Here's the final frame of the 2010 UK Championship from the weekend. Best of 19, tied at 9-9, John Higgins had trailed 9-5 after 14 frames.
My pal, Buzz, and I saw these two legends a number of times at the World Championships in Sheffield. We saw Higgins win the first of his three World Titles in 1998, and Williams win his first (of two) in 2000. I won 60 pounds on the latter match. Great, great stuff. I miss snooker, oh, I miss it.
Enjoy
(Sometimes you get archival stories...I keep them here for when I get old and crazy: read at your own risk)
I can’t believe it’s been eleven years since I hit the road with my friend, Buzz, for our first venture to the World Snooker Championships (we went the next year but it wasn’t the same staying in a cheap motel). About a year earlier I'd purchased an older Bedford caravan that looked a lot like this one with the intent of doing some caravanning around England; very English, indeed. Needless to say, the caravanning never happened and it mostly sat around – having completed only this journey before eventually being sold.
Way back in 1998, in order to attend the Embassy World Championships, I had to complete an actual paper application form for tickets; I’d mailed mine on the first eligible day in hopes of getting seats for the finish of the semi-finals on Saturday and the Sunday/Monday finals sessions (the second day of the final is always on the May Bank Holiday Monday). My ticket packet arrived a few months later and we were set – somewhat surprisingly – for all three days of snooker.
First, the Bedford. This little, old dinghy thing had the standard sleeping set-up with a dinette table turning into one bed and a second over the cab. The kitchen area had a small refrigerator (electric when in camp, propane when on the road), a two-burner stove, a small oven, and a radiator heater; all running on propane. If I remember correctly, we loaded up on Saturday morning with some bread, instant grits, eggs, milk, sandwich fixings, bottled water, butter, bacon, and Heineken: your basic guy weekend necessities. I also brought along the portable CD-player stereo since they didn’t apparently have stereos in Bedford caravans built in the 1980s. I stopped by Buzz’s to grab him – and his bevy of classic rock CDs – before heading out to the A1 and running north to Sheffield. The Bedford four-speed manual ran like a champ that day as we listened to some Sabbath (or any Sabbath family-tree band;believe me when I say I got a Sabbath family tree lecture) and imagined just how crisp the green baize would look when we entered the great Crucible Theatre.
The camp/caravan ground I’d found (I don’t know how…the Web was still a bit immature) was up the side of a steep and muddy hill on the northwest outskirts of Sheffield with nothing else around it. It took quite a bit of navigating to find - after driving past the bog at least once - and some quality driving to get the rig in and parked between the scrappy trees and mud. South Yorkshire is still a damp, cold place in late May and this was something we hadn’t really considered prior to the trip (see below: heater). The campground was probably half full with mostly tent and sleeping bag folks that were doing who knows what out in the cold and dirt. We had a power post for the caravan and a bathhouse about twenty paces away. Overall, it met our needs well enough since we were living large in the Bedford condo. I did feel a little bad each morning as we stepped from our warm cocoon – with the scent of toast and grits spilling out the door – and headed to the shower. The well-chilled and hardy north England campers would be hunched over small brews with hunks of stale meat in their medieval claws. Okay, not that bad, but it was dang cold in the mornings and I secretly admired their manliness as I ate my eggs and grits in the warmth of the camper.
Our first foray into the Crucible for the first Saturday afternoon session was amazing. The table is set in a pit so all seats have excellent views of the action; being that a snooker table is monstrous it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. You’ve got fully stocked food-and-drink vendors that ply a vast selection of sausage and/or ham sarnies and pints of beers – manna for snooker fans. Each session, which runs eight frames, can take anywhere between 75 minutes (if Ronnie O’Sullivan is playing) to 3 hours (if Steve Davis is very slowly ambling around the table). You can come and go between frames if you need to top up on beer but the place is absolutely quiet during play with only the occasional eruption of applause at difficult pots, great safety play, completion of a frame, and century breaks. We attended seven sessions over three days and watched on Monday night as John Higgins won it all for his first World title. We also managed, prior to Saturday’s play, to get then reigning World Champion Ken Doherty’s autograph as he entered through the player’s entrance. Damn snooker groupies.
