Ronnie O’Sullivan has seven World Championship titles to his name, but he has looked back on the time he visited the Crucible to watch the final at the age of 14.
O’Sullivan was making waves on the snooker circuit as a teenager, having taken up the sport at the age of seven.
At the age of 14, he travelled to Sheffield to take in the 1989 final between Steve Davis and John Parrott.
Davis ran out a dominant 18-3 winner, with O’Sullivan at the Crucible to watch him win the World Championship for a sixth and final time.
“[I watched the] final session, yeah,” O’Sullivan told Eurosport. “13-3, he won the first five frames. I remember Davis potted the brown off the black. It was on the spot and he hit the brown half ball onto the black and potted it.
“[My dad] dropped me off there and I sat with my friend in the crowd. It was good.”
While O’Sullivan has enjoyed major success at the Crucible, Jimmy White suffered a series of agonising defeats on the biggest stage.
White lost in the 1994 final to Stephen Hendry 18-17, having been 14-8 to the good.
“My worst nightmare was being 14-8 up and collapsing with Hendry,” White said. “Just ran out of steam. Everything went and he got stronger. Another bad one was twitching on the black at 17-each. I potted a really difficult red against him at 12-each to win 13-12. The first time I ever did sports psychology and I went 8-1 up.
“He’d won everything that year and I had to qualify. That was my best session.“
White also lost to eventual winner Alex Higgins in the 1982 semi-finals, where he led by 59 points in the 30th frame only to see his opponent make one of the greatest breaks in Crucible history to level the match before going on to win the final frame.
“Every time I go and play shows, they show me that break on video as if I haven’t seen it 100 times,” White said. “It’s amazing. The few balls he potted. The amazing blue he potted, he didn’t come on the red, had to pot it in the green pocket.
“I was never comfortable in the match. I never really got going. He was struggling. I was 7-3 up as well. I’ll never forget it. He played a brown into the yellow pocket. He missed it so far it hit four cushions and went into the green pocket and he was bang on the blue. So that was to go 7-4, ended up 7-6 so I’d have been too far in front.
“A few times in that break, I thought any moment he’s going to miss one. No, it was amazing. It was something from the gods. I believe in that, the snooker gods.
“I’m glad he did it. I might have lost to [Ray] Reardon, I might have won it. The way I was going… I was going a little bit crazy in life.”