Snooker: Out of the shadows comes a bright star: Gordon Burn meets Ronnie O'Sullivan, the new golden boy of snooker who has emerged from a troubled past to lay claim to a better future for himself and Barry Hearn

LOW-LIFE, right. Low-lifes. Forget about the grans in their party chiffon planting peppermint-flavoured pecks on the cheek of that nice Steve Davis. Forget about 'corporate' and 'aspirational' and all the wind that blew through Barry Hearn's tunnel in the 1980s. Its delinquent undertow - the scabrous tattoo under the bible-black; the counterfeit urine sample; street-life right there in the living-room - has always been a big factor in accounting for snooker's couchpotato popular appeal.

It'shard to imagine now who they thought they were kidding with all the penguin suits, the lame-thread waistcoats and television manners, and rock-steady poofed-up hair-dos. It was always pretty obvious that under all that social hygiene - all the odoriferous top-dressing - was something ineradicable; something dingier and murkier that, like the smell of scurvy underwear and crusty socks challenging the hosed-on Adonis and Brut, would rise up and reassert itself sooner or later.

'Right from the start,' Steve Davis wrote in his autobiography, 'Barry and I agreed that courtesy, politeness, smart presentation and always being on time for an appointment would help me make it to the top . . . I cut my hair and had it styled. I went out and bought my first dress-suit. I began to take more interest in my appearance because I realised a good image is an important part of the act.'

It was an image designed to distance snooker from its old associations with no-goods and no- hopers and with places like The Regal in Eric Street in the East End of London, the notorious hall owned throughout the 1950s by Ronnie and Reggie Kray, and described by John Pearson in The Profession of Violence: 'Most thieves require a well-run base if they can find it, somewhere they can relax, talk freely, pick up the latest gossip and know they are safe. For them the billiard hall was perfect . . . Before long it was offering local criminals a genuine service. It was all carefully organised. There were lock-up cubicles under the seats for the thieves' tools; stolen goods could be left round the back of the hall . . . The billiard hall was a good receiving ground for criminal information, a word from a fence, a tip-off from a taxi driver, a telephone call from a barman.'

So it should seem odd that Barry Hearn, the leading tub- thumper for 'deviance disavowal' in snooker, last year signed up a player whose father is at present serving a life sentence for the murder of a man who worked as a driver for the Kray twins' older brother. It should seem even odder that Hearn would take Ronnie O'Sullivan on at a time when his once world-beating stable of male players had dwindled to one: Steve Davis. Jimmy White, Neal Foulds, Willie Thorne and Dennis Taylor had all left in acrimonious circumstances, and a number of legal actions relating to Hearn's alleged negligence in the handling of finances are still pending.

His involvement with Ronnie O'Sullivan would only suggest inconsistency, however, to those who are unaware of how Barry Hearn has been able to switch from accountancy to fashion; from fashion to property speculation and gaming machines; from property to sports management and snooker-as- showbiz over the years, as new opportunities have presented themselves. Freddie King, a former lightweight boxer from the Jim Wicks-Henry Cooper stable, was his partner in the fruit-machine and amusement arcade business. And, from the late 1980s, Hearn started to direct his energies into exploiting the titles controlled by the World Boxing Organisation. His face disappeared from the bars and hospitality rooms of the snooker circuit and began appearing with increasing regularity on television, shepherding Chris Eubank or one of his other fighters under the disco lights and Union flags into the ring.

Hearn's glory days in snooker appeared to be over. As far as the public were concerned, he had virtually severed his links with the sport, which was now dominated by a new young champion, Stephen Hendry, and a new, colonising manager, Ian Doyle. And then, two summers ago, he pounced and picked up a player who was then still only 15 and who he had never seen play. Why?

Hearn's answer is predictably hyperbolic, but likely to be supported by anybody who has watched Ronnie O'Sullivan playing at the top of his game. 'Because', he says, 'he is going to be the best there's ever been. Better than Davis, better than Hendry, better than White. 'Also,' Hearn adds, 'he's an Essex man. I'd come across his dad a few times. We're from the same world. We are of a like kin. We're Essex men. We've got to stick together. We're a superior breed.'

