Shaun Murphy - Part 1 (Hardship, Hunger, and the First Magic)

In this first installment of our five-part conversation with Shaun Murphy, the snooker great takes us back to the beginning and opens up about the difficult early years that shaped both the man and the champion. Long before becoming a World Champion and one of snooker’s elite Triple Crown winners, Shaun was a young boy whose family life changed dramatically after financial collapse turned comfort into uncertainty almost overnight. What followed was hardship, hustle, and a growing realization that snooker might become far more than a pastime.

Shaun recalls the family’s struggle after his father left a successful career, the loss of their home and security, and the way small junior winnings from snooker events began helping the family survive. He shares the charming story of asking Santa for a Commodore 64 and finding instead a little Steve Davis snooker table that would alter the course of his life. From there came the obsession: long hours at the club, a century break as a 10-year-old, and a fierce desire not for prize money, but for medals, trophies, and mastery.

This episode also explores the key influences in Shaun’s early development, including his father’s determined guidance and the profound impact of Mark Wildman, whose knowledge of billiards, snooker, and three-cushion gave Shaun a deeper education in cue sports than most young players could ever imagine. Along the way, Shaun reflects on leaving school at 13, turning professional at 15, and learning that raw attacking talent alone would not be enough in a grown man’s game.

Part 1 is the origin story of “The Magician” — a story of adversity, discipline, curiosity, and the first sparks of greatness.

Transcript

Mike Gonzalez 0:13

Welcome to another edition of Legends of the Cue and Mark Wilson. We have a snooker player with us today. And I will say that my mark, I'm not a snooker guy, by the way, you know that, but my mark of a fine and great snooker player is if you can find their name on the wall at Formby Golf Club, you must be somebody.

Mark Wilson 0:34

You know, I couldn't be more excited to uh have somebody on our show that Steve Davis declares as the greatest uh snooker cueing in the business. So really looking forward to this.

Allison Fisher 0:47

Yeah, this is the first time on our podcast that we're interviewing somebody from my side of the pond. I'm delighted and honored that he's joining us. He's one of the finest queuists on the planet, hence his nickname, the magician. He's a world champion and one of only 11 winners of the Triple Crown Club, winning the World Championships, the UK Championships, and the Masters. Please welcome Shaun Murphy.

Shaun Murphy 1:12

Guys, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike Gonzalez 1:16

Thank you, Shaun. We're delighted to have you here. Yes, Shaun, thanks for joining us. We've been working on this for a while. I'm glad we finally nailed you down because you're uh still actively competing, unlike most of our previous guests. And uh it's nice to have you. My reference to Formby is uh something I heard from a friend of mine, Ian Jampson, who you may know at Formby Golf Club. I've played Snooker there, and I think your name is on the wall, is it not?

Shaun Murphy 1:42

Well, a bit of inside information here. It's definitely on the wall as a potential member. I'm on the waiting list to join Formby Golf Club. Well, congrats. Um and uh in fact, the golf club is at the bottom of my garden. So it it taunts me on a daily basis. Um You're not a member here, you can't play. You're not a member here, you can't come and play. I'm allowed to play there with a member six times a year maximum. I did a snooker exhibition myself for them about 18 months ago in their beautiful snooker room as you referred to. John Parrott, former World Snooker Champion of 1991, is a member there. He lives 400 yards from my house.

Allison Fisher 2:23

Really?

Shaun Murphy 2:24

And I'm waiting for that exception to be made and that I can join, but no such there's been nothing forecoming as of yet. I need a I need another pandemic to clear the list.

Allison Fisher 2:36

I can't believe that. John can't I John can't get you in. That's unbelievable.

Shaun Murphy 2:41

Well, as we know, Allison, you know, John John would get where Water can't get. And if he can't get me in, I've got no chance. So it's it's the municipals for me until I joined Thornby. I'm just hacking it around the munis, but yeah, golf's definitely way down the list. It's certainly not as big a part of my life as it used to be.

Mike Gonzalez 3:01

So what do you play what did you play off of at your best?

Shaun Murphy 3:06

My best handicap was plus two, and I got down to plus two about five years ago. I kept that for a couple of years. It was painful though, because I never won a game against my mates. I was always the one paying out at the end of the round. It's very hard to give the course shots and win, especially as a an amateur who doesn't play very often.

