Relentless

Secrets of the Sporting Elite

Alistair Brownlee

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008295288
• eBook ISBN: 9780008295301
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Éxito personal

In his quest to define ‘sporting greatness’, double Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee has spent nearly 4 years interviewing and training with some of the greatest minds in sport to discover what it takes to become – and remain – a champion.

From the age of 11 Alistair Brownlee has been obsessed with being the very best, and not just improving his sporting performance across his three specialist triathlon disciplines of swimming, cycling and running, but also understanding how a winner becomes a dominant champion. Winning gold in consecutive Olympic Games has only strengthened this need and desire.

Over the last 4 years Alistair has been on a journey to learn from the best, talking to elite figures across multiple sports – including Chris Froome, Ronnie O’Sullivan, Alastair Cook, Paula Radcliffe, Ian Poulter, Shane Williams, Ian Botham, Mark Webber and AP McCoy – as well as leading thinkers and scientists, to understand what enabled these remarkable individuals to rise to the very top, and to push the limits of human capability in their relentless pursuit of perfection.

Alistair uses these fascinating interviews, along with extensive research, to explore a range of sports and environments – athletics, cycling, football, rugby, horseracing, hockey, cricket, golf, motor racing, snooker and ultra-running – to reveal how talent alone is never enough and how hard work, pain, pressure, stress, risk, focus, sacrifice, innovation, reinvention, passion, ruthlessness, luck and even failure can all play a crucial part in honing a winning mentality and achieving sustained success.

Includes:

Ian Poulter • Ronnie O’Sullivan • Alastair Cook • Paula Radcliffe • Ian Botham • Alex Danson • Michael Owen • Shane Williams • Mark Cavendish • Donna Fraser • Denis Irwin • Anna Hemmings • Richard Dunwoody • Chris Froome • Kilian Jornet • Mark Webber • AP McCoy • Stuart Lancaster

1

Risk-taking, self-sabotage and the myth of genius

‘I think he’s overdone that slightly … has he?’

John Virgo is commentating on a first-round match at the Embassy World Championship in Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre in 1997. It’s between Mick Price and a fresh-faced young player with a black waistcoat, neat bow tie, slicked-back 90s curtains and the hint of a swagger. The young man came to the table and potted a long, difficult red while the applause for the preceding safety shot was still trickling around the hall. He followed this with five quick reds and blacks – 10 balls in total – but now the alignment appears just a little off.

‘Can he force the cue ball into that cluster?’

Barely has Virgo finished his sentence than the player has cannoned the white off the black and split the reds into a perfect configuration. ‘He can,’ Virgo says, impressed. More balls are sunk. Black, red, black, red. The player, if anything, is picking up speed. He criss-crosses back and forth at the bottom of the table like a perfectionist waiter setting a table. An exact placement here. A little flourish there. Several more balls are sunk, straight down the throat of the hole, the white stunned, or spinning off at a crazy angle to come to rest where the player already waits, cue cocked.

‘This is amazing,’ says Virgo’s co-commentator Dennis Taylor as the score ticks up to 57. Price sits in his chair, trying to concentrate on his cue, his shoes, his water. He doesn’t want to watch what’s happening but, like the rest of the Crucible, he can’t take his eyes off his opponent: 21-year-old Ronnie O’Sullivan.

‘Well, one more red and the frame is safe,’ says Virgo, as the score reaches 72. He pauses. ‘But Ronnie’s got other things on his mind, and so does everyone in the audience.’

As O’Sullivan reaches 80, Taylor’s thoughts turn to reflected glory: ‘Listen, John, I know you’ve commentated on a maximum before, I have never. I’m starting to get a bit excited here.’ He’s not alone. Everyone watching is aware that something special is unfolding, an ‘I was there’ moment. With every ball that’s potted, the tension mounts. The only person apparently not affected by it is O’Sullivan himself. His economy of movement is striking. At one point he glances up at the crowd as he walks around the bottom of the table to the spot where he knows, with complete confidence, that the white will come to rest. There’s almost a smirk on his face. It seems to say, ‘Stick around – this could be good.’

