Behind the White Ball: My Autobiography - Hardcover
After Hurricane Higgins crashed out of snooker's top league, Jimmmy White has been the `People's Champion' even though he never quite made the top World spot, pipped at the post in 1995 by Stephen Hendry, after missing one single black. Aged 16, White was the youngest player to win the English Amateur Championship. At 18, he won the World Amateur title. By 1984, he's a professional success, married but not at all settled. He's the kind of man who goes out for a packet of cigarettes and comes home two weeks later. Gambling, women, marathon binges with showbiz friends like Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones, have threatened the stability of his marriage. But somehow White has survived, to tell in candid detail, a most unusual, often outrageous story of a very sporting life.
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Review:
Jimmy White has been beaten six times in the final of the snooker world championship and on at least two of those occasions it was easier for him to have won than lost. But at the death White always managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. It is now likely he will be remembered only as the people's champion but he isn't complaining. White has made a fortune and then lost a good chunk of it, mostly through gambling. He's been in trouble with the law, had his share of tabloid exposes and pushed his marriage to the edge of collapse. But if one thing comes out of this sparky autobiography it is that White is a chancer and he will always keep going.
Review:
Behind the White Ball starts with an illiterate teenager getting both a street education and an income hustling in a south London snooker hall and ends with an older, a bit wiser, and literate man still making a living from his cue. But in between there is all the mayhem you could ask for; escaping irate locals after taking the money off the customers in a Liverpool snooker hall; fetching up a bit too often for his wife's peace of mind at Ronnie Wood's place--"although when I hang out with The Stones I end up making the tea"--and, bizarrely, attending Chelsea matches with Peter Cook. Whirlwind stuff indeed. --Nick Wroe
"Mercurial, enigmatic, exciting" (Alex Higgins)
"He may play a spellbinding game, full of invention and dash. He may even be the "best snooker player in the world" - but he is loved because he is naughty . . . and therein lies his abiding appeal" (Sue Mott Sunday Telegraph)
"Jimmy's harum-scarum attitude to life has never altered, even though he is now a household name. One of the loveliest things about him is his naturalness. Stardom has come and touched him and left him exactly the way he was" (Sunday Mirror)
"Jimmy's the ultimate player's player. He thrills the public . . . but the players get even more enjoyment out of watching him because he strikes the ball so well" (Daily Express)
"He may play a spellbinding game, full of invention and dash. He may even be the "best snooker player in the world" - but he is loved because he is naughty . . . and therein lies his abiding appeal" (Sue Mott Sunday Telegraph)
"Jimmy's harum-scarum attitude to life has never altered, even though he is now a household name. One of the loveliest things about him is his naturalness. Stardom has come and touched him and left him exactly the way he was" (Sunday Mirror)
"Jimmy's the ultimate player's player. He thrills the public . . . but the players get even more enjoyment out of watching him because he strikes the ball so well" (Daily Express)
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherHutchinson
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 0091855322
- ISBN 13 9780091855321
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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