In the weeds of the 1985 World Snooker Championship final, there is a ball in the ninth frame that haunted Steve Davis. In the opening session he had floored Dennis Taylor, winning all seven frames, and he was 8-0 in front when he was faced with a tricky green along the cushion.
Davis was the reigning world champion and the world’s greatest player. The consistency of his potting under pressure was superior to his peers, but he was a master of risk management too. Davis was the Scottie Scheffler of snooker: fairways and greens, down the middle.
He agonised over the shot because the actuary in his mind couldn’t give him a straight answer. He only needed to pot the green to make the frame safe, but a bout of safety play never bothered Davis. He was happy to wait and smoke his opponent out.
But in that moment, he went for it. The ball wobbled in the jaws of the pocket and refused to drop.
“Snooker isn’t just about potting balls,” he wrote in his autobiography years later. “It is as much about playing the right shot at the right time. That was my game. That is how I won so many matches by so many frames. Not only was I very accurate but I also made the right tactical decisions, based on the psychology of the game.
“That is the shot I beat myself up over. When a player looks back on a match, certain moments pop up like flashing neon signs. In every match there are decisions that will effectively win or lose a match. Although I didn’t know it at the time I had just made a fatal one. When Dennis made it 8-1, I sensed the dynamic had changed.”
In the psychological landscape of the match, Davis’s miss was mountainous. He had crushed Taylor 9-0 in the final of the Jameson Open four years earlier and, as the evening session began, the resonance of that scoreline occurred to them both.
“I had been used to Dennis falling apart,” said Davis years later, “and I think a lot of people had.”
Does that remind you of anybody?
After Rory McIlroy holed the winning putt at Augusta it didn’t take long for people to remember Davis and Taylor, though not necessarily for that reason. In the early hours of Easter Monday, 40 years ago, the most extraordinary snooker match staggered to its conclusion. A television audience of 18.5 million was rapt by the spectacle of two men in bow ties and waist coats, going for each other’s throats.
At 23 minutes past midnight, an hour and eight minutes after the final frame had begun, the black ball disappeared. Just like the Masters, it had been an excruciating evening of shouting at the telly and watching with your eyes closed, helplessly rooting and hoping.
The conflict between strength and weakness stalks every arena. On that evening at the Crucible, Taylor and Davis were just like McIlroy, scrambling to meet their desperate needs: sure, not sure, not sure, sure. As the match wore on, the dial was moved violently by bad shots and good shots.
“Your soul is out there for everybody to see,” said Davis.
The story of that match is typically remembered as Taylor told it. For all the talk, there are very few fairy-tale endings in sport. Underdogs lose, mostly. In 14 tournament meetings, Taylor had only ever beaten Davis twice.
Early in Taylor’s career good judges reckoned he would be world champion before he was 30, but one final and three semi-finals later he had confounded that prediction. He was 36 when he played Davis.
I got out of my chair with legs like lead. They didn’t feel like they were mine. Neither did my arms.
— Steve Davis
In snooker, Davis was the master of the universe. Not exciting, not loved, not vulnerable. Alex Higgins and Jimmy White shared the passionate affections of the huge crowds that filled the venues, fast, daring, exuberant players who didn’t have Davis’s command of the percentages.
The dynamic between Davis and Higgins especially was fascinating. For vastly different reasons they were the two most polarising figures in the game. When they met earlier that season at the UK Championship Davis beat both Higgins and the crowd and afterwards Higgins made an extraordinary plea.
“It doesn’t help me when they’re baying for Steve Davis’s blood,” he said. “It is all right being the People’s Champion, but it is a very hard burden to carry now. They are no help to me at all [the crowd]. They don’t realise how it works against me, but it also works in favour of Davis. All the noise makes me lose concentration whereas Davis plays in perfect silence.”
In the normal course of events, Davis had an imperious air in the arena. “Steve had such a domineering demeanour around the table and some players used to get annoyed by that,” said Taylor.
In sport, though, every mask is hiding something. By the end of the second session in the 1985 world final, Taylor had reduced the deficit to 9-7. Davis’s head was in a spin. A year earlier he had also led White by eight frames in the world final and that lead evaporated too. In the end, that match was decided in the 34th frame out of a possible 35.
“I left the Crucible shell-shocked,” he wrote. “I wanted the earth to swallow me up. I was inconsolable.”
Taylor was so relieved to be back in the game that he shared a bottle of champagne that evening with his wife and his friend Trevor East, who was head of sport at ITV. A day later, the players fought to the death.
They were level four times on Sunday. Taylor never led until the last ball. Neither man made a century break. In the 34th frame Davis failed to pot a ball. The tension was overwhelming.
Before Taylor played the winning shot, Davis had a chance to cut the black into the top corner pocket. In that moment, the greatest player in the world faltered.
“I got out of my chair with legs like lead,” he wrote. “They didn’t feel like they were mine. Neither did my arms. Neither did my cue. Getting up to the table seemed to take me a lifetime. I overcut the black so massively that it didn’t even wobble in the jaws of the pocket. My right arm had now disowned me.”
Isn’t that why we watch, though: to see the mask drop; to see their souls.
