Rocket Ronnie: Sports Personality of the Year hands down

As a wise and stunningly pissed man once said, snooker is a powerful tonic for the soul.

He was deeply wrong, of course, but when self-flagellating deities like Saint Ronnie are around, anything's possible.

Screw SPOTY (Zara can have her toe-curlingly risible gold star) — our infinitely less worthless "Provider of the Greatest Sporting Fillip on Any One Particular Afternoon" Award for 2006 goes to that man O'Sullivan, for a drab Thursday in mid-December when the singular austerity of professional sport was flipped the finger like never before.

Glancing up from my lunch, I found myself in the enviable position of having stumbled across a live Hendry-O'Sullivan UK Championship quarter-final in its early stages — just about the only possible scenario capable of rekindling my once-smouldering interest in sputtering old snooker, sport's perennial odd kid.

...Only to find, alas, that neither player could sink a ball, the crowd resembled a clutch of bereaved Mormons, and even the commentators were blustering about the game's foremost titans being "off colour". It was, quite frankly, shit.

To the eternally sepia-tinted Hendry, of course, such stupefaction was meat and drink. But to fully functioning humans, the situation bordered on the psychotic. What the hell are we all doing here? shrieked the faces of the assembled company, the poor sods.

Truthfully, I like snooker. Or, I have liked snooker at certain previous junctures, occasionally enjoying a blissful communion with its hushed, metronomic charm. The twilight hours of many a night during those red-eyed, horizontal Uni days were blessed with a meditative waltz around the hypnotic green baize: the geometric dance of the reds; the rhythmic bass thud of pinks, blues and blacks arrowing home; the billowing dust motes of chalk caught in a slow-mo close-up. Unlike the fusty apologisms currently being offered for this Ronnie/Hendry trainwreck, Clive Everton's dulcet intonations were once a litany of precise calm — the perfect soundtrack to a percolated witching hour where results were immaterial and incantation was all.

There is, of course, more to witnessing snooker than a soporific stoner's seance. I've followed many a taut skirmish with captivated studiousness — drug-free and everything. But my once lucid sea of tranquility had just curdled to a homogenous trudge. It was game over this time. Snooker had abdicated any semblance of passability.

Thankfully, at that moment, Ronnie and I were kindred spirits.

For just as my erstwhile affections for the most pedestrian of sporting pantomimes were forever eviscerated, Saint Ron did precisely that to the match, and perhaps to the game itself.

Hendry, world cloven, pudgy face retreating into a monobrowed scrunch of disbelief, could but look on aghast at his — and snooker's — painfully public castration. Back in the studio, Parrott & co. continued the shellshocked theme with hilarious consequences, grappling for "what possible reason" SOS (Saint O'Sullivan) might have had for his part in "such an unprecedented spectacle".

There is simply no room in professional sport for anything other than slavish, ascetic commitment. Which is why Ronnie's entirely apposite exit wasn't merely wind-from-sails time, it was crossbow-to-the-abs territory. He simply inferred, with beautiful simplicity, "This is rubbish — I'm off." And the man was not wrong.

Naturally, the official line from camp O'Sullivan soon re-balanced the picture — moment of madness, professionalism, regret, yada yada. But just for that one moment, O'Sullivan did what we were all thinking — what Hendry could never bring himself to even conceive of, let alone actualise. Finger time.

Here's to the man, and his renegade ilk. God bless Saint Ron.