The Green Baize Obsession: When Snooker Ruled the World

Ed Tayler remembers the glory days of the 1980s, when 18.5 million people stayed up past midnight to watch two men in waistcoats poke a ball into a hole.

If you tried to pitch Snooker to a Netflix executive today, they would laugh you out of the room.

“So,” they’d say. “It’s two men. They are wearing bow ties. They walk around a table in silence for seventeen days. They drink water. And occasionally, one of them coughs.”

It sounds unbearable. It sounds like a punishment. Yet, in the 1980s, Snooker wasn’t just a sport; it was a national religion. It was prime-time viewing. It was the only thing that mattered.

We didn’t have TikTok; we had Pot Black. We didn’t have influencers; we had The Whirlwind. And frankly, we were better off for it.

The Romford Robot vs. The People

The genius of 80s snooker lay in the casting. You couldn’t write characters this good.

In the Red Corner, you had Steve Davis. The “Nugget.” The “Romford Robot.” A man so efficient, so clinical, and so utterly devoid of visible emotion that people genuinely suspected he was a cyborg sent from the future to destroy the concept of joy. He didn’t just play snooker; he solved it.

In the Blue Corner, you had everyone else. The rogues. The mavericks. Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, a man who played snooker like he was trying to start a fight in a car park. Jimmy “The Whirlwind” White, the people’s champion, who could pot a ball from three postcodes away but couldn’t win a World Championship to save his life.

It was a soap opera. You weren’t watching sport; you were watching a battle between Order and Chaos played out on a 12-foot slate table.

The Diet of Champions

Modern athletes are boring. They drink protein shakes and sleep in hyperbaric chambers.

The 80s snooker player was built differently. They were the last generation of athletes who treated their body like a landfill site.

Bill Werbeniuk, a Canadian giant, famously drank 40 pints of lager a day “for medical reasons” (something about a tremour in his arm). Alex Higgins smoked roughly 4,000 cigarettes during a single frame.

Watching these men compete was mesmerizing. The air in the Crucible wasn’t oxygen; it