Snooker great Steve Davis talks retirement, record shops and Big Brother with Sky Sports (2024)

"Timing-wise, it just felt right," says Steve Davis, as he reflects on his decision to end a 38-year career in professional snooker with a public farewell at the Crucible Theatre a fortnight ago.

Audiences at Sheffield's snooker mecca saw Davis win six world titles during an era of dominance that coincided with the sport's boom under Barry Hearn's guidance in the 1980s. As he held the trophy aloft ceremonially - and a little sheepishly - for a final time, there was a feeling of relief that "the circle was closed".

"It just slowly got harder to compete at the top level. It's not that I didn't love the game, it's just that I've been playing competitively for so long that when you practise, you practise with a view to playing in a tournament," Davis says.

"And if you're losing every match then it perhaps isn't worth practising."

Six years after he last qualified for the World Championship, the game was up.

Just Jimmy White remains active of the 80s giants who laid bare on the baize a range of contradictory personalities that helped propel a pub game out of the Pot Black era and into the big-time.

A BBC film called 'The Rack Pack' chronicling a fictionalised version of Davis' rivalry with Alex Higgins was released in January, and the nostalgia - the sense he was part of the past rather than the present - played its role in the 58-year-old's retirement.

More influential, though, was the death earlier this year of his father Bill, whose unswerving practical, technical and paternal support took his son from the south London clubs to the amateur circuit and, in just a few years, to the top of the world.

"Things coincided with my father passing away," Davis says. "I didn't really feel the desire to play on longer with him not around, and by complete coincidence 'The Rack Pack' came out. That just brought home that first wave of enthusiasm for snooker to hit the UK - everything seemed to be leading towards the conclusion that it was the end of an era."

What an era, though. Davis emerged in the late 70s as a kind of other-worldly automaton pitted against the all-too-human Higgins and the unaffected White's outrageous talent, and he had ringmaster Hearn in his corner.

Given the way Essex's great sporting impresario has subsequently exploited the pantomime potential of boxing and darts - for the benefit of player and promoter alike - it is tempting to wonder whether the man vs machine narrative of the time was at all scripted. Not so, says Davis.

"It was just the way it was. We were all pushing boundaries in our own way, and you just did what you did the way you could do it. Part of your personality comes out on the table - you can't really do very much about that.

"The robotic, emotionless person I was on the table was how I dealt with the problem at hand. It wasn't so much Barry Hearn's influence as [a reflection of] the way each one of us lived our life at the time. I was pretty regimented, probably the hardest practiser."

That treadmill of practice-competition-practice took him to 28 ranking titles, and a genuine passion for a hobby-turned-profession helped maintain his meticulous approach even during the harrowing time when Stephen Hendry was wresting control of the sport.

The Scot bolted a total lack of fear onto Davis' merciless professionalism and toppled snooker's king, surpassing his record of six Crucible wins. Somewhere along the line, though, that new vulnerability - first glimpsed in the famous final-black world final defeat to Dennis Taylor in 1985 - meant the snooker-watching public came to love Davis where once he'd been merely admired.

A genial willingness to embrace Spitting Image's 'Interesting Steve Davis' caricature did no harm, and he remains the only snooker player to win the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year award, but Davis wonders now whether he or any of the circuit's fabled 80s 'characters' would leave a mark in today's post-internet, multi-channel world.

"I think the trouble is that the world's become quite immune to 'characters'. The analogy of Big Brother would spring to mind. The first winner of Big Brother [Liverpudlian everyman-type Craig Phillips in 2000] was just a normal bloke called Craig. Nowadays, it seems you've got to be some sort of absolute weirdo even to get on the show.

"I think the same applies in the world of sport. What was once considered to be a 'character' now doesn't cut the mustard. The way we look back at some of the old 'characters'... I don't think the modern-day players are any different to them. People have become a bit immune."

Think of the relative lack of interest in say, the brash idealism of Judd Trump or Mark Allen's spiky outsider status, and it is easy to agree. The exception, of course, is Ronnie O'Sullivan, who spoke after his recent Crucible exit about the combined pressures of being snooker's "new figurehead" and its most popular player. Davis sympathises.

"The same thing happened for Jimmy and for Alex," he says. "People wanted them to do so well, and when they weren't you'd get people shouting 'come on Jimmy' and 'come on Alex'. Sometimes I felt as though that hindered them more than helped. That didn't happen too often from my perspective, but actually perversely [the lack of support] was probably easier to deal with.

"Ronnie's certainly got the pressure of not only being the No 1 ranked player when he wants to be, he's also got the pressure of everybody wanting him to win. It's a double-edged sword."

Davis now has the luxury of looking on from a distance, and although his enduring love for the sport is obvious both from the way he talks and from his insightful television analysis, the tone is one of proud granddad ruffling the hair of his favourite grandson.

It is time for some of his other passions to share top billing now. Already a published author - he has co-written two books on chess - Davis' life story 'Interesting' is nominated for Autobiography of the Year at the prestigious Cross Sports Book Awards.

An interest in music - from rare 70s soul to obscure prog rock - has been a matter of record for years but has brought new opportunities recently after promoters tuned into his community radio show and spotted his potential for bringing "out-there" electronica to a wider audience.

Acclaimed DJ sets have followed, and when Davis answers his phone to Sky Sports he is busy rooting through the racks in a record shop in Manchester.

"It's great fun," he says. "One minute we're doing a radio show, the next minute someone's asked us to play a music festival, and now all of a sudden we're DJs. It's been brilliant, amazing."

A rapid rise from part-timer to pro? A burgeoning career he describes as "a hobby gone berserk"? All sounds a bit familiar...