In all my time watching and participating in sport, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone more in their element. I’ve watched this clip dozens of times, so I know with certainty what’s going to happen. But it’s almost as if that certainty existed even then. Ronnie was doing something that – in snooker terms – was, and still is, almost beyond comprehension. And he was making it look like a foregone conclusion.

That something was the fastest-ever maximum clearance. A 100mph 147. The minimum maximum. Every red followed by a black – the highest-scoring ball on the table – then the colours in regulation order. No mistakes. No room for error. No breathing space. The maximum is the toughest task in the game. The hundreds of permutations revealed by every shot. The chess-like complexity. The horrible claustrophobia of those reds orbiting the all-important black.

It’s also, in the sense of a wider match, largely pointless. A maximum doesn’t win you any more than one frame; but it can easily lose you one. Far better (i.e. safer) to release the pressure by switching to a more open pink or blue to keep your break going. But where’s the fun in that? The 147 is snooker’s showboating – the chipped penalty, the reverse dunk or the through-the-legs baseline shot, something that players give back to fans. And Ronnie, as the decades that follow are to show, is all about the fans.

‘There’s the no small matter of £147,000 on offer this year for a maximum break,’ says Taylor. Only it is a small matter, at least as far as O’Sullivan appears to believe. He ups the pace, looking like someone clearing balls in a provincial pool hall after a five-minute warning. The final three reds bring up the century. It has taken four minutes.

The crowd are now struggling to contain themselves. ‘Come on, Ronnie!’ Down goes the black, the white bounces off the bottom cushion, then the side, then begins its long journey up the table to come to a halt with a neat angle on the yellow. Massive applause. Twenty-six seconds later, the table is empty.

As I say, I’ve seen this clip dozens of times over the years, and its impact never lessens. On that evening of 21 April 1997, O’Sullivan’s virtuoso performance lasted 5 minutes, 20 seconds. Fifteen reds, fifteen blacks, all the colours. He averaged just under nine seconds a shot. No one, not even the ‘Rocket’ (as O’Sullivan was to become known), has come close to matching that.

‘I can’t see that record ever being beaten,’ Dennis Taylor said subsequently, having broken his 147 commentary duck in spectacular fashion. To give you a sense of how quick it was, when a shaven-headed O’Sullivan played his nemesis – and antithesis – Peter Ebdon in a horribly taut encounter in 2005 (Ronnie was in full erratic mood that night, even standing on his chair to assess shots over Ebdon’s shoulder), Ebdon needed the same amount of time to build a break of … 12. Little wonder that Ronnie feigned falling asleep.

Yes, the 1997 147 was a piece of astonishing skill. Outrageous audacity. Total mastery of the game and the occasion. But don’t you dare call it genius.

‘I absolutely fucking hate it.’

It’s a damp October night 21 years later and I’m sitting with Ronnie in the kitchen of his mum’s house in Chigwell, Essex. Those thick, arched eyebrows are bushier, there are flecks of grey in his sideburns, and, in a pair of dark trousers and a low-hanging T-shirt, he’s leaner than I can ever recall seeing him – a product of the strict exercise and dietary routine he follows these days.

We’ve spent the past couple of hours chatting, laughing, gorging on his mum’s (exceptional) lasagne. And now I’ve put it to Ronnie that, just maybe, the ‘genius’ tag pisses him off. The BBC compared him to Mozart. Shaun Murphy, the 2005 world champion and a career Triple Crown winner, said: ‘Any time you get to play Ronnie O’Sullivan it’s a dream come true because you get to find out just where you are in relation to the greatest player that’s ever picked up a snooker cue. He really is an absolute genius on the table.’ Jimmy White once said: ‘Anyone who had held a cue before knew he was a genius.’ According to Judd Trump, the 2019 world champion, ‘Ronnie is just a genius, really. Easily the best player that has ever played.’ Stephen Hendry, Ronnie’s inspiration, rival and one-time adversary, merely called him ‘the best player that I’ve ever seen’.

