Mark Wilson - Part 4 (From Personal Trials to Mosconi Cup Triumphs)

Okay, so you're back in Moline, you got your Big Ten Footer, which is, as we said, is a beautiful table. So, where do you go from here?
Well, move back to Moline, playing pool, pro tour, training really hard. Life is good, starting to win a lot of regional tournaments now. Then I meet this girl, and we fall in love.
It was after a terrible episode. My mom had committed suicide, and I discovered her. So that is a life-changing event that will never heal.
I went down to the depths of, I'm going to throw my life away because it's ruined now. Then distraught, heartbroken, never been devastated like this, never had a blow this severe.
Just going to throw my life away, away with drugs and alcohol even though I'm not that person. And I went through a terrible time where I couldn't go to the pool room. That's never happened to me in my life.
But I was so afraid that someone would come up and want to express sorrow or pity, but I wasn't strong enough to accept it and was needed in the escape from what consumes your brain every day.
So you inadvertently go through dramatic weight loss, lack of sleep, lack of being able to focus, can't concentrate, and despair, you know. And then I thought, one day I thought, you know what, you can't hurt me. What are you going to do, kill me?
I'd do it myself. And if I had the courage, what are you going to do, take all my money? I don't care.
Nothing means anything to me anymore. My whole life has changed dramatically. And then after a few weeks of that, I thought, you know, if I do what I'm thinking about doing, that would be disrespectful to the quality of the parents that I had.
And I can't do that. That would be wrong. And at that point, out of a billion cells in my body, one cell had a flicker of light, everything else was black.
And next day, three cells. And I was just thinking about, yeah, you can't hurt me. I don't give a shit.
What happens now?
And so I'm just going to go on and make the happiest life I ever had.
And that's why you'll never ask me how you're doing. It's always better than I've ever been. Because, and I learned from that, relentless positivity.
Because I would have thrown my life away. I was down that hole, but I was already a pretty positive person when that happened to me. And I went completely black.
Had I been a little bit negative, there would have been no recovery whatsoever. And so it took a long time, but I did never heal fully, but semi-operational now. And then I went to the pool room once finally, after a few weeks for a couple of hours.
And then soon I was back in full go. So I'm playing the tour and then I meet this girl and she was cute and we fell in love. And that was good.
And she played pool too. And so then as time went by, she got a sponsor. I didn't, but I was winning money and she really wasn't, but it was good.
And sometimes if she did, it was better. And then I opened the pool room and that did well. So we started off with nothing and time went by.
And then after eight, nine years, pool became hard for her. And she knows I'm hardcore. So she goes, I'm just going to, I'm not going to play pool.
So, okay. I let her go just because she's so rebellious. If I say, no, you got to play pool.
She couldn't do it. So I just thought, just let her go. Well, then she got a job in a casino and I'm immersed in pool.
And every night she's cocktail waitress at a casino and all these guys are hitting on her and better offers and like this. And she's out of pool and not going to work hard at it like I am.
And so now once she got disillusioned with pool, then I didn't look like Tom Cruise anymore to her. And so that was kind of the beginning. And at that time, I'd won a big tournament in Hong Kong.
And it was really cool. And then that was me and Steve Davis in the finals. And it was the amount of money wouldn't even pay his taxes.
But yet it was the best money I ever won. And so I did end up winning. And the other nervous this could be.
But I did tuxedo affair and $40,000. So that was a big deal. So that was great.
But this guy, the way he do it, you got first class airfare, you and your wife, your first class hotel, which Hong Kong has the greatest hotels in the world. And then all your food. And then if you win something, you win something.
So it's all good. Well, now I get invited back again. And because she's out of pool and kind of disillusioned, and kind of, I don't know, she knew she was going to leave me.
I think it's really what it was. But I was still hopeful. Okay.
And so Bob invites me back to go over to Hong Kong, defend my title. I can't wait. This is a Super Bowl pool.
Maybe I never win again, but it's such a great experience. I don't want to miss it. And she goes, Hun, we get to go and you're invited and it's going to be great again and everything.
No, I'm not going. If you go, I won't be here when you get back. And, oh man, I don't like confrontation.
I don't want to lose my wife over a pool match, but damn, I don't want to miss this tournament, you know? And it was awful week and a half. And I just got like a sleepless.
And why would she do that? And then she knows this will just kill me and I can't miss. Anyway, I couldn't come to an answer, you know?
And it was, well, then finally, I'm flying back from Hong Kong, hoping that she was bluffing, but she wasn't bluffing. So now I got my good wife, you know what I mean? And that's that.