Mike Gonzalez 3:25

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 3:25

I'm currently off scratch. My exact handicap is uh 0.2.

Mike Gonzalez 3:29

Okay. All right. And and Alli and Mark plus two. That is fine.

Allison Fisher 3:34

Yes, I know he's a good golfer. Yeah. A lot of the super players play golf, right?

Shaun Murphy 3:39

Big thing, yeah. I think um and you know, thinking about it, I think that was partly why I got into it, because it was something that a very influential character in my life played socially, a guy called Mark Wildman, who I'm sure we'll talk I'm sure we'll talk about later on. But Mark, amongst other things, as well as being chairman of the WPBSA for many years, owned the snooker club where I grew up playing. And I think he was just waiting for me to sort of come of age before he was like, Do you fancy going off playing a game of golf? Should we go and have, you know, should we just go and have a game of golf? And golf ran in the family. My dad was a uh golf professional in his in his youth before you know he had to go off and get a real job. And yeah, golf was something I kind of was always curious about. I took up snooker far earlier than golf. And that's that's I think that's why I don't do very well. When we go on holiday, when Joe and I go away, you know, we we uh I tend to sit under an umbrella because I've got snooker players' complexion, you know. I don't I've not been used to seeing the sun. Very, very pale. So I tend to burn immediately unless we're golfing, funnily enough.

Mike Gonzalez 4:39

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 4:40

But yeah, well, I've been into golf for a long time.

Mike Gonzalez 4:43

Well, you'll get back to the game at some point, I'm sure.

Shaun Murphy 4:47

Yeah, no, I will do, and I do play every year. I very, very fortunately get invited to a lot of charity days and corporate days and stuff, and you know, it's nice to get out and play. I've never been a big practiser of golf. I th I find that I've given so much of myself to practising snooker that the hours required to practice golf and other things, I just haven't got it in me to do that. You know, I still practice a hell of a lot for snooker, you know, do hours and hours at home in my snooker room. Sure, where would you find the time in the day to then go off and work on other things, you know? So snooker's still the snooker's still the main the main force.

Mike Gonzalez 5:25

Yeah. You don't have to travel far to find great golf around you either. That's a pretty nice stretch on the coast there.

Shaun Murphy 5:31

Yeah, it's beautiful, I have to say. Yeah, you you're absolutely right. You can go in any direction and be on a a worldly. I mean, we've got the open here soon, and you know, it's just it's just an amazing part of the country for well, a m an amazing part of the world for golf. Yeah, it's a wonderful place, I have to say.

Mike Gonzalez 5:47

Well, let's uh let's go back to the very beginning. What's your earliest recollections of growing up as a lad in England?

Shaun Murphy 5:55

Pre-snooker, I mean, we we uh my sort of growing up life was a bit mixed. My dad had a really good job with Mercedes-Benz. He was head of their sales team, their commercial sales team, so that's sort of the trucking department of Mercedes-Benz. You know, he would have been selling trucks to the trade, and we had two nice Mercs on the drive and a nice house, and this, that, and the other. And unfortunately, you know, he he fancied a a change in direction with his life, and my parents, they took the decision that he would leave that job and they bought a restaurant, and it was the restaurant where he'd done a lot of his meetings, and you know, his typical Italian restaurant in the middle of this bustling town centre, and you thought it would always be a success. Unfortunately, in the late 80s, there was a quite a large financial crash in the UK, and we lost the restaurant, we lost the house, and the bank took everything off the family, and we were very, very close. It's not it's not an exaggeration to say we were very close to being homeless. We we we got the charity of a local businessman who who had a house to rent and he rented it to us at a very, very cheap rate. And that was kind of around the same time I sort of took up Snooker, you know. It was it all seemed to happen at the same time. As I say, when it when I when I took up the game and started playing Snooker, it was a very quickly sort of seen as a this could really sort of be a way out, you know, of of what was a quite a tough upbringing, quite a tough first part of my life. I mean, I was only I was nearly nine when I took up Snooker. So a lot had happened that was outside of my control. As I say, the the sort of decisions that my parents had taken to that point were pretty good, and then one bad decision, you know, it all went wrong, which is, you know, it's totally out of everyone's control. And it reminds us that you're only a couple of bad moves away from being in trouble in life, aren't you? You know, you could be flying high one minute, and then the next minute life has a different route for you. So we would have had a nice lifestyle up until me being about six, and then we lost everything, and it was a difficult time until Snooker came into our life, really. And you know, Snooker, Snooker and the opportunities that it brought changed everything.

