The genius of Ronnie O'Sullivan

 

A piece I wrote for the Idler about the new snooker world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan a year ago is now available for all to read at the magazine's website. Here's a snippet:

Ronnie is something else, a spectacle in a sport which is not spectacular. Here’s a man who has knocked in the fastest competitive maximum break at a barely believable five minutes and eight seconds. But here’s also a man who played in his socks during the first round of the 2015 world championships because his shoes were annoying him, until tournament director Mike Ganley told him that playing shoeless breached the dress code and lent him a pair of his own. And here’s a man who is so tired of dull interview questions that he sometimes goes gently rogue and answers them in an Australian accent (he’s from Dudley), or like a robot.

You can read the rest here.