RONNIE O'SULLIVAN grew up in a handsome, double-fronted house in Chigwell, a symbol of his father, 'Big' Ronnie's successful career as a pawnbroker and sex-shop proprietor (although at his trial for the stabbing of Charlie Kray's driver his occupation was given as 'book trader'). A snooker room is part of the property, but 'Little' Ronnie, as his mother calls him, even though at six-feet-some he dwarfs both his parents, practises every day from 10 until nine at Ilford Snooker Centre, part of a converted cinema on the High Road.

There are two snooker centres in Ilford, though, and I was directed to the wrong one by a man selling papers outside the station. Ifound the New World on the other side of the Exchange, a deserted shopping centre done out in shades of bubblegum and full of deserted Kard Kabins, Kandy Marts, Kall-Kwiks and Pronto Prints. The New World shares a building with Ilford Panel Craft and is next door to a take-away called Wonder Kitchen whose beakers and trays floated on the tide of debris and garbage that lapped around the entrance.

Inside, skiingwas playing on the giant screen, and snooker and American football on the conventional ones. A couple of fly-boys loitered by the fruit machines in an alcove, a man with a goitre was occupied scraping mould off a piece of cheese in the kitchen area, and I concluded I'd come to the wong place.

'A lot of trouble gets bought at that club,' Ronnie O'Sullivan said when I finally located him. 'Local gangs come in and wait around hoping to start something. You know - stabbings, throwing drugs around. Just what you need when you're trying to play a game of snooker.'

He'd broken away from a pokerschool to say this, a big, open-faced boy - a country boy, you'd be inclined to say if you met him in a different setting - with a ruddy complexion and rough, black hogsback hair that probably comes from his mother's Italian side of the family. 'Seventeen going on 38.' That's what everybody always says about Ronnie. And it is obvious within a couple of minutes of meeting him that he is not 'lacking in the worldly-wise department' in the way that Steve Davis acknowledges he was at the same age.

In the early days of Davis's partnership with Barry Hearn, nothing - not the socks he wore, not which side of his head he parted his hair on, not the way he walked into a room - was left to chance. Even preparing for an interview with the Romford Observer, everything was rehearsed and, if possible, scripted in advance. One frame away from taking his first major title in 1980, Davis left the hall to meet Hearn in his dressing-room, as arranged, for a last-minute run-through of the speech they had worked up for the occasion.

A couple of weeks ago, though, facing Stephen Hendry in the semi-final of the Dubai Classic (which he lost 2-6), Ronnie O'Sullivan was on his own. All Hearn's energies were going into the selling of the Eubank-Benn rematch, and Ian Doyle, Hendry's manager, is of the opinion that Ronnie O'Sullivan suffered as a result of it. 'There's certainly no way I'd have allowed the boy to be in Dubai unprotected and at the mercy of the media, with no one there to correct the wrongs. Ronnie is a very, very nice young lad, a lad much more mature in some respects than Stephen was at the same age. But there are some ways he does show his youth and inexperience. 'Stephen gives you a million chances,' he said to me after the match in Dubai, and I had to tell him, 'Ronnie, Stephen never made any move out of second gear to beat you. If he gives you a chance, you've got to kill him. If you don't, he's going to jump out of the cupboard and kill you.' '

Playing in the qualifying rounds of the season's major championships over three months, in Blackpool in the summer of 1992, O'Sullivan virtually rewrote the record book by winning 74 of his first 76 matches as a professional. It was at that time, though, that Ian Doyle claims he detected the first signs that O'Sullivan was being neglected by his manager. 'I became very aware of the fact,' he says, 'that Ronnie was very unhappy with Barry towards the tail-end of the qualifiers. In many ways young Ronnie was like a lost soul.'

O'Sulliv an's reaction to this is that Doyle must have been talking to his mother. 'Barry's brilliant with me. Barry's different class. But my mum expects him to drop million-pound Chris Eubank contracts for me just like that. I don't want all the attention from Barry Hearn. I think I'm old enough and ugly enough to look after myself. I don't need Barry Hearn phoning up and telling me how I'm doing . . . He knows he's got no problem with me. He could see from my mum and dad the sort of person I was. It's an easy way to judge a person: look at the parents and see what they're like. He knows my mum and dad are not going to let anything bad happen to me.'