But the bad thing for my career wife, and I love her with all my heart, Kathy, is she can't say, oh, you're not playing pool. Oh, really? Well, that card's already been played, just so you know, you know?
And so I will be playing pool.
You made sure of that with this one. She's supportive.
Yeah.
Yeah, Kathy's great.
No, she is.
Well, that's a funny story. You lost your marriage over that, going to Hong Kong, didn't you?
Well, you're never really gonna get great in pool till you blow out one spouse. And so I'm very committed. I don't know about you guys, but I've did it, you know?
And I think most of the rest of us have too.
So I think for our pool listeners, they may not be as familiar with the name you mentioned, because you played a great, great player in Steve Davis, but people in pool circles may not know him as well.
He's much more famous for the other game, isn't he, Allison?
Yes, he was one of the best snooker players of all time and somebody that I emulated my game on. I started watching him when I was about 12 years old, I think, playing snooker on TV, and a great, great player, one of the best of all time.
We'll hear that name again too, won't we, Mark? Because as we get into your Moscone playing days, who's representing Europe?
Well, one of the fellas is Steve Davis, another person is Allison Fisher, for those that didn't know that women played in that event at one point. But before we get there, where are we going now in your life?
Okay, so I'm married, playing the pro tour, going around and got my pool room, and life has gone good. Efra and I have become fast friends at this point, we're training together quite a bit.
Then we get divorced and now we went from zero to where we have a couple of cars, we own the house, no payments. I got $100,000 or plus in the bank and life is good. But then lose my marriage and so off I go on the road again, playing with no...
The problem is what I didn't have a plan for not the plan that we had. And so then now you kind of go into this chaotic of, boy, I can't even pick another girl. I mean, I can't even trust myself.
You might as well pick for me. I mean, that was a loser I would have bet my life on and you know, bad move. So then where did I go?
Well, I moved to Hong Kong. Yeah, Bob knew I was forlorn, heartbroken. So he said, I need you over here, son.
ASAP. And this is Bob Moore we're talking about. He's a cool character.
And I go, oh, you do? Big job, big job. Need you here.
And it pays great over there. It is a wonderful place.
So I went and then Bob and being this spontaneous combustible self, despite the fact that he was multi-time millionaire many times over after being poor, he kind of got in a tiff with the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, which is actually pretty
dangerous. It's like dealing with the mafia. And so he comes to me one day while I'm running this pool room and he says, listen, I'm leaving son, I'm leaving the ESAP. I can't tell you where I'm going.
It's undisclosed. I don't know when I'll be back. And but you stay on, everything good.
And then so I did, I stayed on and off he went, but it was, now this got chaotic and weird. And it was also right in 1997 when Hong Kong was transitioning from British rule to Chinese rule.
And I wasn't really too worried about it, but all these big corporations were acting like it was going to be a major catastrophe. And then I started thinking, man, maybe I am really dumb. I should probably be concerned.
And then, so then I got a job back here in St. Louis and I, I felt kind of like I was kind of taking advantage of Bob. He did that not because he needed me.
He just knew it would help me, which it did. And so then I moved back here to follow the Cardinals a couple of years. That was in 97.
And I thought, well, I'll just stay there. And I worked at this little pool room because it was a friend. And okay, good.
And I'll do him good. And then I'll just buy season tickets and go to the Cardinals and attend all the team functions around town. And just be really deeply involved for a couple of years.
Then I'm going to move to a different city. But the only cities in America I can move to have to have a National League baseball team. That's the key.
So Atlanta. No, really, I'm like that. I don't like the American League because of the DH rule then.
And that was just absolutely no go. So San Diego would be a good one and Miami was fine. But anyway, then now I've been stuck in St.
Louis ever since. So that two years has turned into 27 years or something like that. And have a happy life here.
And then the Pro Tour dissolved. The Camel Tour was really the greatest tour that ever lived, no matter what anyone tells you. And I'm not a cigarette smoker, but I'm going to tell you if I did smoke, it would be Camel's for sure.
Because of how good they treated us throughout this. I even thought about it. I really, I should support them.
You know, I mean, I really should. Hey, are you insane?
You thought about smoking?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And people say this today.
I go, you know, I'm thinking about taking up smoking. And they go, oh no, don't do it. Don't do it.
You know, like, oh yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Like that'd be a quality thing. But nevertheless, they were very fair to us. And it was, oh, it was a fantastic tour.
Nothing like that has ever existed before or since. And there will be people who say the IPT was Kevin Trudeau, which was good, but it only was brief. This is the Camel Tour lasted five or six years.
And it was by far the best.
I didn't know about it.
Yeah.
Yeah. And very invariably, we're gonna talk a lot about the history of the game, aren't we?
