'He can see the pocket closing up' - Re-live Steve Davis' history-making first-ever 147 break on its anniversary

It’s January 11, 1982. Deepest winter in Oldham, Lancashire. A Monday night in early new year offering little apparent claim to a place in history.

Inside the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a young ginger-haired man is studiously setting about a sporting first. Steve Davis, who became world snooker champion the previous year, is playing John Spencer in the Lada Classic, one of the tournaments added to a newly burgeoning circuit to meet the growing demand of television viewers.

He pots 15 reds with 15 blacks. There has never been a maximum break constructed in tournament play before. Spencer had himself made one three years earlier at an event in Slough, but it did not count as an official 147 as the pockets had not been templated to tournament standards. Either way, there was no footage of the break as the television crew, including the camera operators, were on a meal break at a local McDonald’s.

That debacle was an example of how snooker used to be – a bit ramshackle, a bit disorganised. The audience in Oldham were watching what it would become – slick, professional and in the image of the man at the table.

Davis approaches the colours. He seems to suffer a kick on the brown and finishes a little high on the blue, takes the cue ball round the table off three cushions and lands a few inches above the pink. He needs the rest to pot it, a horrible shot in any frame, but does so with trademark cool, screwing the white off the side cushion for the black.

“He can see the pocket closing up and closing up and getting smaller,” is how John Pulman, former world champion and understated television commentator, described how Davis will be feeling in these final moments. His colleague, David Taylor, is somewhat less understated, abandoning any pretence at impartiality or self-restraint. He is simply overwhelmed by what he is witnessing and starts to shout as the black goes in.

You can’t blame him. This is a big deal, snooker’s version of the four-minute mile. Elton Welsby, presenting the ITV highlights programme, cannot contain himself and blurts out what has happened before a moment of action has been shown.

This is 1982, the year of the Falklands War, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the launch of Channel 4. Snooker has secured a foothold in the British television schedules and is about to all but take them over. On the table, century breaks are still relatively rare: three years earlier, 65 year-old Fred Davis made one at the World Championship and was applauded by the referee.

Steve was no relation to the famous Davis brothers, Joe and Fred, who between them won 23 world titles in the pre-television age. He got into snooker through his father, Bill. One day in the 1970s he walked into a club owned by a brash young accountant called Barry Hearn, who agreed to manage him.

They were chalk and cheese in terms of personality but shared one thing – an extraordinary work ethic. The snooker professionals of the time could be forgiven for not treating it as a full-time job. There were not enough tournaments for that. Davis, though, was determined to be the best there had ever been and, as snooker’s popularity grew, became a winning machine, setting new standards of professionalism.

It is often stated that Alex Higgins made snooker, that he took it from an underground folk sport to a major television attraction. Certainly Higgins – intoxicating and, indeed, sometimes intoxicated – brought huge swathes of working class people to the game through his dashing, exciting style of play and natural disposition for rebellion. Yet for the sport to achieve mainstream appeal, it needed a clean-cut talisman.

Davis fitted the bill perfectly. He was a young man, just 24 when he made his maximum, and despite his natural shyness could be relied upon to represent his sport anywhere, most particularly on a myriad of television programmes of the time: Saturday Superstore, Record Breakers, Cannon and Ball, The Morecambe and Wise Show, Wogan. Whatever the hour, whatever the audience, Davis was in demand.

This unassuming lad from Plumstead appealed to middle class audiences, to families. Nans loved him. Sponsors fell over themselves to hand him endorsements. At one point in the mid-80s he was the highest earning sportsperson in Britain. Snooker boomed. The so-called bad boys kept the tabloids busy, but the mass audience warmed equally to those players more likely to start a singsong in a pub than a fight.

More than anyone, Davis widened snooker’s appeal. It was no longer the preserve of smoky halls with their constant air of trouble. Off the table, Hearn realised the huge commercial possibilities of a sport outstripping football in the TV ratings. He cashed in with branded aftershave and duvet covers, overseas tours to the Far East and, most famously, a pop song, Snooker Loopy.

The sport became a central part of British life and money flooded in. For all the many achievements of Steve Davis, this is perhaps his greatest legacy. And when off-table politics and mismanagement threatened the professional game’s very existence just over a decade ago, it was Davis who turned to Hearn and asked him to step in, the result of which has been the rejuvenation of the circuit.

As the years passed, new champions emerged and Davis’s records began to go. He carried on playing long after his peak with some notable successes. He reached the 2005 UK Championship final at the age of 48 and in 2010 beat John Higgins in the second round of the World Championship. He doggedly continued on the circuit, pitching up at leisure centres for anonymous qualifiers, until 2016 when his father passed away. They had always been a team and so Davis retired and turned his attention to another of his passions, music.

He is now a member of The Utopia Strong, who released their first album in 2019, and undertakes regular DJ gigs. Those going along looking for ironic thrills soon forget he was ever a snooker player. As with his former profession, he has mastered his craft.

Relaxed in his own skin, Davis, now 64, is always ready to lampoon the old days, especially his black-ball defeat to Dennis Taylor at the Crucible in 1985, and openly admits the players now are much better.

But why is that? It is down in large part to the man who raised standards, who was snooker’s flag bearer in the era in which it became established both as a viable sport and part of the cultural fabric of Britain.

There is a generation of players now in their 40s who revere Davis as a snooker deity. In their formative years, he was an inspiration. Ronnie O’Sullivan and John Higgins both worshipped him as boys. Stephen Hendry used him as the model for his own ruthless approach to competition.

As for maximum breaks, there have now been 172 recorded in professional competition. Given the many hundreds of thousands of frames played in the last four decades, this is not that many, but it is no longer the event it was. Such is the frequency of 147s, big money prizes for making one have been abandoned, although live audiences are still thrilled to witness snooker’s perfect break.

Those present in Oldham 40 years ago saw something very special, made more so by the man responsible for this piece of history – and for so much more of what we now take for granted in the world of professional snooker.

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