I first encountered Ronnie O'Sullivan in Preston, more than a decade ago. The UK snooker championship was taking place down the road. He was with a couple of friends sitting on some hotel steps. Dressed in tracksuits they exuded a faint air of menace. O'Sullivan, who made his first century break aged 10 and his first 147 at 15, was the cocky one with very dark hair. Everyone knew he was supposed to be the coming kid. The next time I saw him was at Wembley about three years later. Now an established pro, he stalked the table, a forceful, overpowering presence. He was heavily built and looked like an extra from Oliver! who had been squeezed into a dinner suit. He looked at the balls with his mouth open, scowling. His talent appeared somehow a separate entity to himself.
Now we meet at the Groucho Club in Soho, where O'Sullivan is launching his new DVD, Ronnie's Snooker Hot Shots. This is familiar territory for O'Sullivan - his father, Ron, owned a chain of sex shops around here. Ronnie enters diffidently, smiling. His desire to be liked is both surprising and readily apparent. He had won the British Grand Prix 48 hours previously with a series of bravura performances, outrageous even. He switched from right to left-handed with a nonchalance that brooked disbelief. He looked slimline and completely focused. No one could live with him. He was beginning to exert a Lance Armstrong-style dominance on the peloton of snooker pros.
There was the following exchange on television between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor after O'Sullivan had made his 371st televised century break. Davis: 'I don't see how you can improve on this standard. Total control of the cue ball.' Taylor: 'He's got that cue ball on a string.'
Davis: 'It is a truly devastating standard and I think this gentleman is moving this game to new levels.'
Yet today O'Sullivan is not pleased with himself. He orders a salmon sandwich and eats half of it desultorily. 'It was quite strange,' he says, eager to talk. 'For the whole tournament I was really struggling. The only thing I looked forward to was practising with Ray.'
Ray is the former six-times world champion Ray Reardon. O'Sullivan's father enlisted him to curb his son's 'wayward tendencies'. In his post-victory interview O'Sullivan had thanked Reardon profusely. He explains: 'He doesn't tell me anything technically. It's just a relationship between two people who know the game. Me and Ray are quite telepathic really. My father contacted him and I gave him a ring later. There's a way to play the game. Positional play, really. Keep control of the cue ball. I'm a good potter and he was a good potter. It's hard to describe. We just have a laugh. He should go on the stage. He has me in stitches.'
It goes without saying that O'Sullivan's father remains a powerful influence in his life. As a child Ronnie Jr was ferried to and from snooker clubs and looked after in every respect. The money from the sex shops meant that no expense was spared in helping him pursue his goal. He had his own purpose-built snooker room at the family's Essex home. He was allowed to leave school a year early on condition that he did roadwork every morning and only went into snooker clubs to practise and nothing else; a snooker table worth several thousand pounds was installed in one club.
Anyone who met O'Sullivan snr could expect the proud prediction that 'Little Ron' would one day be world champion. Then, suddenly, he was gone. In his autobiography, Ronnie, O'Sullivan writes: 'Dad and his mate were in a nightclub arguing over who should pay the bill [his father, he says, insisted on paying for everything]. Then two black fellas, brothers who had been signed in that night by Charlie Kray, got the wrong end of the stick and thought Dad and his mate weren't going to pay. A row started. Dad said, "Let's talk about it", and walked round the bar, where one of the brothers picked up an ashtray and went to whack Dad over the head. Dad put up his hand, the ashtray smashed and two of his fingers were severed. The other fella then picked up a champagne bottle and smashed Dad over the head with it. Dad then picked up a knife that was on the side of the bar and that was it.'
In September 1992, the trial judge, mindful of what he said in his summing-up were 'racial overtones', sentenced Ron O'Sullivan to 18 years in prison for murder. Shortly before he went to jail, Ron had told his son that he must choose between snooker and Pippa, his then girlfriend. Pippa went.
In November 1993, aged 17 years and 11 months, Ronnie won the UK championships. A year later, his mother, Maria, was jailed for a year for tax evasion after police had mounted an 18-month surveillance operation. The still teenage O'Sullivan was left in Essex looking after his younger sister, Danielle. He also had to keep the sex-shop business going. Amazingly, at his trial, his father had managed to acquire another shop in Brewer Street during a break in proceedings. Left on his own, O'Sullivan went on an orgy of drinking and drug-taking. He then became addicted to food instead and put on three stone. He was treated for depression.
