For snooker’s cash-hungry blazers, the Turkish Masters is an important new event in the calendar, and its opening ceremony was a chance to schmooze the local dignitaries and curry favour with the sponsors.
It was absolutely not the occasion to arrive thuggishly pissed, get into a scrap and leave in an ambulance. Unfortunately world number 44 Robert Milkins didn’t get the memo.
After turning up late because he’d been drinking all day to celebrate his birthday, The Milkman started a fight with some VIP guests and fell over in the loo, splitting his chin open.
He then got into another bust up with snooker boss Jason Ferguson before an ambulance took him to hospital where he had his stomach pumped.
Milkins, who uses The Wurzels hit I Am a Cider Drinker as his walk-on music, said later: “I drank far too much. I don’t know exactly what happened — I was in a state where I didn’t know where I was.”
Lovely little tantrum from world number six Shaun Murphy, who reacted to a shock defeat by insisting his low-ranked opponent shouldn’t have been in the tournament in the first place.
Murphy (career earnings: £4 million) claimed amateur Si Juhai had an unfair advantage because he doesn’t have the pressure of earning money from the tournament.
He seethed: “He played like a man who does not have a care in the world, because he does not have a care in the world. It is not fair, it is not right.
“I feel extremely hard done by that I have lost to someone who shouldn’t even be in the building.”
Hopefully poor Shaun can find solace in his main hobby – golf. He plays to a high standard, and in 2019 managed to edge out several struggling pros to book a spot in the qualifiers for The Open… as an amateur!
You don’t get proper grudge matches any more. Last century, when sport was still a proxy for violence, feuds were a major part of the fun.
Then the media sanitised it all, at the behest of FIFA and Mastercard. Suddenly all the delicious animosity, like John Terry knobbing Wayne Bridge’s wife, was relegated to “elephant in the room” status.
The nearest thing you get to bad blood today is Conor McGregor yelling “yer wife’s in me DMs” at some YouTuber. Which just doesn’t cut it.
So we’ve been counting down the days ’til the “Battle of the Exes” clash between Reanne Evans and Mark Allen at the British Open.
Reanne and Mark dated for three years and share a 14-year-old daughter, but literally cannot bear to be in the same room as each other.
Back in April, Mark got Reanne chucked out of the BBC studio because he complained her presence as a pundit was “distracting him”. She made a formal complaint.
And when Reanne joined the men’s tour, along with another female player, Allen wanted her off that too, sneering: “I’m not really sure what they are going to bring”.
Well today he found at, as his ex gave him a hell of a scare.
Things got off to a thrilling start when Evans snubbed Allen’s offer of a fist bump. And with a raucous crowd cheering her on, she almost pulled off an upset before eventually losing by three frames to two.
Allen described the experience as “horrible”, while pundit Stephen Hendry said it was the most intense match he’d ever seen.
The final anecdote from our Winter Warmer series comes from the memoirs of hell-raising snooker legend Jimmy White. This story describes a very heavy time in Dublin, when he went for the weekend without any spare clothes, and returned six weeks later.
White‘s promoter booked him into the luxury Gresham Hotel, and arranged for them to send 24 bottles of Dom Perignon champagne to his room every day.
All was going well until infamous boozer Alex “Hurricane” Higgins checked into the same hotel.
“I’ll take my usual suite,” he informed reception.
“Sorry, Mr Higgins, but a Mr White is already booked into that,” he was told.
Higgins wasn’t happy. “That’s no trouble,” he told them. “I’ll just stay in his bathroom.”
He fucking did as well. He constantly wore this white suit — Higgins thought he had to dress at his very best in The Gresham — and he slept in the bath, in this white suit, for three nights until he moved to the floor below.
White and Higgins were joined by “nightclub girls, croupiers, hostesses, UB40” and Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy for the mother of all benders:
The party carried on for 17 days. At one point the promoter’s wife came to tell us he had been carted off to a mental hospital after having a breakdown.
She simply cut our ration to 12 bottles of champagne a day.
In the end all the booze gave me alcohol poisoning and I decided it was time for home.
“I’m off lads, I’ve got to go,” I told some of the stragglers.
I flew to Gatwick and presented myself at our front door, ready to make peace with Maureen.
The second the door opened I knew I was in trouble. It all kicked off and before I knew it, I was out of there again.
“Fuck this”, I thought, and told the cab driver to get me back to Gatwick. Fast forward two hours and I was back at The Gresham.
“Can I check into the Elizabeth Taylor suite?” I said to the girl behind reception.
“You could do,” she replied. “But you never checked out in the first place.”
