Snooker: Snooker's Master of Arts and Graft Finds Will to Take on World

When Ken Doherty won the world snooker championships in 1997 the impact of his triumph was measured in Ireland by the startling absence of a single crime on the deserted streets of Dublin that night. Doherty had heard how everyone in his home city had been transfixed by his victory over the then supposedly unbeatable Stephen Hendry. Yet he only started to believe such sweeping claims when, on his return from Sheffield, 250,000 Dubliners cheered his open-top bus parade through the heaving streets.

"It was amazing," Doherty remembers, "but it also seemed very strange. I was introduced to the chief superintendent of the Dublin police force and he said, 'Doherty, you should be on the telly more often - you'd make my job an awful lot easier.' And then he told me that, while I was playing the last session of the final between seven and 10 that Sunday night, there had not been one report of a crime."

Ronnie O'Sullivan, with his raging demons and sheer brilliance, occupies a compelling presence in snooker; but Doherty is by far the sport's most entertaining and intelligent character. He is also ranked third in the world, a place above O'Sullivan, and is a serious contender for this year's world championship, which begins at the Crucible on Saturday.

As colourful and warm in person as he looks pale and pinched on screen, Doherty takes some dazzling conversational turns so that, in less than an hour, he discusses subjects stretching from Roy Keane, Caravaggio, Johnny Cash and Alex Higgins to opera, growing up in a crammed Dublin house, being ejected from a plane for "drunk and disorderly behaviour" and what it's really like be to be seduced by an Australian psychiatrist.

Doherty has appeared in two other world championship finals since his memorable win in 1997 - losing 18-12 to John Higgins the following year and then, in 2003, 18-16 to Mark Williams in an epic that characterised Doherty's unquenchable fight throughout a tournament in which he staged a series of barely credible comebacks. In the final he was 10-2 down before he hauled himself level at 11-11.

"I thought I was going to win it then because I'd pulled off all those miraculous recoveries. Even in the semi I'd been 15-9 down to Paul Hunter and won it 17-16. So when I lost the final it hit me hard. I didn't get over it for two seasons."

For all his rounded interests away from snooker, Doherty concedes his sporting insecurities. "When I get a knock I'm not like other players who can just shrug it off. I often take the disappointments into my next match and there was a real psychological hurdle for me because I went five years without winning a ranking tournament. Last year I was worried about slipping out of the top 16 so it's significant that since I finally won again in Malta I've climbed back to No3. That's where I was in 1997 and it's my highest-ever ranking."

Doherty was 8-5 down to Higgins in the final of the Malta Cup in February before he unleashed one of his trademark recoveries to win 9-8 and end his barren spell. However his ensuing celebrations, in the company of the friend he'd just beaten, soon made different headlines across Ireland and Britain. Eight hours after their gripping match Doherty and Higgins were ejected from an early-morning flight about to leave for Heathrow.

Though reports acknowledged that Doherty was not drunk and that he had been asked to leave the plane only after protesting Higgins's removal, he stresses that "it hurt me. Most people would say John and I are two of the most unlikely people to be ejected for drunk and disorderly behaviour. We were totally victimised. John may have been a little drunk but if we were being loud it was only through laughter.

"It seemed ironic, with me being such a big Man United fan, that the following weekend I caught a flight full of Liverpool fans. We were off to see United and Liverpool in the FA Cup and they took the piss out of me mercilessly - even if they knew I'm too sensible to get drunk."

Doherty plays down the fact that he once wrote a critique of Caravaggio's use of light and shade in The Supper at Emmaus for a National Gallery newsletter. "I love art but it's not something I study. It's just a passion for me and [his wife] Sarah. If we go on holiday we'll go to Paris or Rome and as soon as we arrive we head for the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel."

With his additional interest in opera and a "religious devotion to the movies", the 36-year-old Doherty is unlike most of his peers. "They rip into me at any opportunity. They're surprised a snooker player can enjoy anything vaguely arty."

Doherty has certainly moved beyond the impoverished start he and his family endured in Dublin. "We lived at No19 Ranelagh Avenue and shared this small house with another family. There were two tiny rooms for six of us on our floor. We didn't have an inside toilet or a real bath.

"But it seemed better than the house we'd moved from in Donnybrook. At that place we'd come home and find the landlord had changed the locks or, once, when there was a fire we discovered he'd locked us in. My mam had to pass us through the windows to get us out. Ranelagh Avenue didn't seem so bad after that."

They eventually moved to a better house down the road, which they did not have to share. "I felt for my mother because, not long afterwards, my dad died. I was 13 and she had to look after me and my two brothers and sister. Most of the time she was chasing me out the local snooker club, Jasons. She always threatened the owners - two fellers called the Conway brothers - that if I failed my exams it would be on their heads. But they helped me because, once they heard my dad died, they let me have as much free practice as I wanted."

The contrast between that life and Sarah's in Australia could hardly have been greater. "She was born here but her family went to Australia when she was seven. Her dad was a doctor and years later he sent her back here to study at the Royal College of Surgeons. She's a psychiatrist now and doing some interesting research in DCFS which is . . ." Doherty hesitates and then whispers, "I better get this right or I'll get the brunt of it."

He shouts to Sarah in the room next door, "What is it you're studying again?" before proudly echoing the focus of her research: "Mental health and behavioural abnormalities in dilcardia facial syndrome . . . which is basically helping people with facial abnormalities."

Doherty laughs when asked if he let slip to such a smart woman that he was a mere snooker player on the night they met in Dublin in 1999? "I didn't have time. She just seduced me. She plied me with drink and took me back to my place. She knew nothing about snooker."

Does Sarah have any psychiatric help to offer on the brink of another world championship at the nerve-shredding Crucible? "She knows when I'm doing something wrong and she'll tell me. But like all my family she's far too nervous to watch me."

Sarah may not watch any snooker over 17 days of excruciating psychological drama, but her engaging husband travels to Sheffield with renewed hope. "I think I've got a really good chance of winning. Wouldn't that be grand?" Snooker-loving culture vultures will no doubt agree by slapping on some Puccini and staring at a Caravaggio print in celebration of their secret hero. Anxious policemen across Ireland, meanwhile, will simply pray that the boy from Ranelagh ensures another rare crime-free Sunday night in Dublin.