Genius comes up so regularly – and it clearly infuriates him. ‘I still hate it now,’ says Ronnie. ‘Whenever people mention it, I go, “Listen, you go and speak to anyone on the snooker tour, or who’s practised in the same club as me – ask them how hard I work.” Because all this genius tale – I ain’t no genius. I was never the best junior. I was never the best amateur. I was talented. I worked really hard. I wanted it. Not that I wanted it ’cos I wanted it. I wanted it ’cos I loved competing. I loved the game. I was fascinated. Y’know what I’m saying?’

Ronnie speaks as he pots. Straight and quick.

‘So I don’t buy that genius thing. Because I’ve seen geniuses: Alex Higgins was a genius. Jimmy White was bordering on genius. Me, I was never a genius. I was always more of a Stephen Hendry, Steve Davis type of player. But I had a quick brain. I kind of attack the ball.’ (He’d later tell fellow pro Tony Drago that, during the famous maximum, he felt that if he’d slowed down to think, he’d have missed.) ‘So a lot of people went, “Oh, it’s easy for him, it’s all right for him,” but the hours and practice that were put in, people don’t see. They think, “He just has to turn up.”’

I’m intrigued as to what he thinks separates the good from the very best. He points to something that resonates with me – something I’ve tried to focus on in my career, particularly on the biggest stages. The ability to up the ante when the ante is already at its highest. Pressing your opponent, or opponents, when they’re most vulnerable. Sport as foot-on-the-jugular combat.

‘See, with snooker there’s an element of skill,’ he says, sitting back in his armchair, with a long line of trophies on the mantelpiece behind. ‘You have to be skilful. It’s not a physical sport. But skill? That’ll only take you so far. The very, very best have the skill, but they also have the courage and that killer instinct. I always believe the greatest take risks. So it’s all right being a percentage player, and that’s very good, but the greatest players, come that moment, they take on the shot, or grab the game by the scruff of the neck, kind of make it happen.’

He references his extraordinary World Championship semi-final against Hendry in 2002, won by the Scotsman 17–13. To some people (with apologies to 2019’s Trump–Higgins world final), it is the highest-quality match in the history of the sport. With echoes of that Agassi–Becker semi-final in 1995, Hendry was playing angry that day; O’Sullivan, in an interview before the match, had spoken of sending Hendry home to his ‘sad, little life in Scotland’. It got to 12–12, then the Scot blew him away.

‘I was always kind of an aggressive player but it wasn’t until I played Stephen Hendry in that semi-final that I really … got it. I got to the final session with us attacking each other, and I’d got my nose in front, and I thought, “I’ll just try and play a bit careful here.” And Hendry just got more and more and more aggressive. That was the biggest lesson for me: that if I ever wanted to achieve anything like he’d achieved, in them situations I had to make it happen rather than wait for someone to make a mistake. He taught me why he was so successful.’

I suggest that it’s easy to take that risk as an underdog, less so when you’re on top. At my first Olympics, in Beijing in 2008, I was an unknown 20-year-old student. Free from pressure or expectation, I was able to race my own race, take chances. I went off hard, was second out of the water, and I attacked repeatedly on the bike and in the run. With just 3km to go, I was leading the Olympic final. Then, as I said at the time, ‘the wings came off’. I came 12th. In the years that followed, that anonymity – the freedom of the underdog – was a luxury I was never to enjoy again.

‘Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,’ Ronnie agrees, leaning forward in his chair. ‘Hendry never done it in a “Oh, I got nothing to lose” way. It was done ’cos he’d been in that situation many times before, he was experienced at it, and he knew how to kill someone. He knew what he had to do to get over the line and I kind of thought, “OK, what do I wanna be?” I wanna be Stephen Hendry, taking risks, might fuck up, but I know that the ball’s absolutely in my court. Go out all guns blazing!’

