In Praise of ... 147 Breaks

Like snooker or loathe it, if you watched Ronnie O'Sullivan at the Crucible on Monday you will have been dazzled by the swashbuckling swagger with which he notched up the ninth 147 of his career, and set a new record for the tally of maximum breaks. Billiard-table bores point out that the clearance of 15 reds, 15 blacks and all the colours is not a maximum at all. If a foul is followed by a free ball, a player can chalk up 155 in theory, and 149 has been achieved in practice. Real obsessives go further, fantasising about higher breaks that could be made if a colour-blind referee re-spotted the wrong ball. Such quibbles are a distraction. Higher scores rely on someone else making a mistake, but 147 can be achieved through perfect play alone. Perfection was what O'Sullivan showed on Monday, dispatching an awesome cannon off the 13th black to release the last two reds. After that his job was simple, and the crowd twitched with anticipation. O'Sullivan later insisted he had been planning the clearance from the moment he sank the first red. In earlier times such ambition would have been indecent: 27 years passed between the first official 147 in 1955 and the third in 1982. But since then it has become fashionable to play top-level snooker sober. O'Sullivan - who previously set the record for the speediest 147, completing the 36 pots in 5 minutes and 20 seconds - has now pulled off the feat three times in the last two years. That record, like the 147 break itself, is not something that will be easily bettered.