WITH a murderer for a father, teenage years spent in his parents’ sex shop, a history of drink and drugs – but a supreme talent for his sport – Ronnie O’Sullivan’s life is stranger than fiction.
So it is little wonder that the snooker ace has drawn heavily on his own experiences when writing his first novel, Framed — a crime thriller set in the gritty underworld of 1990s Soho.
It tells the story of snooker club owner Frankie James and his criminally dysfunctional family.
Frankie’s dad is in prison for armed robbery, his mum left when he was 16 and his brother is accused of murder.
Five-times world champion Ronnie, 40, says: “The book is a sort of mirror image of my life. It’s set in that world I remember growing up.
I hated snooker…I only played so Dad could watch in jail
“It was a very murky world, not one I entered out of choice — but that’s what happens when your dad is involved in an adult bookshop up the West End.”
Ronnie’s dad — also Ronnie — was jailed in 1992 for a vicious killing, but to his son he is a hero, the man who mentored him, drilled him in snooker and encouraged him to aim for the stars.
And it was his father who built Ronnie his first snooker room, in a shed at the bottom of the garden at the family home in Chigwell, Essex.
The house — and shed — were paid for from the proceeds of Ronnie Snr’s string of sex bookshops across Soho.
Ronnie recalls how the family garage was packed with dirty magazines and videos, and reckons he sold his first adult film when he was just ten.
He says: “It was one of those businesses where you could have gone to prison for six months for selling material you weren’t supposed to.”
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Ronnie Snr served 18 years for murdering dad-of-two Bruce Bryan, the driver for Charlie Kray — brother of gangsters Ronnie and Reggie — during a fight in a Chelsea nightclub.
He stabbed Bruce and his brother Kelvin with a six-inch hunting knife while allegedly hurling racist abuse at the two black men.
Ronnie has stood by his dad, who he says got mixed up with the wrong people as he was “not a particularly good judge of character”.
He adds: “He was a very generous person and some people took that kindness for weakness and played on it. That was his downfall.”
Ronnie’s Sicilian-born mother Maria was jailed soon after for tax evasion, leaving teenage Ronnie and his eight-year-old sister Danielle on their own.
Ronnie, who turned professional the year his dad was jailed, says: “I suppose it was a lot to deal with but at the time I didn’t think anything of it. You just go into survival mode.”
Danielle was taken in by family friends but Ronnie was left with the daunting task of trying to track down a vital witness to his dad’s crime.
He says: “The loyalty I felt towards my dad . . . I’d do anything he asked.
“I had to meet certain characters I would never normally have met.
“For quite a while they were in my life — not that I wanted it, but I had to do it for my dad. Before I knew it I’d got psychopaths as friends.
“I really tried to find that witness but I failed. At the end of the day I’m a snooker player, not Columbo.”
Such stories help to give Framed its authenticity and go some way to explaining why Ronnie is so famously complicated.
An undisputed genius with a snooker cue, he has 28 ranking titles to his name, second only to Stephen Hendry, and is so good he once beat an opponent playing left-handed. But he also has a love-hate relationship with the game, and has been dogged by a series of controversies, including assaulting a match official, failing a drugs test and making lewd comments to a female journalist.
For years he struggled with the pressures of his career, combined with his personal traumas, and was so desperately unhappy he was on the brink of quitting.
The only thing that kept him going in those early days was the thought of his father, alone in a prison cell.
Ronnie says: “My dad used to say it was like a visit to him when he saw me on the TV. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, that’s got to be the most important thing, it’s keeping him going.’
“So I knew I couldn’t give up, even though I was hating it. I couldn’t deprive my dad of that.”
To relieve the pressure, he began to experiment with drugs and alcohol, eventually falling into addiction.
He says: “I’d be feeling s**t and I wouldn’t want to sit there just thinking about snooker, so I’d have a joint and a drink and go out with my mates. Before I knew it, one night turns into a week, a week turns into a month and six years later I hit rock bottom.
“I got myself clean but then you have to learn to live sober, how to deal with the raw emotions and the stress. I’ve had battles with that for ten years.”
Today, Ronnie is better than ever at dealing with his demons. Running has been a big help — he calls it his “stress reliever” — as was taking a year off from snooker. In 2013 he revealed he had spent the time working on a smallholding, looking after pigs.
He is a devoted father to Lily, ten, and Ronnie Jnr, nine, whose mother Jo Langley he met at Narcotics Anonymous. He is now engaged to former Holby City actress Laila Rouass.
But Ronnie’s life is not completely settled, and this year has been particularly tough.
In February he revealed on Twitter how he had been conned out of £125,000 by a bankrupt businessman, and described the previous 16 months as the “worst in a long time”. Then in April he had a full-on breakdown at the World Snooker Championships, smashing up his dressing room and storming out of Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre without explanation.
He says: “I lost the plot and people knew, because they heard the ruckus in my dressing room.
“But I just took myself to hospital, checked myself in and I wasn’t coming out until I was better.
“That breakdown was great because I came out of it. I just think, ‘Wow, you can go into that hole and then come out of it five days later.’ I feel like Houdini sometimes.
“It would have taken me much longer to do that before but I’ve got so many skills now for dealing with it.”
Ronnie also allows himself the odd night off the wagon. He says: “I like to look at it as my Olympics — not every four years, but every three months I’ll have a little blowout.
“I’ll go out and get smashed and have a good night, then in the morning I wake up, go for a six-mile run and think, ‘Wow, you don’t need to do that for a while.”
And nowadays he has a far more relaxed attitude to the sport that made him famous.
He says: “I used to think I could have no distractions, I had to give 110 per cent to snooker, but that is completely untrue. It is better when I’ve got loads of stuff going on because it takes my mind off things.”
As for retiring, he says: “I’ll know when the time is right but at the moment I’m still putting in good performances and I get a kick off that. When I stop getting a kick, that will be the time to stop.”
For now, not only is Ronnie riding high in his sport, he also has a new career as a crime writer.
But there is one tough critic he is worried about — his dad, who was released from jail in 2010 and lives round the corner from him in Chigwell.
Ronnie says: “He’s not read it yet. I’m a bit scared, as if you came from his world you didn’t write books. He’d never tell his story, but I’m a snooker player, a straight-goer, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
Framed by Ronnie O’Sullivan (Orion, £16.99) is out now.
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