The Cult: Ronnie O'Sullivan

Ronnie O'Sullivan is the latest inductee to The Cult, VICE Sports' collection of brilliant, flawed, and brilliantly flawed athletes. You can read the lot here.

I should probably admit this right away: I think snooker is pretty boring. So if you were imagining this was going to be some paean to the balls and the baize, it isn't that. It definitely has its moments, but I prefer to see them like that, in snippets of brilliance on the BBC Sport sidebar. Just once, having taken magic mushrooms, was I truly engrossed by snooker, and then I confess that the coming of the white ball across the table like its approach was the most important thing in the world, and then that click and the shower of dissonant colours it caused, was pretty good. But sadly my schedule doesn't really lend itself to taking magic mushrooms and watching snooker anymore.

I think sport is, in its secretive nature, a version of life with a dash of fantasy applied. At the top: football, rugby, basketball, American football. That's just tribes going to war, except with a referee, and clear rules that no-one can break, and performance instead of blood.

Snooker is something different; snooker is the idea that you can arrange your life just so, with this leading to that leading logically to that, without an unruly five-year old ever coming and throwing their hands all over what you're doing and dripping ketchup on it. Which, to be honest, isn't a life I'm that keen on idealising.

And, to be even more honest, I don't think Ronnie really is either. That the man who is considered the greatest in-the-moment snooker player of all time is the same guy whose mind would appear resistant to it is the kind of thing that makes the world a magic place. What I know for sure is that there are only two snooker players I ever felt true human warmth for. One is the late Paul Hunter. He once told a story of how, floundering 6-2 frames down in his first Masters final, he took a break. He had sex with his wife, then while she took a bath he went back and blitzed the remainder of the match.

The other is Ronnie O'Sullivan. And he, I feel, is as close to a sporting soulmate as I'm going to get. Ronnie plays like he wants to get away from snooker as quickly as possible, but not before casting a few spells.

Yes. For those who didn't know, Ronnie O'Sullivan has won a lot of snooker matches. That's that cleared up. So try this instead – you approach the snooker table, remembering that it's about the size of a small boat. You break. Your mate walks around the table a few times, finally figures out a shot, fluffs it. You exchange words about how bloody impossible this game is, then you walk around the table a few times. Fiddle with the chalk. Go and change the music playing on your phone. Come back. Ding! That sound is Ronnie O'Sullivan, clearing every single ball on the table, always black following red. 5 minutes 20 seconds, at the Crucible in 1997.

The feat of angle-perception and power-control that this requires places him in a class of one. 1-5 of the fastest recorded 147s all bear the same name. Jimmy White asked him after the 1997 effort, why so fast? "Because if I stopped to think, I would have missed."

The clearest evidence you get that Ronnie O'Sullivan is a genius —at least during the episode of ITV4's Life Stories that your fearless correspondent watched all of to ensure his authority on the subject — is the sense radiating from him that he considers his brain to be, among other things, his worst enemy. He probably has that morbid fantasy that if he could just cut it out and go freewheeling, life would be one unbroken frame of pleasure. The sides of Ronnie O'Sullivan clash like brown clashes with green clashes with black; except altogether, they work. Sometimes. Trying to pin him to one place is as useful as picking up the pink ball and saying, 'this is snooker.'

"I'm a plodder", says the Essex Exocet, of how he lives his life. "Started to win a few tournaments, started to win a few trophies, and I started to feel good about it," he says. He can't walk away from the game: "I haven't achieved what I knew I should have achieved." Then he lurches into a downtrodden screed that goes "alright, I've been successful, I've won tournaments, I've ticked the boxes." He has facial expressions that are utterly, helplessly alone on his own coil; and not a single person interviewed for the programme can help the warmth they feel for him.

Here's the thing, I reckon – Ronnie O'Sullivan is two people, at least. A slice of immaculate perception, alone in the world. A low-key sociable lad from Chigwell who's tried out about 10 different hairstyles in his life and is watching all this thinking, "bit of a carry-on, isn't it? It's just snooker."

And then spaces in between I wouldn't presume to be able to take the temperature of. But you know his dad is there, in all of them. The black ball in their relationship is separation; first when Ronnie was growing up and his dad was always working, then from the age of 17 when he was serving 18 years for murder. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the occasions when Ronnie Junior would have had Ronnie Senior's absolute, rapt attention. His dad said to him, "in jail, every time I see you on the telly it's like a visit for me."

Maybe being the best at snooker is sometimes more of a multi-headed responsibility than he has the strength to bear; he calls the description of him having depression inaccurate. He says, "I think I suffered with snooker depression." When you see him lift trophies, you can just feel that it isn't the goal. The better the snooker, the more impossible it is for eyes to wander. Orgasmic escapes from impossible situations give him barely a satisfied grimace, like he's just bought a bit more time. And yet, it's just snooker, it isn't all that. And yet, it's the thing that he is the best on the planet at, that he'd probably still do in a darkened room all by himself. And yet, and on and on.

"Five foot 10," replies Ronnie, quick as a flash. That is the coolest answer given by any 14-year-old to any question ever. He claims he doesn't get why everyone laughed; all he was referring to was what he'd worked out the optimum height for a snooker player to be. Ah, but there was a glint in his eyes as he said it. That was Ronnie, right there – two sides without much of a clue what the other one was up to.

Split in two, naturally. First, in description of the coloured spot-painting given to him by Damien Hirst. "I remember looking at it and thinking – before Hirst had said anything – they look good for a 147." His first 147, as it happened.

And from the bio on his Twitter profile: "I have a degree in snooker and I am a genius.. haha."

@tobysprigings