of the year. "Hey, you won't stitch me up, will you?" he says. "Sometimes I'm too trusting, and people take advantage."

No chance of that, because you can only respect how O'Sullivan has emerged from his personal trials.

Anyway, I didn't fancy a soaking.

Biography: Ronald Antonio O'Sullivan

Born: 5 December 1975 in Essex.

Turned professional: 1992.

Career earnings: £3 million-plus.

Maximum (147) break: Four times – Embassy World Championship, 1997; Regal Welsh Open, 1999; Grand Prix, 1999; Regal Scottish Open, 2000.

Ranking event wins: (11) Embassy World Championship (2001); UK Championship (1993, 1997, 2001); British Open (1994); Asian Classic (1996); German Open (1996); Regal Scottish Open (1998, 2000); China Open (1999, 2000).

Also: compiled the fastest-ever 147 – 5min 20sec – against Mick Price in the 1997 World Championship. Made first tournament century break aged 15.