Mike Gonzalez 8:08

Yeah. At that young uh of an age, uh, were you cognizant of what was happening? Did it really affect you, or or were you kind of oblivious? You were just so young and carefree.

Shaun Murphy 8:20

Uh well, I was always a bit of a petrol head at heart, and I I remember asking my dad, where have the cars gone? You know, where have our nice cars gone? Uh, because we had two. We had a, I think we had a you know, a brand new E-Class Mercedes, and my mum had an old sort of E-class Mercedes. It was a bit of a classic, and they were taken, you know, one day they were there, one day they weren't. The family car went from being this lovely Merck to a transit van, which we we then started doing like um house clearances and antique fairs and car boot sales. You know, that's how we made money as a family, and then it became cyclic then. The money that we made at those things paid the entry fee for my junior competitions, and the money that I won in these junior competitions helped pay the rent on the house. It's amazing. It was and it and it was cyclic, you know. I and of course I'm only you know 10, 11 years of age at this time. I'm totally unaware of that. This is happening. All I'm bothered about is can I have some money out of my winnings to go and buy a Star Trek model? That's what I was into as a kid. I'm not too proud to admit it. I was the kid who made the Star Trek models and put them with fish wire on the ceiling in my room. That's what I lived for. I didn't know where the rest of the money went. And Snooker as well, I don't, you know, it's quite unique in terms of even as a junior player, as an amateur player, you can earn money. That's not common. You know, if you win a junior amateur golf event, you might win a sleeve of balls in the shop, but you're not, you're not, you're not getting you're not walking away with 500 pounds or a thousand pounds or whatever, which I which I would have been doing as a 10, 11, 12 year old.

Allison Fisher 9:51

That's amazing. Yeah, but I noticed I noticed in we you know, on some of the references to you, you made a century break at the age of ten, is that correct?

Shaun Murphy 10:01

I was desperate to be we'd heard on the grapevine, I think I was only nine at the time, and we'd heard on the grapevine of this young player called Ronnie O'Sullivan. Now you guys might have heard of Ronnie O'Sullivan. He he he went on to become quite good. Yeah, we both. That's what I've heard. Um he went on to be a good player. But we'd heard anecdotally that he made a century break as a ten-year-old. I think m my dad and I had sort of said, Oh, wouldn't it be good to, you know, be ahead of that? So I was desperate to make a hunter break in a frame against somebody before my tenth birthday. And the low a local queue maker, a guy called Mac Chambers.

Allison Fisher 10:35

I remember Mac.

Shaun Murphy 10:36

Wow.

Allison Fisher 10:38

Yes, I do.

Shaun Murphy 10:39

Yeah, he he was he lived in the village next to us, and he said, If you if you ever make a sentry break in a frame, I'll make you a queue free of charge. We were like, ooh. The the queue I had at the time was like from a jumble sale, you know, it it could have been it could have gone could have come from anywhere. And I've made a sentry, I think it was 125 against my dad. And it was on table twelve. It's funny how you remember these things, isn't it? It was on table twelve of Ron's Q Sports, which Allison, you'll remember, you played there many times. Yeah. And it was 125, I think it was on a Monday night against my dad. We'd I'd be picked me up from school and we'd gone to the snooker club, so I made this entry. We just missed out on Ronnie's, you know, made it as he was 10. I think I was two weeks after my tenth birthday, and I ran down, I remember running downstairs in the club. Of course, this is before mobile phones or anything like that. Used the club phone, rang Mac Chambers and said, You better get some wood ready, Mac. I've just made a hundred break.

Allison Fisher 11:45

If I can picture that as a 10-year-old, that's unbelievable.

Shaun Murphy 11:49

Yeah.

Mark Wilson 11:49

That's you know, one thing that sometimes when you see great success stories, they're born out of desperation or tough times. And I've seen it uh time and again where the hardship ends up leading to tremendous success that maybe wouldn't have been wrought had it not had that occasion.