'Let me tell you something,' Hearn says. 'He's a man. Not a boy. He doesn't need his hand held. I asked him: 'What d'you think?'

' 'I feel like a man.'

' 'Then go on your own. Be a man. Be a man.' Sticking him off on his own in Blackpool was part and parcel of the policy, a way of making him a man in a man's world. Look, I haven't got time to wipe anybody's backside any longer. Which is why I made the move around. Where I used to control the players, I do my best now to control the telly. Events on television last longer, they can't answer back, you can turn them off. You can't turn a human off. Well, you can, but it's called murder.

'So that was my thinking. But every now and then a player comes up and stops the complete turnaround you plan to make. It would have been madness to lose Ronnie O'Sullivan. Ronnie O'Sullivan is the front runner of a whole new breed. They're fearless. They're totally fearless. They bring with them a quality I only find in the ringed arena.'

THERE is a subtext, of course, to all this bluster. When Hearn had the chance, but failed, to sign Stephen Hendry at the World Amateur Championships in 1984, the balance of power within snooker shifted. Hendry provided Ian Doyle with the power base on which he has since successfully built, and Hearn's previously unassailable position was significantly weakened. When O'Sullivan becomes world champion - and one of the few things Doyle and Hearn agree on is that it is not if, but when (Hearn says 1994, Doyle a year or two longer) - whoever is managing him will be able to claim to be in the driver's seat for the rest of the decade.

Doyle says the greatestmiscalculation of Hearn's life was not signing Stephen Hendry. He says the greatest miscalculation of his own - and he has since been accused by Hearn of trying to 'poach' the boy from him - was not snapping up Ronnie O'Sullivan when he had the chance. 'I should have signed him, but I wasn't too sure he was as good as some people were saying. The sum and substance of it is that, while I was considering the position, Barry stepped in. He beat me to the punch. I have to say in all honesty I made a big mistake. I made a big mistake in not signing O'Sullivan.'

'For Ronnie O'Sullivan to be managed by anybody else,' Hearn maintains,'is unthinkable. Doyle was never in the frame. Never in the same street. Never in the same county. No way was Ronnie O'Sullivan ever going to marry the Scotsman.'

O'Sullivan was signed to Hearn in July 1991. Three months later, 'Big' Ronnie, Ronnie's father,was drinking with a friend in Stocks, on the King's Road in Chelsea. They had spent pounds 200 on food and champagne when they got into an argument with a group celebrating the birthday of a former girlfriend of Charlie Kray. A man called Bruce Bryan, who was black, was stabbed twice, once in the stomach, and died on the pavement. Sentencing O'Sullivan Snr to life imprisonment, the judge told him: 'This was a very excessive attack which included elements of racial harassment and quite gratuitous and disproportionate violence.'

(It is the sugggestion of a racial motive which most upsets Little Ronnie's mother, Maria. When I met her for dinner at Langan's, she was accompanied by her husband's hairdresser, a black man, whose clients also include the former boxing promoter Ambrose Mendy. The maitre d' at Langan's, Graziono, who was at school with Big Ronnie, also wanted to testify that he was an all right geezer; a gem; 'bollo' - read: 'the bollocks'. A photographer friend, who met O'Sullivan Snr on holiday in Florida, confirms this; as does the snooker commentator Clive Everton, who says many young players have been tided over financial difficulty by Big Ronnie with the words 'Pay me back when you can'.)

'It killedme,' Ronnie Jnr says of the day he heard about his father's arrest. He was in Thailand at the time, taking part in the World Amateur Championship, aged 15. 'That's the worst I've ever felt in my whole life. Ever felt. Because I was in such a state out there, I just couldn't get it together in some matches. I was meant to win it, but there was no way.'

