Ronnie O’Sullivan at the German Masters, 2012. Photograph by DerHexer, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

When I arrived in Sheffield, England, last year and walked to the Crucible Theatre, it was not immediately clear that I was approaching the mecca of a sport watched by millions. Sheffield feels more like a large village, whose greatest claim to historical fame is industrializing so-called crucible steel, which revolutionized the cutlery trade. Today it has a reputation for being a sporting city—soccer foremost, then rugby, then ice hockey, then basketball (Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch spent ten years playing for and coaching the Sheffield Sharks). By far the most-watched sport in Sheffield, however, is snooker. Last year, more people in China watched the final of the World Snooker Championship than Americans watched the Super Bowl. Yet few Americans even know the game exists. 

Snooker is pool’s nightmarishly difficult cousin. While a pool table can range from seven to nine feet long, a snooker table spans twelve feet of green baize. In place of five-inch pockets, players aim for targets just three and a half inches wide. There are twenty-one balls on the table—fifteen reds, arranged in a pyramid on one end, and six in a range of colors, lined up into a pointillistic T. Players must alternate between pocketing a red ball (worth one point) and any “color”—a somewhat technical term that means any shade besides red: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black (in ascending order of value). Referees return the colored balls to their designated spots on the table to allow the cycle to continue, until every red has been potted. Snooker requires thinking at least three moves ahead: a good shot always secures position to make a second ball at the correct angle to play for a third. When no offensive opportunity presents itself, players aim to hide the cue ball behind one of the colored balls up-table. To prevent the opponent from having a clear view of the next ball is to “snooker” them. 

Games are won when there aren’t enough points left for opponents to overcome their deficits (typically seventy to eighty points). Players are regularly seen hunched over the table, mentally calculating which colors they need to pocket to ensure victory. But great matches transcend the goal of simply winning. Even when a player has technically triumphed, they are allowed to continue shooting until they miss. These technically pointless displays of skill, however, become a game within the game—a test of meeting certain scoring thresholds. Scoring a hundred points during a single visit is called a century. A “maximum” is a score of 147, achievable only when players exclusively pocket the black ball (worth seven points) after each red. After a successful maximum, the referee removes one white glove to shake the player’s hand. 

Each April, snooker’s most avid fans embark on a pilgrimage to Sheffield for the World Snooker Championship, the sport’s most prestigious affair by far. But walking into the Crucible felt like attending a community play. The theater accommodates just nine hundred and eighty people, and its limited capacity means no large crowds descend on Sheffield. Neighboring streets and pubs retain a distinctly local atmosphere. Inside, guests silently fill panels of seats surrounding a central sunken pit. The small capacity heightens the intensity; the audience looms closely over the action. (The Welsh snooker star Mark Williams once reached into the audience midmatch to help himself to a spectator’s candy.) Players are not granted the luxury of an anonymous, distant crowd. “The Crucible can be a very lonely place, despite being in the company of so many,” the 1979 world champion Terry Griffiths once said. “In fact, it’s the company of so many that’s the problem.” 

As I chatted with other snooker devotees in the Crucible, I realized I was a demographic outlier: American and young. The audience embodied the game’s subdued energy—perhaps out of respect for the event, or maybe because most in attendance could accurately be described as near geriatric. Snooker fandom has translated poorly across the generations in Britain. Only two British players younger than thirty-four qualified for the World Championship this year. In China, however, the sport has grown exponentially over the past decade. Three hundred thousand snooker halls now line city streets across Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. As attention to the sport shifts across the globe, tournaments now regularly pit a slate of aging UK stars against a flock of young Chinese players that have suddenly begun to dominate the game.

***

Greatness in snooker is rarely conspicuous. No player possesses a supernatural physique. Matches often lack obvious, decisive gut punches. Players have no teammate, coach, or caddy to confer with. They are alone at the table, developing their own rhythm as they oscillate between red, color, red while mentally calculating the necessary speed, angle, and cue-ball spin. Playing the game well requires a level of patient precision that only pros seem to grasp. Perhaps for that reason, television has always been snooker’s driving force. 

Three days after the Apollo 11 moon landing and two days before Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick address, the BBC broadcast a new show. Pot Black, an annual snooker tournament, aired its first episode on July 23, 1969. The series had been green-lit to show off the network’s new color television technology, overlooking the fact that most households at the time lacked a color TV. During one match, commentator Ted Lowe informed viewers that “Steve is going for the pink ball—and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.”

The show served as an appetizer for snooker’s real main event. The World Snooker Championship was established in 1927 but struggled to outgrow its niche audience. Between 1958 and 1963, no event was held due to lack of interest. Pot Black changed that. In 1969, the World Championship adopted its modern format of knockout rounds concluding in a final match. But convincing audiences to watch the weeks-long endurance contest of the World Championship was not straightforward. Many snooker champions have fit the mold of Steve Davis, a player from the London suburb of Plumstead who was so quiet and unassuming that he earned the ironic nickname Interesting. He dominated the sport in the eighties, winning six world championships. But his mechanical, slow approach at the table alienated audiences eager for spectacle. To attract loyal fans, snooker needed charisma. Luckily, in the seventies and eighties, Alex Higgins was playing. 

Steve Davis and Alex Higgins, 1988, via Wikimedia Commons.