Shaun Murphy 12:09

Yeah, and it's a funny one for me personally. It's something that I've I've sort of stayed away from having my say. But I think as I'm getting a bit older, I'm sort of starting to bleak stories is the wrong word, but you know, starting to be a bit more open about my early life. There's a there's a massive misconception out there about me, and I I see it on social media a lot. I think a lot of people think that I come from a very wealthy background or grew up with money or had money or and I'm not sure where that comes from. I'm not sure why people have made that assumption that I must have come from that wealthy background, because I can assure you I didn't. That's not how it was at all. But I think you're right, Mark. I think yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think sometimes out of those situations, you know, things can blossom and bloom. It certainly certainly had created a hunger in me. It certainly created that burning fire to make it work. I left school, mainstream education, I left school when I was 13. I'm not sure what the equivalent is in the States that we call like year nine here in the UK. I was 13, never went back to school. My education stopped there. I took my what we call our GCSEs, and I took those three years early to get them out of the way. So I I played full-time professional like snooker, although I wasn't a pro until I was 15. I played professional full-time snooker basically from being 13 years of age.

Allison Fisher 13:36

Wow.

Shaun Murphy 13:37

And yeah, it did those early times, those early mornings carrying washing machines with my dad in car boot sales and auction houses and ducking and diving, trying to make a few quid to pay the entry fees for snooker tournaments, it certainly set a fire, which still burns to this day. Very cool.

Allison Fisher 13:56

Fifteen years old. Fifteen years old, you turn pro. What does that entail for the people listening over here?

Shaun Murphy 14:05

Well, uh, you know, it the the route to being a pro snooker player has changed many times. Before that, it was quite different. You had to sort of earn your way and win win a particular qualifying event or earn a tick or earn an event that the governing body deemed worthy enough of calling you a professional. WPDSA, which was the world governing body for professional billiards and snooker, actually broke their own rule by allowing me to turn pro at 15. You were supposed to be 16. And the qualifiers that year, the pro qualifiers, started about a month prior to my 16th birthday. So I think they took that into consideration. Now, the fact that the chairman owned the snooker club where I practiced on a daily basis may have had something to do with that decision as well. I wouldn't like to say. But I mean, back then there were hundreds of players on the Pro Tour. And so to try and sort of join the pro ranks and get to an event or get to the TV stages of an event where you might see somebody that you recognized, you know, like a Steve Davis or a Stephen Hendry or a Ronnie O'Sullivan, who were all in the top 16 of the rankings at the time. Somebody like me just starting out would have to win probably seven matches just to get to the round that they started in. So as a young man coming onto the tour, I'd qualified through what they called the UK tour, which was the very, very early stages of what's now the Q tour, where basically if you've got the money, you can pay to go on the Q tour. And if you're one of the best players at the end of the season, you might get a pro ticket. It was kind of the early formative years of that. But it was definitely based on whether you were any good or not. You had to win matches to get the ticket. My first year on tour, you know, it was almost mathematically impossible for me to keep my tour card halfway through this first season. Well, the WPBSA actually moved the goalposts and made it twice as hard for people like me to stay on. We missed staying on by, you know, 10 places or something. And so it was a very quick dip into the world of professional snooker for me. I was a professional for one year from being 15 to sort of 16 and a bit. Found it much more difficult than I thought I was going to, I have to say. You know, I'd gone from playing kids my age, and it was kids, you know, I didn't really have an amateur career. I had a junior career.

Allison Fisher 16:24

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 16:25

But I didn't really do the amateur scene. I kind of went from being a junior player, a kid, to a professional, you know, in very much a grown-ups world. And I played a very, very junior style of snooker, you know, went for everything, very aggressive, no thought of safety or defense. Very similar to how I still play, I have to say. I still very much like that. Yeah, I can't help it. But I I just I got picked off by grown men who were used to, you know, snookering the life out of players and and making life difficult. I wasn't ready for the pro ranks, if truth be told. And I spent another two or three years back on the amateur scene learning how to play properly, I think. You know, I I knew that junior style, that very naive, aggressive, going for everything style. Whilst it might be entertaining, wasn't gonna pay the bills and it wasn't gonna it wasn't gonna get me the wins, you know. It wasn't gonna get me the trophies, which I desperately wanted, you know. Having, as I said earlier on, having come from very little, having had no money as a kid, I wasn't playing snooker for money. It wasn't about the money that you might get if you won. It was about the trophy. As a child, it was about the medal, it was about the little medal you might take home after winning this whatever event it was. All I wanted was the trophies, and I knew that that style of play that I had, it wasn't gonna get me there. So I kind of had to relearn myself and relearn how to play. And it took me probably till I was, was I maybe 18 or 19 before I got back on the tour. And happy to say I've been on the tour ever since.