Barry Hearn says he never had any thoughts about pulling out of a contract which had only recently been signed. 'We decided to be up-front with it. His dad is away. It's better meet it head-on.' He believes he saw the first fruits of this tactic at Blackpool last year, when Ronnie won his first 38 matches as a professional, a record for any player. He eliminated Jimmy White from the European Open on one of the days his father was standing trial; and in January this year became the youngest player to win a professional tournament. 'It would have scrambled any normal man's brain, what he went through,' Hearn says. 'It sounds right corny, but he loves his dad. They'd cut an arm off for each other, which I think is nice. It's given him maturity and character. He wants to succeed for his father. It's given him a focus point.'

'Awright, Jeff? Me dad sends 'is best. I just spoke to 'im now,' Ronnie said. 'He said send me best to Jeff an' that.' Jeff was a burly sort with a bullish, cropped head and an earring, leaning out of his car window in the dark in the direction of Ronnie's Merc. 'New London International Security Services,' it said on Jeff's card. 'Concerts and stuff,' he explained. 'Although lately we've gone over to the industrial side of things. PowerGen. National Power. Round-the-clock uniformed guards.' The rendezvous was the car park of a Moat House just outside Harrow. Ronnie was on his way to an exhibition match. The venue - the War Memorial Institute - is difficult to find, and Jeff was there to lead the way.

'They've put phones in the prisons now,' Ronnie said, 'so me dad phones me up all the time and still tells me what to do. I have to listen exactly. An' the screws in there are like brilliant. They record the matches and let him watch them on video, or he watches them live sometimes. It really gets him going . . . My dad's gonna control my fan club. I'm going to let him do that 'cause I'm starting to get a lot of people writing in to me, and I think it would be good for him if he got all the letters, give him an interest on the outside.'

I wanted to get this straight. He'll give his fan-club address as care of Ronnie O'Sullivan Snr, D-Wing, Wormwood Scrubs, where his father is one year into a life sentence for murder? 'Yeh,' Ronnie said cheerfully, 'course I will. Yeh] Why not? It ain't bad publicity. My dad ain't a bad person.'

Everybody who saw them remarked on the obvious affection between Ronnie and his father, who is still only 38. Clive Everton remembers Ronnie kissing his father goodnight in hotel bars, before going up to bed at 10 o'clock. 'There's nothing nasty about Ronnie,' he says. 'Nothing brash. This may stem from the fact that he's never been short of love.'

'Ever since when I was really young, like 10 or 11,' Ronnie said, 'me dad always emphasised like going to bed early, getting up early, and doing a bit of fitness. Me dad likes working out in the gym an' that, keeping himself in good shape. He always did, and he always put it on me to do it. So I've got into this fitness thing, where I like running, and I don't smoke and don't drink.'

He was playing a Gabrielle tape. He was wearing a jacket belonging to his mother with armbands cinching up the sleeves. 'Life isn't going to stop just because me dad's been put in prison,' he said. 'Me dad's in prison and he's got a sentence to do and he's gonna do it like a man. He's not gonna cry like a babe. An' my head ain't gonna drop because he's in there, 'cause I know it wouldn't be good for him. He wouldn't be proud of me. He'd want me to keep me chin up and go out there an' do the best I can. Be an ambassador for the sport. Not crumble under the pressure. Like, crack up. I just want to keep a head on me shoulders, go along nicely, just do it for my dad.'

He said he wasn't playing for money, but for glory and titles, and at this stage it's obviously the truth. 'I think a lot of them spend more than they earn, really,' Ronnie, who bought a top-of-the-range BMW out of his first winnings, said. 'They're all going to end up skint, because they're leading lives like millionaires and they're only earning a hundred grand a year, d'you know what I mean? It's a nice bit a money, but you can't get a Merc sports and 800-grand houses when you earn not a lot of money, really. Not enough to compensate it.'

As the promoter of the fight in which Michael Watson suffered permanent brain damage, Barry Hearn can't be oblivious to the darker motives that might bring people to see Ronnie O'Sullivan. 'Motor racing crowds are always on the bends. That's in people. You haven't got long enough to understand what's in people,' he once said.

'Listen, I'm a face,' Hearn said last week. 'I'm a lucky face. I bumped into Steve Davis, I bumped into Chris Eubank, and now I've bumped into Ronnie O'Sullivan. What a result] I tell you what. If it carries on like this I may have to go back to working for a living.'

(Photographs omitted)