EXCLUSIVE: Jimmy White on a life fuelled by drink, drugs, lunch with Ronnie Kray, talking snooker with the Queen and playing his dead brother at cards

• Jimmy White tells Sportsmail of his drink and drug-fuelled past
• 52-year-old claims he spent £2million on gambling and £200,000 on drugs
• White: 'I had cancer, so I asked the doctor to replace my testicle with a snooker ball' 

By Jonathan McEvoy for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:29 EST, 27 November 2014 | Updated: 18:11 EST, 28 November 2014

It is 9am and Jimmy White walks into a bog-standard central London hotel with a cue box. ‘Look, I wouldn’t have had this with me in the old days,’ he says.

No, he was more likely to be going to bed at rush-hour than rising from it. For White, in his glorious and grim heyday in the Eighties and Nineties, snapped the candle of life in three and burned it at all six ends.

This is no exaggeration. He has just published Second Wind, one of the rawest biographies ever written by a sportsman. It tells a previously unknown, harrowing and sometimes uproarious tale of wilful self-ruin, truancy, cocaine addiction, minor criminality, alcoholism, gambling on an industrial scale, family breakdown and cancer.

Snooker legend Jimmy White tells Sportsmail of his drink and drug-fuelled past

We meet over breakfast. Appropriately for a man who has spent a long time in dark rooms, as well as dark places, he is as white as his name. His face is full. But, given how he spent most of his 52 years, it is a minor miracle that he is here at all, let alone in seemingly good health.

James Warren White, who was born in Balham, the son of a proud and hard-working carpenter, had a cavalier disregard for authority from the start.

As a nine-year-old he bunked off school to play for money in the snooker halls of south London, with their working-class codes of conduct. The days, he says, when keys on string were left in people’s front doors.

One of the extraordinary early tales is of Mad Ronnie Fryer, a minder/bouncer at Zan’s snooker club. When the police came in one day, Ronnie hurtled down to the cellar. The police sent down a massive Alsatian, White tells me, though in the book it is a Rottweiler. ‘The next thing you know, there was this horrible, strangling noise and the dog, with a snapped neck, was thrown back up the stairs.

‘Ronnie had killed the poor thing with his bare hands. I was 12 going on 35.’

White, nicknamed 'The Whirlwind', has earned closed to £5million during his lengthy career 

White puffs on a cigarette during the Embassy World Snooker Championship at the Crucible in 1994

Then there was Dodgy Bob, a black cab driver who drove him and his pal Tony Meo up and down the country to earn so much money that he soon had £10,000 saved. But generally the cash came and went, gambled away on horses, cards, dogs.

But the mayhem had barely started. He was not only drinking to oblivion but on cocaine. He went to clinics to get clean of both.

In all, White reckons he spent £200,000 on drugs and £2million gambling. He weaned himself off cocaine in 1994, stopping at some unspecified date later. He calls the stuff Devil’s Dandruff.

‘Cocaine is a mental drug. Unlike heroin and drink, your body does not need it. It is only your mind telling you to have it.’

The nadir came during one hedonistic month when, to use his phrase, he was sucking the Devil’s d***’, namely smoking crack cocaine.

White believes he spent £200,000 on drugs and £2million on gambling

Whit, pictured as a fresh-faced 22-year-old, tells all in his eye-opening new book

Former snooker legend Tony Meo (left) trains with a teenage White in 1978 

‘I was flirting with death but didn’t give a s***.’

‘I had a secret account with £30,000 in it, and I just kept on going to the hole in the wall to be able to buy the drug. Within 27 days I had blown the lot.’

The drug turned White paranoid. He and his snooker-playing friend and fellow crack user Kirk Stevens (now also reformed) would sit by the door waiting for the police.

One time in a Kildare hotel they set fire to the furniture to make firewood to cook the drug. ‘When you are on crack cocaine the first hit is the only hit you get all night. You are just topping up after that. It played with my brain and I decided I would never touch it again. Sometimes I think back to it and I shake with fear.’

White was off crack, but the coke and vodka binges continued. He was even on both booze and drugs until 7.30 the night before the 1993 World Championship final against Stephen Hendry. It was a spiral. His marriage with Maureen was turbulent and ended in divorce.