Born in Belfast, Higgins was a two-time world champion nicknamed Hurricane. Immediately after shooting, he would jerk his body and cue to the side in a frenetic motion that no one would teach. He drank heavily (including during big matches), smoked eighty cigarettes a day, and was a prodigious gambler. His rebellious, precarious lifestyle connected him to working-class fans, but wrecked his career. After winning the 1972 World Championship, Higgins revealed that he was squatting in condemned buildings. During his appearances on Pot Black, he had prostitutes brought to his dressing room and was found urinating in a sink. He was caught urinating again, this time in an arena flowerpot, after clinching his second world title. He headbutted a tournament official in 1986, and in 1990 punched another in the stomach. That year, he told the Catholic player Dennis Taylor, “The next time you are in Northern Ireland, I will have you shot.” Higgins refused to quit drinking or smoking, even after receiving a diagnosis of throat cancer. In the end he lost his teeth, and subsisted on baby food (indignities that did not quiet his desire to punch officials, which he did again during a 2007 charity match).

In 1992, near the apex of snooker’s popularity in Britain, three new stars debuted: John Higgins (no relation to Alex), Mark Williams, and Ronnie O’Sullivan. All three are still ranked among the top twelve players, and they have won a combined fourteen world championships. Higgins is a workhorse of the sport, consistently winning for more than thirty years while leaking nothing about his personal life. His one known oddity is a robust knowledge of the American soap opera Dallas, which he made his specialty while appearing on BBC’s Celebrity Mastermind. Williams is less uptight. In 2018 he promised that if he won the world championship, he would give the ensuing press conference naked. After defeating Higgins, he followed through. He has been seen closing his eyes before taking a shot or shooting one-handed. Before last year’s World Championship, he revealed that he was dealing with eyesight issues. He finished as runner-up.

O’Sullivan, a seven-time world champion, is the greatest snooker player of all time. He is so much more successful and so much more famous than any other player who has ever played. No one approaches the game quite like him. O’Sullivan aggressively takes on shots with such speed that referees sometimes struggle to keep up. Fittingly, his nickname is Rocket. At times it feels impossible that he will ever miss. But O’Sullivan is openly vulnerable. The year he debuted, his father was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Ronnie was sixteen. (After winning the 1993 UK Championship, he brought the trophy to visit his father in prison.) The documentary of his 2022 championship run, Ronnie O’Sullivan: The Edge of Everything, features extended scenes with his therapist in which he discusses his depression and drinking; he claims he learned in rehab that happiness is an “inside job.” Throughout his career, snooker fans have watched Ronnie swing between the purest depression and the purest euphoria. He told an interviewer that he discouraged his son from picking up the game: Snooker’s “a waste of a life.” In the same interview, he was asked how he wanted to be remembered: “Like Muhammad Ali is in boxing.”

***

Contemporary snooker is defined by an ongoing anomaly: three men in their fifties still pummel younger players. But while they stretch their primes out beyond precedent, a crop of Chinese players are entering theirs. Back in 2016, Ding Junhui, then twenty-nine, became the first Asian player to make the finals of the World Championship—an early signal that the sport had grown internationally. Despite a match-fixing scandal in 2021, China has continued cementing its status as the new center of cue sports. Last year, twenty-eight-year-old Zhao Xintong became the first Asian player to win the World Championship. Chinese investors have begun scooping up rare cues, tables, and memorabilia to display in the World Billiards Museum in Yushan. For now, however, Sheffield remains the destination for any aspiring Chinese star; Junhui has lived there full-time since 2006, running a snooker academy where Chinese players train for the Crucible. 

Though snooker players tend to fall along tidy demographic lines—the consequences of a sport taken seriously in only a handful of countries—snooker fans rarely show overt national allegiances. At this year’s World Championship, the class of ’92 and a suite of Chinese players, nearly all in their early twenties, were again center stage. But the newcomers receive as much applause as the old Brits, though audience members are not allowed to cheer or jeer while the players are shooting. Instead, onlookers clip mini radios onto their ears to listen to BBC commentary throughout each match. Whispers and murmurs follow tactical shots, progressing to loud cheers when a ball is forcefully struck into the pocket, before again returning to silence. Fans are mercenaries, rooting for the game itself. 

This year, spectators were treated to a string of tense, high-profile matchups. In the second round, Higgins overcame a large early deficit against O’Sullivan, ultimately advancing to the semifinals, where he lost in his hundredth Crucible match to Shaun Murphy, a slightly younger Brit who’d last won in 2005. Hossein Vafaei—the only Iranian to ever compete in the tournament—defeated Judd Trump, the number one ranked player, before falling to Wu Yize, a twenty-two-year-old from Lanzhou making his third Crucible appearance. Wu’s semifinal match with Mark Allen featured one of the most shocking missed blacks in tournament history, allowing Wu to emerge victorious. Talent in snooker lies not only in flashy trick shots and high breaks; sustained focus is often the most impressive part of the sport. A single frame between Wu and Allen lasted for one hour and forty minutes—the longest in the championship’s history.

Wu’s final against Shaun Murphy went on for over thirteen hours. The audience cheered him on in synchronized roars—a sound he initially heard as antagonistic booing, until he realized they were chanting “Wuuuuu.” Just after 10 P.M. on the second day of play, the match was tied 17-17 in a race to 18. Twenty minutes later, Wu shook his head and frowned before potting a difficult red to the center pocket, beginning an 85-point run that won the deciding frame. A second Chinese player, all-time and in the past two years, lifted the trophy.

Julian Waddell is a researcher and a billiards enthusiast.