Here’s what we learned on our first night of camping in the Yorkshire hills. The drinking of a good numbers of beers, playing Crib Golf, and listening to the Jerky Boys while sitting in a caravan in the north of England can be hilarity; maybe not to everyone, but trust me, it was stupid hilarious to a couple of half-loaded snooker followers. We were perfectly happy as our little heater kept plugging away and keeping us warm from the howling English winds while we played round after round of Crib Golf. The other thing is this: even though it feels nice and toasty when bed time arrives at 1am, don’t turn off the heat because you think you’ll be “warm enough” through the night. The Bedford is just a big sheet of aluminum bent into the shape of a box and boxy aluminum isn't warm. I was sleeping above the cab and Buzz was on the dinette-configured-as-a- bed and by about 3am it was freezing cold. Of course, neither of us were initially willing to get out from under any covers to save ourselves. I eventually, against the will of my shivering bones, managed to climb down and fire up the heater. Needless to say, the heater was hard at work all through our second night of camping.
By the time everything wrapped up Monday evening, with Higgins besting Doherty 18-12 in the final, we were packed up and ready to head home to East Anglia. We gassed the Bedford up, pointed south, and managed to make it home safely as the clock neared midnight. We made the trip up again in 1999 and 2000 (only having tickets for the Saturday semi-finals in 1999) but the Bedford was long gone by then. It didn’t have anything near the same feel as 1998 because we were limited to bars and the local Happy Eater for drinks and food – if you’ve never been to a Happy Eater in England, you don’t know garbage food from nothing. Looking back on that weekend in 1998 it was probably as much fun as you can have at a sporting event. I was at the Caps playoff games last year, and it was pretty amazing, but my love of snooker combined with a smaller venue and a crappy camper easily put it up at the top.
Maybe if the Caps win the Cup at Verizon this year I'll change my mind. Even with that, I might need to rent a camper and sleep out on 7th and F St. the night before to get it over the top.
I stumbled upon a grand British row quite by accident today. During my years living in England I learned to love three things: AA Gill, Jeremy Paxman, and University Challenge (and Jamie Oliver; Cilla Black; Nevermind the Buzzcocks [Mark Lamarr verision]; Ready, Steady, Cook; People Like Us; Top of the Pops; Charlie Dimmock, and Carol Vorderman. I forgot about those.) If you don’t know much about any of these then you might want to switch off, but if you do then you’ll enjoy the initial piece by Gill from the 1 March 2009 Sunday Times; here’re the pertinent paragraphs:
“How pleased were you that Gail Trimble, the classics postgrad, led Corpus Christi to victory in University Challenge’s final? Incredibly clever girls are just really hot. I know that’s not an admirable or worthy admission from a middle-aged man, but it’s true. Spectacled academics with split ends and logarithmically come-hither expressions who might whisper the periodic table in your ear are deeply sexy. In place of “GSOH” attached to lonely hearts ads, very soon we’ll be getting “KAT2” — Knows a Thing or Two.
I’m torn by University Challenge. Having given Paxman a kicking last week, I should say he is exceptionally good at keeping this very simple quiz show exciting and vaguely human. Never having personally troubled academia, and being a chippy autodidact who will never use a short word when three etiolated, logorrheically otiose ones are available, I naturally and cravenly find it winning, as I also found the contestants marvellously risible. It’s that delicious mixture of self-conscious youth trying to look cool while simultaneously showing off, and my own shaming surge of smugness when I get a starter for 10 ahead of the wonky egghead.”
Classic. Absolutely, classic Gill. As I was searching about to find a picture of the incredibly clever Gail, I learned that Corpus Christi College was stripped of the UC championship due to an ineligible student – what I wouldn’t give for an evening around a pub debating the merits and chivalry of British pub quizzes. Based on the amount of press coverage that Ms. Trimble received in the built-up to the final, I’m sure the country was all atwitter at the title-stripping from our Gail (sorry, channeling Cilla).
If you want further reading on the set to, you can read more here and here.
Brilliant.