Ronnie looks serious for a moment. ‘Hendry was the greatest player I’d ever seen, you know. He made me feel … uncomfortable. No other player made me feel uncomfortable, and you do that with your shot selection. There was times when I first played him that I’d think, “Yeah, go on, mate, go for that. You’ll never get it.” Then, after about three or four years, I’d think, “Oh fucking hell, he’s gonna pot it.” They was such high-risk shots to the average player. Not even to the average player. To most top players. But to him it was like a bread-and-butter shot. And I thought, “Fucking hell, this is what makes him so good.” And if I wanna be so good, I’ve gotta kind of find something.’

I’d been apprehensive about sitting down with Ronnie. Most people who try to get to grips with him end up getting under his skin. We’ve met before, with his well-publicised conversion to running giving us plenty to talk about. But this is our first in-depth chat, and I know Ronnie doesn’t always respond well to interview-type scenarios. And where do you start? You know it’s almost impossible to ask something that over a 25-year career hasn’t been asked before. Eventually, his answers become almost a caricature of themselves. Like me, he has better things to do than answer other people’s questions. Also, like me, he has ways of avoiding doing so.

He famously adopted a robotic voice while being interviewed by former player Neal Foulds for ITV Sport after his win over Chinese teenager Yan Bingtao at the World Grand Prix in Preston in February 2017. ‘Yes … it resonates … very much … for me … when I come … here to the Preston … Guild … Hall.’ Funny to watch, excruciating to be a part of. Foulds, to his credit, wrapped up the encounter with: ‘You played a bit like a robot tonight, Ronnie. Well done.’ Several months after we meet, O’Sullivan adopts a parody Aussie drawl in an interview with BBC Lancashire Sport at the Players Championship after reaching the quarter-finals. He’s boycotted interviews, gone mute in others, zoned out or got fired up. Yep, Ronnie’s unpredictable all right.

Controversy has followed him throughout his career. Success and scandal: the two Ronnies. There’s been the smashing of cues. The swiping of the balls in frustration, an automatic concession. The self-sabotage of maximums on the final ball in protest at the size of the financial incentive offered by the tournament. The fines. The shoulder barges. The disciplinary letters. The criticism of refs. The picking of fights with photographers. Playing shoeless. The mental-health battles. The public meltdowns. The visit to the Priory. The abuse of venues and of press officers. So rich and consistent has been the controversy, you almost forget about his extraordinary dominance of his sport. It’s like Roger Federer and Nick Kyrgios rolled into one. But he’s never been less than box office. In my taxi on the way to his house, I reflect that I don’t think I’ve watched snooker to watch the game itself. Just to watch Ronnie.

Then, of course, there’s the playing left-handed thing. In a notorious match with Alain Robidoux in 1996, Ronnie so enraged the Canadian by playing with his ‘wrong’ hand that Robidoux went on playing long after he needed snookers to win the frame and then refused to shake Ronnie’s hand at the end. It was uncomfortable to watch. But there’s another way to look at this, as commentator Clive Everton did. ‘Ronnie sometimes plays a series of shots left-handed when he doesn’t need to, as if to shake something up inside him,’ said Everton, while commentating on one of his matches. ‘I think the word “genius” should be used sparingly, but I think he is [one]. Geniuses see things differently from the rest of the world.’

Geniuses see things differently from the rest of the world.

I fully understand Ronnie’s frustration with the ‘genius’ tag. In sport it has come to mean someone preternaturally gifted; someone presented with a wholly formed talent that they can exploit or squander. It robs you of both credit for your success and excuses when you fail. Barry Hearn, snooker supremo and vocal critic of O’Sullivan, put it with stinging succinctness: ‘His biggest strength is what God gave him. His biggest weakness is Ronnie O’Sullivan himself.’