So while we learn about all these great players through the interviews we're gonna do, I think our listeners and us are gonna learn a lot more about the history of the sport. And you think about the highs and lows of pool.
You two know it more than any, but as an outsider looking in, I'm thinking, okay, well, I saw a statistic once that back in about 19, late 20s, let's say before the Great Depression, there were 800 pool halls in Chicago. There are 11 today.
That's insane.
Okay. So obviously, the game had really peaked. Every neighborhood, it seemed like, had a pool table or bar or something that you could shoot pool.
A lot of 10-footers around, a lot of big tables around. Snooker was prevalent. I remember the little town I grew up in in the late 50s and early 60s.
We had two pool halls in a town of a thousand people with a snooker table in each one and three cushion billiard tables in each one. Try to find a three cushion billiard table these days. But you saw color money come out, boom, and down a little bit.
I'm sorry, hustler, hustler first, right? A wave from coming out of the hustler and romanticizing the game and so forth. The Johnson City and all that stuff.
And then at some point the game is sort of waning. It comes back up with color money. You guys saw it with money coming into the sport, cycles back down.
You've seen these waves up and down, right? When that camel tour ended, probably the beginning of a downward trend, I would suppose, for the men professionals anyway, huh?
Big time. Yeah, we lost the ESPN to the WPBA at that point. We have bad leadership, greed and stupidity, and they still won't accept it in some cases.
Some people have seen the light now. But that really had been so good for so long, and we only dreamed it would get better. So prior to the color of money, which is really the pool boom, The Hustler came out in 1960, which is a great movie.
I've watched it many, many times. But I was only five or six years old at that point. So I really didn't get it at all.
But now in my later years, but when you have Paul Newman and Tom Cruise on screen, and it caused a pool boom in the US that had never occurred.
And so everybody, people that don't even know pool, bought tables and sticks and balls and opened up and just started counting money. The business was so good.
And at that point, throughout America, a lot of people wouldn't know this, but it was still pre-alcohol. Pool rooms were forbidden by city ordinance throughout America of no alcohol in a pool room, period. No beer, none of that.
And it would put pool as much better then because you didn't come to the pool room for any reason other than pool. And they had serious devotees to this. It was really more of a sport at that juncture.
And then when they liberalize alcohol laws, then people started coming there and then the owners started making so much more money, so much faster and so much easier. It was going great and then it got way better.
And so then they started emphasizing the alcohol sales because it generated so much more. And then if you want to do that thing down there on that table, go ahead, but be sure and get a bucket of beer was the basic thing.
And so that really changed the dynamic and now wasn't really kid friendly. And people weren't serious about it and they just drank and we really lost a lot during that transition. And that was really the back.
It went from meteoric rise to almost a catastrophe overnight. And we didn't do a good job of we should have secured like youth programs and things like that when we had the initial start of the pool boom.
But what happened was all of us were ignorant that I'd always dreamed it's just going to get better and nobody knew it. And then finally it hit and then like, okay, here we go. Now we're going, it's just going to get better.
It's not getting worse ever again. It can never go back as bad as it was.
But now here we are, the pendulum has swung all the way back to where we're actually worse off than we were pre Color of Money because we burned up a ton of sponsors that are no longer interested in us because we didn't nurture it when we should
have. And now it's very hard. And then you have people trying to run the sport that don't have passion for it. And so they're a big deal.
Here's our business plan. It doesn't exist anywhere else. We need another one of those movies.
Like seriously, we're going to pin our business hopes on Hollywood to save. No, seriously. They say that.
They reiterate that over and over and over. It's offensive to me that I just like, but they don't know better. You can't hate on them just by saying your dog has bad manners.
They don't know. Nobody knew. So that's just, you know, so I don't hate on them, but I certainly don't support the direction that they choose.
They're restricted now. This is the most preposterous thing ever. I laugh about it, but last summer, they chose to sponsor Chinese hayball, some kind of snooker table, eight ball thing.
None of the manufacturers in this world, part of the world make those tables. Nobody plays those tables. When I watched the game, the players don't know the rules, nor the referees.
It was like, this is the craziest thing. My sport is dissolved to this. I mean, that's the best we can do is, we're going to hope that China saves us.
You know what I mean? So, maybe that sounds bitter. I'm just saying what I want to still.
So, it was kind of almost comical that we were restricted to that. You know, like that we're going to do something that we've never even done with no plan or just hope.
Well, we're going to have a lot of chance across all these interviews to talk and touch on the history of Pool, how Pool's evolved. Some people perhaps have a positive view of where it's going, others not so much.