Mike Gonzalez 17:58

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's let's take you back in time a little bit because we talk to most people about their first table. Sometimes it's a little toy table like Allison got when she was a child. Did you have a similar experience?

Shaun Murphy 18:12

Well, I haven't seen the table Allison referred to, but I would I would make a lot of money. It was very similar. It was very, very similar. I actually didn't know what Snooker was. I wrote off to Santa. I sent my letter to Santa asking for, amongst other things, a computer that all my mates had, and it was called a Commodore 64.

Allison Fisher 18:32

I remember that too.

Shaun Murphy 18:33

Yeah, yeah. This is one for the kids. This is one for the kids. Yeah. Powerful. I asked Santa for a Commodore 64, and as I said earlier on at the start, you know, it all coincided with the financial crash of the 80s and of my family specifically. And the top and bottom of it was that we couldn't get a Commodore 64. Came downstairs all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and there was a little four-foot, four and a half-foot snooker table. And like everything in the 80s, it had Steve Davis' name and picture emblazoned on it. Yeah. It was a match room Steve Davis special snooker table, which, do you know, looking back, if you knew what you knew now, I'd love to have kept that. I regret not. I mean, I didn't make a choice to get rid of it, but you know, I wish I still had that. That would have been incredible.

Mike Gonzalez 19:25

Yeah.

Allison Fisher 19:26

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 19:26

But I remember, you know, I lived on that table. I absolutely loved it. And I'm sure you were the same, Allison. I bet I bet you've got a similar story.

Allison Fisher 19:33

Yeah, mine was about half that size, though. Mine was the smallest of the small. But anyway, I did love it. And I think I gave it to one of my cousins so years, years later. But I wish I still had mine.

Shaun Murphy 19:47

It's so funny now. My my kids live with their mother in Ireland in Dublin. And many, many years ago, I managed to get a junior size star table. Star, for those that don't know, star make the tables that we use in all the comps. And you know, they've the smaller tables are so vastly improved from the ones we would have had, Allison. Yeah. I managed to get Harry and Molly one of these tables. I was going to show you how to do a big screwback. Watch this.

Allison Fisher 20:15

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 20:16

I don't know where he gets it from, Allison, to be honest. I don't know where he gets that bravado from.

Allison Fisher 20:22

No, that sounds like a lot of fun.

Shaun Murphy 20:24

But he loves it, and Molly likes being the referee. She's the only child I've ever seen who actually likes being the ref.

Allison Fisher 20:30

I'm not sure what that says about her, but she's a Michaela Tab, maybe.

Shaun Murphy 20:35

Yeah, she's a budding Michaela Tab, yeah. But she um, yeah, the table was, and you look back, like I progressed from that small table to a full-size, big grown-up table that I could barely see over. You know, I was like this. Could barely see over the edges. You know, I was I was playing on a full-size table by the age of nine, just a few months after the you know, I'd got this Christmas present. And again, purely coincidentally, we were sat through looking through some old photo albums recently, and a picture is in this photo album of me playing on this table on Boxing Day that year, having just got the table the day before. And you know, when you look at it with a critical eye, you actually look at you can see a little snooker player, you know, and the grip's in the right position and the hinge is in the right position. You're like, Well, how did you get that? How did I know to do that?

Allison Fisher 21:30

It's so weird. Yeah, did you watch it a lot on TV prior to playing, or did your father was he a player? Nobody, nobody played.

Shaun Murphy 21:39

My dad, my dad played a bit in the golf clubs when the golf course was closed.

Allison Fisher 21:45

Right.

Shaun Murphy 21:45

So if if if if the course was closed because of bad weather, he would have played a bit of snooker, but that was it. There was no active snooker players in the family at all. So yeah, I d I genuinely don't know. I looked at that picture recently, I was like How did he how did I know to do that? Yeah. So strange.