But if defined as the ability to see things differently, to think creatively and with imagination, to not just look for the needle in the haystack but – as Einstein once said of himself when asked what separated him from others – to go on looking for all the possible needles, then Ronnie’s left-handed exploits, and indeed Ronnie himself, start to make a lot more sense.

Snooker is a game of absolutes. There may be a million permutations, but all are governed by physics, by angles. The balls are stationary (not for long, in Ronnie’s case). Being able to play with both hands, and to a championship standard, vastly increases your options: the cueing angles; the body positions; the shot selection. Far from showboating – and I’m not saying Ronnie hasn’t deployed the skill in this way at times in his career – is this not something that multiplies Ronnie’s ways of winning matches? He simply had the imagination to recognise this and – again, through countless hours at the practice table – refine it and make it a weapon.

‘Some people can only play one way,’ he tells me. ‘If you can play that shot two, three, four ways, against certain opponents you have to play, it’s nice to have that. I like to be creative in a game. Sometimes I can go, “Well, that’s the shot to play but, no, I wanna play this shot.”’

Studies over the years have shown that, purely in terms of their imaginations, very young children far outperform adults in the genius stakes. Education kicks in, traditional perspectives are applied; we start focusing on what to think rather than how to think and thereby practise reproductive rather than productive thinking. Asked what half of 13 is, to use that often-cited example, adults usually conclude that it’s six and a half rather than, say, ‘1’ or ‘3’. Or ‘THIR’ or ‘TEEN’.

O’Sullivan has never seemed to succumb to the traditional mindset. Could the near-miracles he has performed on the snooker table be attributed to his tendency to continually ask one simple question: why? ‘Why do we play this way?’ ‘Why can’t I do this?’ ‘Why should I pot this final ball for a maximum just because I can?’ These are not questions you feel Peter Ebdon was overly burdened with.

This free thinking has proven invaluable in the latest, golden period of Ronnie’s career, when directed in the service of reinvention. The 2017/18 season saw him score a career-high 74 centuries. He tells me he’s had to reinvent himself ‘four, maybe five times’ because of new players coming through with fresh ideas and new techniques. He talks of the fear of coming up against a rising star, thinking you’ve got them beat, and then them hitting you with a multiple-frame burst and loading the pressure back on you. ‘You kind of get over the line, but you think, “Fucking hell, I’ve not had that done to me before,”’ he says.

‘So I’ve had to change my technique. Hendry didn’t wanna change his game, he was like, “Nah, I’m staying the same.” Steve Davis didn’t wanna change his game; probably didn’t feel like he could. When you see new talent coming through and they do things better and they’re more aggressive and they’ve got 15 years on you, it can send the shivers down you ’cos they haven’t got the scars either. So I’ve kind of had to go, “Well, you’re doing all right because you’re reinventing yourself. You’re in the lion’s den all the time with these young kids, and you’re kind of having a go.” So I think what Hendry didn’t do, I kind of have. I’m adapting. Which is fun.’

It’s a lovely house, his mum’s. Homely. Ronnie Jr, O’Sullivan’s 12-year-old son, is running around – he drags himself away from Fortnite on the computer to join us for some dinner – and the house is full of memories and mementoes, of both the normal and exceptional. This has been his mum’s house...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to Readers
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Risk-taking, self-sabotage and the myth of genius
• 2 The science of suffering
• 3 The pawn, the goal king and the power of consistency
• 4 The Postman, the taliswoman and the potency of teamwork
• 5 Driven
• 6 The maverick, the choirboy and riding the torpedo
• 7 The pressure and the pain
• 8 Riding with the punches, idol talk and going all in
• 9 The man-beater, the missile and the power of obsession
• 10 Stress-buffering, affiliation and feeling the love
• 11 The luck of the bounce and being too small to fail
• 12 Untouchable
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher