Snooker Legends--On the Road and Off the Table With Snooker's Greatest by Jason Francis

Author:Jason Francis [Jason Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789460308
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

I’d confided in only one other person, talkSPORT presenter Andy Goldstein. Andy had hosted Jimmy’s testimonial for me and we’d become friends when meeting at the Sky events. He was snooker mad and even played at the show in Brighton for us as our special guest.

Andy went to school with Ronnie; I think he was a couple of years above him. He does the late show on talkSPORT, getting in at about 2am; he also fronts some of the Eurosport Snooker Coverage. Don’t feel sorry for him – he has his dream job! However, that said, I didn’t want to drag him from his home after a few hours’ sleep for him to hear Ronnie roll out his ‘I’m retiring’ speech.

The news was going to be confirmed by the first line of my statement. Andy had already typed the tweet and he hit the send button the moment I said it – he was the first to release the news to the sporting world.

We’d got Sky there, BBC and ITV; it was a huge relief. Jimmy was coming as well – he was now a ROK Ambassador.

I picked Ronnie up about 10am; he was wearing ripped jeans and a shirt. For once I had to advise it wasn’t appropriate. He’d packed a pair of black trousers and a jacket and we had to get the team in London to rush out for a waistcoat and white shirt.

I smuggled him into the hotel, and we chilled out in the room so he could change as the world’s sports press were assembling downstairs. Ronnie’s World Trophy was also making an appearance, alongside the Oval Vodka brand of course, which he would soon be promoting.

It was from this day that I took on my first tenure as Ronnie’s kind of manager – well, maybe not manager, more organiser. It was a role I probably could have taken on full-time on two other occasions but it was one I shied away from because of my friendship with him. I only did it full-time from 2015.

Commercially, earning commission from him was easy, certainly not rocket science. Companies were coming to him to spend their money, but I didn’t want to be the guy dealing with any issues or problems with World Snooker, or telling him off for not signing autographs for fans. At that time, I was happy to help out ‘unofficially’ up to the World’s but not beyond that.

Of course history shows that he went on to win the championship so my managerial record started with one tournament, one victory, one World Championship! Should have stopped there really.

One thing I did miss in the chaos of the press conference was a courtesy call to Barry Hearn and Jason Ferguson. I felt this was important, but of all the places in the world you could get a mobile phone service, it seemed the Metropole in Edgware was not one of them. I did get through to them both just after the conference but that was wrong really.

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