Mike Gonzalez 22:05

And so young. You don't have an answer. You don't have an answer to that. Nobody had showed you.

Shaun Murphy 22:10

No, I think I think I mean maybe I'd seen it. I don't know. What I have learned as I've got older is I'm I'm a really good mimic might be the wrong word. I don't know, that might be the wrong word, but I learn things visually. So if I see somebody do something, I'm good at following. You know, I I've we kind of gently referred to it earlier that I play piano a little bit, I play a bit of music, and obviously I'm engaged to a professional pianist with Joe, like, you know, she and she, you know, she's world-renowned in her circles, you know, she is a proper pianist. But when I watch her play, I think I might have a go at that. I've taught myself to play piano purely by watching others. I've not had piano lessons, or you know, I wish I'd I wish I had had, because I'd be a damn sight better than I than I am. But I think I I've always learnt things by watching, not by words or by books or anything like that. Now I grew up, my father taught me to play snooker from the Joe Davis Bible, which was kind of all snooker players learnt from that. I'm sure there's an American equivalent from players gone by over the years. I'm sure there's a, you know, there is literature, I'm sure, that's coaching and all of that. But he he didn't know what he you know, he my dad didn't know what run inside was or Czech side or he wouldn't know a good safety shot from a bad one. You know, it you know.

Allison Fisher 23:32

So it could take you so far, maybe, and then and then it was learning by watching players in the local club. Yeah, it was. Then you said you had an interaction with Mark Wildman.

Shaun Murphy 23:44

Yeah. I think when I would have been about eleven, around 1993, 94, Mark bought Ron's Q-Sports, which was my home club. And added he had two or three clubs at the time. And for those obviously that don't know, Mark Wildman was the 1984 World Billiards Champion, billiards being the game from which all Q-Sport games derive from. That's the that's the Godfather game. Yeah. And he was world champion at that in 84, so he knew his way around the queue. Yeah. Under his influence, that club had the only carom table in the UK. Carom, again, for those that don't know, is the game that looks like a nine-ball table but has no pockets. Do you call that carom in the stakes?

Allison Fisher 24:32

Yeah, three-cushion table.

Mike Gonzalez 24:33

Three cushion billiards is yeah, three cushion billiards, and and the other billiards you refer to, I mean, I've heard it referred to as English billiards properly on this trade. Yes. Yes, yes.

Shaun Murphy 24:43

To give it its proper name.

Mike Gonzalez 24:44

Yeah, so for our pool listeners, maybe explain just a bit about what that game looks like with three balls.

Shaun Murphy 24:51

Well, English billiards is I mean, it's totally different. It's a snooker table, but with three balls, and you score by making pots and cannons and in-offs. Three cushion is the same, but with no pockets, so you can only score by making cannons using three cushions. So it's an incredible game, billiards and carom to incredible games to sort of give you that grounding and that base knowledge of angles and how the balls work around the table. And as I say, the club that Mark bought, which just purely coincidentally happened to be the one that I was playing at as a kid, had that table in it, and we were the only club in the UK that had one. And certainly on a Saturday, we would play snooker, we'd play English billiards, then we would play three cushion. Mark would be there holding court, telling everyone all the shots to play, and you know, and and how to do it, and I used to just lap it up, you know, when what he said, and then he would take me to his house. He had a beautiful billiard room in his house, and he would show me the secrets of how to manoeuvre those balls around the table. This is a guy who played at the crucible of, you know, that's our mecha for the World Snooker Championships in the 80s, you know. He really did know his stuff, and yeah, it was a it was a you know, looking back, it was an incredible grounding, it was an incredible education to have as a young player. I couldn't have asked for better teachers, really.

Allison Fisher 26:15

That's a great role model right there. And he became a commentator, didn't he? He was a commentation.

Shaun Murphy 26:21

Yeah. I think I think by most people, certainly who haven't played, he became better known as a commentator, and he had such a rich voice. I mean, I've I've dabbled in commentary a little bit, and it's so easy to talk too much. Everybody listening to this podcast will think, goodness me, Shaun doesn't have a problem talking. That's what we learned on the podcast. I know where my weaknesses lie, but I but but Mark, Mark had such a rich voice, had such a good turn of phrase. He'd gone off, you know, Bill English billiards particularly was he was never going to retire from that. You know, he'd gone off and had a career in banking. You know, he's extremely successful in his other life, spoken multiple languages. You know, he was a an in a very, very intelligent gentleman. And he, in some ways, he was the grandfather that I never had, you know, I never knew my grandparents. And Mark took on plenty of roles in my life. He just passed away a couple of years ago. You know, I stayed in touch with the family, he retired out to Spain, lived out his life in Spain, and where I believe he was the three cushion champion of his local city. I think he moved to I think it was Seville he moved to, and um, he was the local three cushion champion there. So he lived his life well.

Mike Gonzalez 27:28

Yeah. You know, you talked a little bit about how you learned, and it seemed like it was early on, at least through observation. What do you think about the kids nowadays? Do you think they have an advantage with all the material now available through YouTube and videos and everything else to really accelerate their learning?

Shaun Murphy 27:46

Well, I you you just couldn't have a better resource, couldn't you, than all of these things at your fingertips. I mean, I remember collecting the match room player profiles video series, which you featured in, Allison, many times. Did I? You did. And you know, all the players in the match room stable had their own video, and I remember watching those, but these were videos I had to go and buy at a secondhand shop or a carbootsa. You know, I happened to come across them. Nowadays you can get on YouTube, you can find out how to do anything. Yes. And it wasn't that long ago, I actually I had an oil central heating system in an old house, you know, and it got blocked up, and I was like, what am I gonna do here? So I went on YouTube, how to unblock a within an hour. I was like a fully trained technician. I was this is fantastic. But in all seriousness, no, I mean if you were a young player now coming into the game of Q Sports, how do I do X? Wait, I mean, how much how much information is there out there now? There's so much. You know, back when I was a kid, we had a we had a book, a couple of VHS cassettes, and Mark Wallman. That was it.

Allison Fisher 28:53

Visual learning, a little bit of visual learning there.

Shaun Murphy 28:56

Yeah, a little bit of visual learning. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, that was it.

Mike Gonzalez 29:00

Well, you talked about uh being attracted to the the trophies, to the medals, not necessarily the money. But what really hooked you on the game? What was it about the game you really you really loved as a youngster?

Shaun Murphy 29:14

Goodness, that's a that's a great question. I think as a youngster, I think it was the I think it was the colours, I think it was the the vibrancy of the game, I think it was an interest in in trying to master that game. You know, there's there wasn't really any sort of outside elements, you know, there was no weather elements, there was no out, you know, you you're not having to deal with the wind and the rain like soccer or football or golf or whatever it might be, you know. It it it felt as if the game was in front of you, and if you could understand it, well then you could become good at it. You know, the the biggest obstacle to being a good player was me. So quite I quite liked that. I thought it I liked the challenge of that. I liked being able to, certainly on those nights after school where we would drive to the snooker club and we would do the same practice routines. I quite liked watching and seeing if there was any improvement day on day, week on week, watching those average scores climb and that routine that used to take me an hour now took me 15 minutes. I quite liked that. Still like that a little bit to some degree. I still like getting in my snooker room, hitting balls and seeing, actually seeing the improvement or not, as the case may be, you know, seeing it seeing it happen.

Mike Gonzalez 30:26

Yeah.

Shaun Murphy 30:28

It's quite, you know, that type of thing would w has always been a fascination of me. I remember, you know, again, anecdotally, you don't know whether these things are true or not, but hearing stories and rumours of players gone by and saying, Oh, well, so and so managed to do this routine in eight attempts or whatever, you know, can I do it in less? And, you know, I it was that type of thing really that attracted me to it. And then the skill of controlling that cue ball. I remember Mark saying to me, you know, if you can control that cue ball, you know, that's what the game's all about, you know. And if you can put that ball in the right place, you know, you make the game much easier. Steve Davis had one of these throwaway lines in the 80s where he said, I never miss an easy shot, and I make every shot as easy as possible. You're like, yeah, no, that that'll do it. Yeah, that'll win. Yeah. That'll do it.

Allison Fisher 31:16

Thank you for listening to another episode of Legends of the Cube. If you like what you hear, wherever you listen to your podcast, including Apple and Spotify, please follow, subscribe, and spread the word. Give our podcast a five-star rating and share your thoughts. Visit our website and support our four history projects. Until our next golden break with more Legends of the Cube. So long, everybody.