While his reputation within the game was rising, in between tournaments he visited his mother and father in prison. Cocooned among minders, he has often seemed in search of guidance from father-figures. The world championship that had appeared inevitable after such feats as his 5min 20sec 147 break during the 1997 tournament eluded him. He looked lost. He frequently talked of giving up entirely. He checked into the Priory and, in his own words, he 'got his life back'. In 2001 he became world champion for the first time. But he relapsed. His father believed he was keeping the wrong company. Hence the phone call from prison to Reardon.
It worked. This year, it has got even better. Now 29 and still unmarried, O'Sullivan is again snooker champion of the world and, more importantly, kept the momentum going with no sign of another fall.
'My father has been brilliant,' he says now. There is a snooker table in the room, but he shows no interest in it. He draws on a Marlboro Light. 'He's given me everything. If I don't want to do it for myself I can do it for him. I just want people to come from the heart. I've had hangers-on for six months or a year but you find out in the end. I was hanging out with the wrong people.'
A man in his mid-fifties named Vic Andrews enters the room midway through our interview. He is gaunt and well dressed. He does not talk. He simply observes. I ask O'Sullivan if he is aware of the comments of Steve Davis and others, who believe he has taken the game to a new level. O'Sullivan is not convinced. 'It's going to be the same in another 10 years,' he says. 'There'll be someone like you sitting there talking to someone like me. I've just won a tournament and I didn't play to my best. I'm not satisfied, but anyone can have feelings of disillusion.'
O'Sullivan remains prone to depression and sometimes even self-loathing. I suggest that for all the influence of his father, Reardon and members of 'Team O'Sullivan' such as Vic, surely it is he alone who has achieved this remarkable turnaround in his fortunes. He is startlingly pleased. 'Yes, a lot of the time I'd look for outside influences,' he says. 'But I'm starting to give myself more credit now. I'm me at the end of the day. I used to think it was other people.'
He leans back and smiles trustingly. His vulnerability is palpable and rather shocking. He's the champ. Surely he should be cock of the walk? 'I've always been in search of something,' he says. 'Serenity, happiness. A lot of times I've not been happy. Voices in my head. In 2001 at the Priory I went on a spiritual ... now I don't go round the angles. I go straight to the thing. Like playing left-handed. Or going to the Buddhist centre. Then when I'm ready to go back into the nuttiness of the world, I will.'
These random if somehow charming thoughts then provoke a denial that he is a Buddhist, or indeed a Muslim - the latter rumour being sparked by his friendship with the boxer Prince Naseem Hamed. 'We were just mates and I got to know his family well. We met up quite a bit. I was just inquisitive [about Islam]. He sat me down and we had some deep chats. How to live your life well and all that. He says he'd rather have been a snooker player than a boxer but then he said, "But I do love knocking people out".'
He became interested in Buddhism after being approached in Soho by a complete stranger. Most people in his position would have walked on by, one feels, but not O'Sullivan. 'Yeah, some fella came up to me, a dentist I think he'd been, and said, "Read this book and tell me what you think." The book was called The Power of Now. And I read it and phoned him up and said thanks. What was the book's message? Stop thinking and stop being mad. Express yourself. It's only knowledge. People just feel they've got to say something but they've only learnt it from someone else. Often they're just talking crap. This book is just my little journey. If ever my mind's whizzing it's what I go back to. I've tried everything. I've tried religion, Prozac. They've never done it for me.'
And then there is the structure of the snooker season. 'I get four or five months off every summer,' he continues. 'It bores me. I want to be playing. I want to be with Ray. You get restless.'
Understandably, when his mind is 'whizzing' it is generally revolving around the subject of his father. He cannot phone him and has to wait for calls from prison. 'He's not a violent man. Psychologists have said that. Hopefully someone will do something about it. They made an example of him for some reason. I get really wound up about it. Sometimes I sit there counting the days until he is out. It would make everything sweeter if he was out. Then I could do it for myself and not for him. I said to him once, "I want to come in and do some time with you". But he said, "This place is for losers". He's helped a lot of people inside.'
He lights another cigarette. Talking to O'Sullivan you suspect that a part of him remains frozen on the day his father was taken away. He tells me that winning is sometimes the worst thing: 'You can be there but then you think, hold on, I'd swap being the best snooker player in the world for happiness any day. It's a juggling act. But being a snooker player is what I do. It gives me a buzz a lot of the time.'