One of Slate’s writers finally added his voice to the much read and discussed Shane Battier story in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine from a few weekends ago. The kinfolk from Vermont were down visiting for Second Christmas when one of our late night rap sessions slipped toward sport and superstars. It’s happened in the past, and I’m probably the cause of the jumps, but there are some sports happenings that equate well to various real-life situations – I don’t remember the source of this particular foray. Oddly enough, the morning after our chat the Battier piece shows up on our doorstep as if called from the beyond. I also broached the subject of the article with my resident Sabermetrician and he assured me that the article “was all the talk” in and around the community over the weekend. I felt a bit nerdy knowing that something I found interesting was the “talk” of the Sabermetrician community; they’re a strange breed.
The piece struck me in two different ways: first, it confirmed my long-held suspicions that there are many aspects of team athletic endeavors that go unnoticed. As X pointed out while reading the article, why have we chosen to only accept (and pay athletes) by the defined box score numbers we see in the paper? Second, I wanted to believe that I was Shane Battier – and I’m also apparently the guy who could be writing the Slate piece. Hey, I lived in Arlington until this year and I have prescription Rec Specs! Secondly, my final season of playing organized basketball was way back in 1995 as I was finishing up my first tour in England and a lot of the story rings true for a mid-level player. I finally gave up playing after that year because when you hit 30 it all becomes too much. Well, that and the fact that I have a very low threshold of pain and blowing out a knee didn’t seem like anything I might be interested in experiencing. And, if I may let you know, most military bases have regular basketball leagues and over-30 leagues: I was barely interested enough in playing with 18- and 19-year-olds heaving up twenty-five footers and dressing like MJ – there was no way I was showing up to play with the old guys. My retirement at 30 had long been on the table and that Spring it was formally announced and reported to my rearview mirror on my drive home through the English fens. Those last two seasons were spent doing the same junk I'd always done: rebounding, blocking out, playing defense, setting picks, moving without the ball, and hoping that the *Kevin Johnson-wannabe point guard would somehow manage to not turn the ball over or possibly figure out how to use a pick. Two things quickly became evident way back then: the point guard would never figure out the pick and I was getting way too old and tired to play with the kids. It was also during that final season that I was ejected from a game for the first time. Oddly enough, it wasn’t because I was hanging 30 points on the opposition or yanking down 20 rebounds and the other team was targeting me; it was because of a beautiful blindside pick set on the point guard’s defender as they were hurtling down the court. For some reason, or more likely simple luck, the point ran his man right into the pick. I had the benefit of seeing it coming (don’t think I wasn’t smiling….) and had time to brace for impact. The poor defender was simply de-cleated, if you will, and he was pissed at everything. No foul was called but chucklehead was none too happy when he got up off the ground and threw a punch. I ducked – I’m a lover, you know – and the ref ejected us both: he for being a jerk, me for being too good. Or being Shane Battier, had we known.
I pulled off my Rec Specs, wiped the sweat away, and headed home. A good night, indeed.
t
*I had to dig through my dusty brain to come up with a 1995 era point guard. I was going to throw out Steve Nash or Allen Iverson but that would have taken my readers outside the picture I was creating. I would have had all kinds of feedback about how Steve Nash wasn’t yet an NBA MVP so how could that kid in 1995 have wanted to be Steve Nash? Was he Canadian? Nevermind.
There’s a great sport commentary in the Sunday Times (London) today. As I was reading I realized that what was before me was a slap down at every sport supporter whose favorite team doesn’t do well. Endless hope. This commentary dealt specifically with the England national team and just how horrid they’ve become. Believe me, I can substitute my team into the article – with parallel players and coaches – and come to the same point as the writer. As an example, the England nation football team didn’t even qualify for this summer’s European Championship. For a nation that wholly believes that their team is one of the elite footballing nations, it’s a sad situation. England won the World Cup in way back in 1966 while serving as the host country and nothing since WWII is more ingrained in the consciousness of the English than that great moment. It’s the sole time that nation lifted the Cup and it’s carried through generations of English fans. Since then, four other countries have won at least two World Cups (Brazil has won three) yet England still consider themselves to be part of that elite group of national teams. England has never even reached the final of the European Championship yet there's a often a feeling of divine right and success. You know, I don’t want to get a bunch of e-mail cursing my name from England fans around across the globe, I lived in England for ten years and I suffered through tough times cheering for the team, so just bear in mind that I’m a Cubs fan I can match every excuse and poor choice that’s ever been made by a team.
Rubbish. That says it all about fans as much as it does about teams.
t
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