Some things never change. For the 38th consecutive year, Steve Davis is spending some of his spring in Sheffield. The one significant difference on this occasion is that when he packed his bags and headed to the World Snooker Championships he left his cue at home, as he officially retired from the sport a year ago. Once the instrument with which he laid waste to his rivals on a regular basis, his cue now gathers little more than dust. Having waited so long to finally step away from the table – his manager, Barry Hearn, quipped at the time of his announcement last April that “you retired 10 years ago, we just didn’t have the heart to tell you” – he has been running away from it ever since.
“I never play now. I don’t pick the cue up from day to day,” he says. “I might play the occasional exhibition, when I pick the cue up and hopefully work out which end to hold. It’s a bit like riding a bike, once you get going some of it comes back – not all of it, but some of it. That’s fun. I don’t watch a lot of snooker – I keep an eye on the scores, keep my finger on the pulse without sitting in front of the television all day – and I would never go to a snooker table to practise now. The love of the game is still there, but there’s no reason to practise. After a while as a professional the only reason you practise is to prepare for the next event. But because I’m not playing in any events I have no reason to practise, so it’s sort of job done. I don’t have to go to the practice table, so I don’t.”
It was his dedication to honing his craft, the hours he put in at the table, that first set Davis apart from his peers in the 1980s, when he won the world title six times in nine years. “He changed the way the top professionals looked at their game, because he came in and was putting long hours of practice in,” his erstwhile rival Terry Griffiths said. “His technique was as perfect as it can be.” But as his career slowly waned so did his appetite for the work that had fuelled his ascent, so much so that now it has disappeared altogether.
“When I ended my career part of me went with it, in as much as I’m no longer a competitive animal at snooker in any way, shape or form,” he says. “But I can’t say I miss it desperately. I think I probably outstayed my welcome a little bit, so in the last few years I was going through the motions more than anything else. Now I don’t have to compete I’m welcoming it. There’s certainly no sadness that I’m not turning up, it’s just a slight change of mentality really.
“A part of me does miss the excitement of preparation – because a lot of the thrill of the game is about getting ready for it, like the way the buildup to Christmas is part of the experience – but I don’t miss it in one respect. Because regardless of how well you’ve done in the game, and how much you tell yourself the outcome doesn’t matter, you still get nervous and apprehensive. I’ve lost the apprehension and I don’t miss that part of it. I never lost those nerves. You might put yourself in the frame of mind where you go, well, the result doesn’t matter, but you can’t help it, to be honest with you. Jimmy White played this year and I can guarantee that in the buildup he’d have been as nervous as a kitten. That’s what it does to your body. Just because you’ve got the experience, it doesn’t make it easier.”
His latter-day dislike of practising is not confined to snooker, with its absence listed among the greatest attractions of what has become something of a small-scale second career, DJing. Last year Davis and his partner in musical crime, Kavus Torabi, played Glastonbury and they will be back on the festival circuit this summer, with appearances including Festival No6 in Portmeirion. “It’s great fun,” he says. “It requires no skill compared with being a snooker player, it requires no practice. You just turn up with a bunch of CDs and records, put them on, press play and then have a dance. As a snooker player you have to practise for eight hours every day, and even then you get no guarantees.”
Davis’s DJing began with a weekly show on the Essex-based community radio station Phoenix FM, where he continues to explore his interest in “strange stuff, weird stuff and quite a bit of electronic madness and weirdness”, not necessarily the kind of music that you might expect to be favoured by a retired sportsman who will turn 60 this summer, or for that matter by Essex-based community radio stations. “It’s not for the faint-hearted sometimes,” he says. “If you’re looking at classical music Mozart would be the pop end of things, whereas Stravinsky would be the messed-up area of things. We’re searching for the modern-day Stravinskys, I suppose.” Since an appearance at last year’s Bloc Weekend in Minehead, a proliferation of invitations has meant that despite the end of his snooker career Davis continues to feel the thrill of performance.
“It is amazing to think that something else has happened after snooker,” he says. “That, I think, would be a concern for a lot of people in the sporting world: what do you do afterwards? You could say that nothing’s going to replace the excitement of the competitive arena, and that’s true because there is nothing quite like walking out at the Crucible Theatre, but I’ve been fortunate enough to replace that with a different kind of excitement. I’m getting my adrenaline rush in a different way.
“But the fact is that it hasn’t really got the skill element. It’s not like we’re doing anything other than pressing play. We’re not trying to be skilful DJs, all we’re doing is turning up, choosing a record and putting it on, and hopefully our choices are the correct ones. That’s where the skill might lie. I think with me there’s possibly an element of there being a novelty factor, so people aren’t necessarily going to judge me as harshly as they might judge someone who’s unknown as a DJ, but we feel we do a good job. People come up and tell us they enjoy what we play.”
He may have left the sport with barely a backward glance but Davis has been forced into a certain amount of nostalgia by a commission to present a history of the World Championship since its move to the Crucible in 1977, to be broadcast on BBC2 on Sunday. In the circumstances it is perhaps unsurprising that “the 80s gets a fair bit of exposure in the documentary”, but he is not sure whether his own success and the initial surge of television-fuelled popularity made that a greater era for snooker than the current one.
“I suppose the question would be, is a sport in a healthier position when you’ve got a dominant force like me, Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, and everyone’s either hoping he wins or hoping he loses and you have to have an opinion on it, or is the sport better when you don’t have a clue because any one of 30 people could win it? There’s arguments for both. When I was the dominant player in the 80s every time I lost somebody would say, ‘That’s good for the game.’ But they’d also, perhaps without knowing it, like the fact that Tiger Woods or Mike Tyson was unbeatable, because it gave the sport an identity. So I don’t know. I’m too close to snooker to make that decision.” Though not, if he’s got anything to do with it, for long.
The Crucible: 40 Golden Snooker Years will be shown on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday 23 April
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