Even his hair transplant went spectacularly wrong. They were ‘butchers’ and pulled his face so tight it was agony. The surgery left a ridge in his head so wide you could roll a penny down it. He later had a thatch, and is wearing a black hat indoors when we meet.

White is currently ranked 51st in the world but believes he can become world champion

White, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 1995, claims he asked if he could have a snooker ball to replace the removed testicle

There was also testicular cancer. The doctors offered to insert a ping-pong ball in place of the removed testicle. ‘I asked if they could put a snooker ball in there instead,’ he says. ‘They said it would be too heavy and point-blank refused.’

Still, he had a son after his treatment, Tommy, now 16, to go with his older four girls. Before the book was published he sat Tommy down to tell him what he would reveal in it. ‘He was a bit shocked,’ says White, with understatement, ‘but it was all a long time ago now’.

The book contains three fabulous — if, in at least one case, seriously macabre — stories about unlikely meetings.

The first was in Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight. ‘A gangster who had helped my mum by getting back her handbag after it had been stolen asked me for a favour in return,’ recalls White. ‘He said: “Can you go to see a mate of mine in prison? His name’s Ronnie Kray.’

Twice White was scheduled to see him but he found himself too drunk to get there. Finally two heavies turned up at his door one morning and took him there in a big Mercedes.

White went through security and saw Kray, who was neatly presented in a suit and tie. He had just one guard.

White is completely off drugs, allows himself occasional glasses of wine and gambles moderately

‘Ronnie Kray had full silver service,’ says White. ‘He had no handcuffs and gave me a hug.’ Over finger sandwiches and tea out of china cups, delivered by Kray’s own waiter, the two men talked for two hours about snooker — shots, how to stun and spin the ball.

The second bizarre encounter took place at Buckingham Palace when he was made an MBE. ‘The Queen is a true professional and calmly pinned my MBE on,’ he writes in the book. ‘Then she got down to some serious business.

‘Jimmy,’ she started. (Hang on, the Queen knows my name? She knows who I am?).

‘Jimmy, Jimmy, please tell me this,’ she continued. ‘Do tell me why they put the snooker highlights on so late?’

The strangest ‘meeting’, however, is with his dead and dearly beloved elder brother Martin. ‘I was in floods of tears,’ says White. ‘I went to the funeral house. There was a massive chain. I kicked it and the door opened. We carried my brother’s corpse out to the car and drove him to my other brother’s house. It was 10 miles away. We put him in a chair and we all drank and played cards with him — next to his body.’

Then they put him a taxi — ‘he was a bit stiff’ — and took him back. The police called on White, but let him off in his grieving state.

So what of Jimmy White now? He says he is off drugs, allows himself occasional glasses of wine and gambles moderately. After this interview, he went back to his home in Epsom and practised for three to four hours. 

The 52-year-old admits he has only 'prepared properly' for a World Championship 'three or four times'

That practice paid off for he has reached the second round of the prestigious UK championship, where he will play Ding Junhui. ‘For 25 years I was arrogant and trusting in my own ability and on cocaine so didn’t practise as much as I could have. But I am enjoying the game now.’

He rates his friend Ronnie O’Sullivan as the best player ever, Stephen Hendry as the hardest competitor, his ‘best friend’ Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins as a great shot-maker. 

‘He was called Hurricane because he was fast. Actually, he ran around the table like a whippet and that gave the impression he was fast.’ Of Steve Davis, his old rival in the pantomime of the Eighties, he says he never disliked but ‘we were total opposites.’

He admires Judd Trump, the exciting young left-hander. And he predicts a Chinese world champion in the next few years. That person from snooker’s new world is sure to be an automaton rather than a free spirit like White.

White believes he can challenge snooker star Ronnie O'Sullivan (above) 

Now he is ranked 51st in the world. ‘I have only prepared properly for the World Championship three or four times in my life,’ says White. ‘If I had gone about it professionally I would have won the title 10 times.’

‘Ronnie O’Sullivan is on a super level, and winning at the Crucible is as hard as ever. But my game is good. My eyes are fine. Snooker is not like boxing or football — you can go on longer. I feel as strong as ever.

‘I still believe I can become world champion. The day I no longer believe that, I’ll go and play bad golf.’

Ray Winstone and Jimmy White talking Movember (Archive)

Second Wind: My Autobiography by Jimmy White is published by Sport Media

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