– I could always dream about this.
English player Gary Wilson will stop by for an interview with Urheilu in the Uumeni of the Tampere Hall on Monday evening. Wilson is all smiles, despite having just lost an exhibition match For Ronnie O’Sullivan batch 3–6.
However, Wilson is a player who knows how to put things into perspective. Access to a foreign country to perform in front of nearly 2,000 spectators against the sport’s most successful player of all time is only a distant dream for the vast majority of snooker professionals. That was also the case for Wilson for years, although he, like O’Sullivan, was known as a child star.
Wilson was born in 1985 in Wallsend, Newcastle and North Tyneside, North East England. When O’Sullivan, who was ten years older than him, achieved his first ranking victory in 1993, then 8-year-old Wilson was already giving the local snooker guns a head start.
At the age of 9, Wilson bagged his first 100-point streak and made his television debut on the BBC’s Young Snooker Promises programme. As a teenager, he defeated O’Sullivan for the first time in an exhibition match and won numerous junior tournaments, including twice the British Under-18 Championship.
The crown of his junior career came in 2004, when Wilson won the under-21 world championship. The title unites him, O’Sullivan and the Tampere event organizer, the only professional player in Finnish snooker history Robin Hullwho reached the pinnacle in 1992, a year after O’Sullivan.
Seven long years
Despite the excellent starting points, the jump from a junior who dominated amateur games to a professional was a painful growth process for Wilson. In 2006, he dropped out of the professional tour, where he managed to return only seven years later.
Since there was no significant money in the amateur game that flourished recently in the early 2000s, Wilson had to finance his life with normal salary jobs. For example, he spent two years packing frozen pancakes with his mother at the Findus factory in Longbenton.
– Deep down I always thought I should be a snooker player. However, life doesn’t always go the way you want it to. My message is that even if things don’t always go the way you want, stay strong and believe in your abilities, 38-year-old Wilson says.
After packing frozen foods, Wilson had time to spend almost five full years as a taxi entrepreneur until he became eligible for the tour in 2013. A year later, he decided to put everything on the line for a snooker career.
– There were days when I was depressed. But they were always accompanied by the feeling that life would carry on – I would achieve my dreams, drive a taxi or work with frozen foods.
– You have to constantly try to stay positive. That’s advice I can give and try to follow. I think ultimately that’s what helped me achieve my dream of becoming a snooker professional, says Wilson.
Not for extension
Gary Wilson is not the only player who struggled for years between amateur and professional snooker. A compatriot who recently won the world championship Kyren Wilson got on the tour in 2010, dropped out right after the opening season ended, and only got back after two years of trying. The Wilsons, who are not related to each other, have traveled the same long continuous distance on the professional tour since 2013.
Professional snooker has been built on a different foundation in the 21st century than in the early 1990s, when O’Sullivan and his peers born in 1975 John Higgins and Mark Williams debut on tour. At that time, anyone could buy a professional license that allowed them to play in the weeks-long qualifiers organized in the summer at the Norbreck Castle Hotel in Blackpool. If the professional tour currently consists of 128 players, 30 years ago there were almost 600 players.
In his debut season, O’Sullivan achieved, among other things, 38 consecutive professional victories, a record that still stands. However, O’Sullivan beat a lot of opponents in the qualifiers, whose main focus was on the other offerings of Blackpool, known for its nightlife, instead of a true professional game.
However, O’Sullivan’s age group was able to play with a game system where the level of games got harder step by step. In today’s game, on the other hand, newcomers have to face the top players at a faster pace than before, which has been reflected in the wild increase in the average age of the top players. At the end of this season, the average age of the top ten players in the world ranking was 39 years.
Despite his difficulties, Gary Wilson says he likes the current system and is not in favor of expanding the tour.
– Even if there were a thousand players on the tour, only the best would make it. I think the tour is as good as it can be given the conditions at the moment. Hopefully it will expand to other countries like Finland, says Wilson.
– The audience was fantastic. This country clearly loves snooker, Wilson praises.
The reason why Wilson now played in Tampere can be found in O’Sullivan. The superstar gets to choose who he agrees to play exhibition matches against. In other words: O’Sullivan has to enjoy his opponent’s style of play.
Wilson beat O’Sullivan 6–2 in Tuesday’s exhibition match and 6–5 on Wednesday. On the final night, he scored four streaks of more than a hundred points, one of which was an attempt to make a maximum break of 147 points (ended up with 112 points).