The King of the Cue-ball. Review on Steve Davies

Everything mellows down with age, and Steve Davies too has lost much of his exceptional snooker skills to the inevitable process of ageing. The 6 times World Champion and undisputed king of Snooker in the 80’s is remembered more for making Snooker a competitive sport worthy of watching on TV, than for his countless titles.

I am one of the votaries of Steve Davies’s style of play and I must confess that I am a great fan of his. He glorified the art of ‘precision potting,’ and reveled in high pressure nerve wracking positional play. I consider him the ultimate snooker player and an all time great and that’s no big revelation, because, almost everybody who is in love with snooker and cares to chat about snooker shares my opinion.

Steve Davies was the young, gangling kid on the block in the 80s, and he managed to take on what was largely a group of older established men who played drooling snooker and drank countless pints of beer. “That wasn't for Steve; he wanted to stay sober, sipping water and abstaining from the nicotine!”

He astounded the connoisseurs of the game with his super confidence and ability to play long potting shots even at difficult angles. Positional play requires a high degree of control of the cue ball and Steve excelled in that too. A highly cerebral player, Steve read the game quickly and was just as quick in deciding as to when discretion was the better part of valour, and safety was the need of the moment.

Steve Davies won many tournaments, but I felt he had a special liking for World Snooker Championship, held at the Crucible in Sheffield where he showed his true mettle. He has won this 6 times, only bettered in modern day snooker by Stephen Hendry. “As well as those wins, he has been on the losing end of some great finals, against Joe Johnson and of course, Dennis Taylor (in 1985) - one of the most talked about snooker matches ever.”

Once you reach the top winning every major tournament, it becomes more and more difficult to find motivation to do better. Even the urge to stay consistently at the top wanes, and you feel there is nothing more to prove, nothing more to achieve. In the 90’s, after a glorious decade, Steve began to experience something of this kind and also he now had to contend with more and more younger players hungry for success.

The game has much to owe to Steve Davies for making it worthy of watching on TV. With the game becoming a success on TV, the sponsors swooped in like falcons sensing a kill. And with the coming of sponsors, the game had more money to play with (excuse me for my choice of words). The chain effect continued one step further and brought with it more younger players hungry for success, fame, and money.

Ironically, Steve’s success also turned out to be his nemesis. For more than a decade he strode like a colossus in the cue-ball game making it not only very popular by his style of play, but also by his demeanour on and off the snooker table.

Now in his forties, and in the sunset of his career, Steve can look back with pride and satisfaction. During his younger all conquering days, Steve was a very handsome and lovable person. He had impeccable manners and was an instant hit with the ladies (how often do we see men with impeccable manners being femme proxima?).

What we haven’t seen of Steve Davies on TV is the other facet of his personality. Steve is a very funny man with a rare gift of timing. His sense of humour is always spontaneous and spot on. He also has the gift of the gab, which is to say rather mildly that he has carved a place for himself as a commentator and a sports presenter. So you see, Steve is never going to be out of job!

Kudos to a fine gentleman and a great sportsman, who took snooker from the Bacchuses of the London pubs and made it one of the most endearing and enduring games watched by lovers of Snooker, Billiards, and Pool on the idiot-boxes all over the world.

© M B Farookh. Feb, 2005.