A few days later I ring Vic Andrews. I want to speak to Ray Reardon but that, Andrews tells me, would not be a good idea. It is best that I speak to him. Andrews says he will tell it like it is, within parameters obviously. 'He was actually going away from keeping control,' he says of O'Sullivan. 'But when Ray [Reardon] came along he was able to talk to him about that. Ray is almost the final piece of the puzzle. He fits tremendously well into the team.'
Ronnie certainly seems to have got his control back. 'The battle is an ongoing thing,' Andrews says. 'Ronnie can suffer from depression. In the midst of everyone's joy and happiness you can feel absolutely shit. Ronnie's peace of mind is the most important thing. If you go back to a couple of seasons ago people began to say, "He's likely to go on a wobbly".'
What exactly does Andrews do, I ask him, since he appears to be a key member of the team. Anyone who wants to contact O'Sullivan has to 'go through Vic'. Andrews will not tell me anything about himself. It is not important, he says. And he does not get paid. 'I look after things,' he says. 'But we don't call me a manager. A nephew of mine was a snooker player. With Ronnie we don't stay in hotels. We rent places, farmhouses, out of the way. It's not a false environment.'
What of the idea that O'Sullivan is in search of father-figures? 'We're not father-figures,' Andrews says. 'Ronnie's had a lot of contact with his dad.'
So who pulls the strings, if anyone does? 'His father takes a great pleasure in watching. Ron is there for Ronnie. Sometimes Ron will sound off to little Ron but that's how any father is.'
I was thinking back to the Groucho and the way, when the photographer had asked him to take his shoes off and lie on the snooker table, O'Sullivan had agreed without demur. Looking down on him lying there I asked him whom he thought were the major threats for next year's world championship, starting with the most threatening in descending order. He replied, without hesitation: 'Hunter, Williams, Higgins, Hendry, Stevens. Doherty.' He added: 'With certain players you can't give them an inch. They come to tournaments to win them. With others, they're decent players but they're missing something.'
He considers Hendry to be the best of all time. 'He had the most bottle. The greatest. If he's playing well I'd put my money on him.'
Mark Williams was the most talented of his generation. However, he observed that Williams had just had a baby and this might be affecting his game. 'A very talented player. But sometimes I just think you just lose your way.' And Ebdon? 'He observes a lot of things. Like light bulbs.' Doherty he grew up with in the clubs of Ilford and Barking. O'Sullivan admired Doherty and modelled his cueing style on his for a time. When Doherty won a tournament they put bunting up in the club, but with O'Sullivan they didn't bother. He puts it down to jealousy - perhaps his father's money. He concedes he could be 'horrible' while he was growing up, only behaving if his father was present. He was banned from one club even though he was by far their most lucrative client. Now Doherty, a friend, is in his wake.
O'Sullivan now has a girlfriend, Jo, whom he met at Narcotics Anonymous. He is relieved not to be alone. 'If I'm on my own a lot, I'll do funny things like clean the car or clear out my cupboard.'
He mentioned rather spectrally a former contemporary from the old days, Chris Callan, who was his equal but disappeared to Amsterdam and is now, he thought, working on a building site. 'He played all the shots. But Chris didn't have the same type of people as me behind him. They were more the hustler type. He wasn't playing the best players week in, week out. When I emerged it was as a hardened match-player.'
For Ronnie O'Sullivan his life and success seem bound inextricably with the question of identity. And he may at last be in the process of eclipsing the mysterious support-system that surrounds him. As he says, it is just him now.
As he lay on the snooker table with his shoes off I put to him that the next stage of his career might be the Lance Armstrong one, of total dominance. 'I follow the Tour de France, actually,' he said. 'And when Armstrong was six or seven minutes behind a few people thought he was finished, but he was quite comfortable. He knew what he was doing and was exactly where he wanted to be.'
Perhaps the same could be said of the new, remade Ronnie O'Sullivan.
· Jonathan Rendall is the author of Twelve Grand: the Gambler as Hero (Yellow Jersey Press). Ronnie O'Sullivan's DVD, Ronnie's Snooker Hot Shots, is out on 15 November. Ronnie: The autobiography of Ronnie O'Sullivan is published by Orion