It'll be interesting to get a variety of thoughts and opinions from people at Matchroom to people at WPA to players and promoters to see where we may end up.
But suffice it to say that the loss of the Camel Tour was a big, big blow to men's professional Pool in America.
Yeah, it's kind of unceremoniously dumped a lot of the older players out of now, there's never been a tour and then they got older and then they didn't play as much.
And then when we had the tour, there would be the Camel events and then there was probably another ancillary. The Camel events were eight events a year that were super good.
But there was another eight or 10 that were equal in terms of the prize money or darn near. And so it was a really, you could play 10, 11 times a year, which we have not had.
The day we have the US Open and we have the International Open and we have the Derby City, which is more of a festival. I'm not putting it down. I'm just saying it's not like an elite, glamorous tournament.
The Derby City, there's 500 players and there's 70 pros. And last year I'm doing the broadcast and I'm looking out over the field. I'm like, well, my goodness, there's my plumber down there playing.
Now I have a good playing plumber, but it's not exactly like the Co-brothers playing. Anyway, that was just, it's more of a festival. The other two are big-time tournaments where every match could be a feature.
It's going to be like the finals.
Well, let's talk about the Moscone Cup. It's interesting because both of my co-hosts were performers and participants in the inaugural Moscone Cup. This goes back to 1994.
The venue was the Roller Ball in Romford, London, England. It was almost like a home match for you, Allison. But how did this come about?
How did this event come about? Whose brainchild was it and how did it get organized?
Well, I believe it was Barry Hearn, matchroom and he put that together, didn't he, Mark? I knew nothing about Paul at that point. I think I might have played one tournament.
He was inviting a few of the snooker players to play in it so that they get viewership from Europe and because they were familiar with Steve Davis and Jimmy White and myself somewhat. And so there were four women in it.
There was Jeanette Lee, Vivienne Virial, myself and Franziska Stark from Germany, and then all the guys from America and then some European guys. I think it was Tom Storm, wasn't there? Maybe Ralph Sucay, Oliver Ortman, great, great team.
Lee Tucker was in the first one, I believe.
Lee Tucker, yeah, so it was a great, great team.
But again, I think Steve, Jimmy and myself really didn't know much about Pool. So we were kind of thrown in there. And that was the first time that I met Mark.
And you can tell the story about getting in my car, I gave you a ride, didn't I? Back to the hotel.
Well, she did.
I know you love to tell that story.
It is true, you know, that was 94 was the only year that we had women in it. And so, after we won, the bus was going to take us all back to the hotel. And, but the poor bus driver had no idea who's a European player or American player.
And there's all these drunken British fans getting on the bus and the guy can't even get the door closed. And he assumes or presumes that everybody belongs. He doesn't know who he's picking up.
And so somehow I got shut out and they closed the door. They finally forced the door closed and off they go. And I'm out there like, I have no idea how I get 40 minutes across London to whatever hotel we're staying in.
And I was so fixated and consumed about the match. I didn't even see any of the sights of London because I'd never considered it. I was just, we got to play this match.
We're going to win this match.
And so then Allison comes out and, oh my goodness, you know, she offers me a ride, which she doesn't really like this part of the story, but I'll tell it anyway, is that, oh man, I would rather ride with her than that stupid bus anyway, you know?
And so I opened the door to her car, and it's, debris starts coming out. It's like, cassette tapes and hamburger wrappers and soda cans are twisted up, and I'm like, good god, Allie.
And she's like, oh no, no, no, don't say anything, because she's so together in every way.
Naturally, all of us American guys were smitten and adored her because she's just this little debutante with the British wit, beautiful smile, cute as a button. Her little waistcoat fits perfect. Every stroke is perfect.
And it's like, oh my god, this is pure dynamite here, you know. And so, yeah, when I tell people that, and I said this, Gerda Hofstadter and I, Gerda Gregerson, were having dinner. And I was telling Gerda about the day I got in her car.
And she goes, oh no, it's still like that. And I go, oh no, it isn't, no, it isn't. Gerda goes, well, then somebody else cleaned it, you know.
So Gerda definitely does.
It's definitely cleaner now, thanks to those stories going around.
Yeah, exactly.
But back to the Moscone Cup, Mark, how did it finish? How did it all end up?
Well, no, I think really, you know, like what was your, when they invited you to this, what did they explain to you? Cause mine was very vague. I didn't understand.
Nothing much.
Not much. I think I got the letter to turn up at the roller rink and you're playing in the Moscone Cup. I had no idea what I was going into.
It was fiercely competitive, but somehow I was selected and I was like, oh, okay, that'd be good.
But I've never heard of it. And then the people that selected said, boy, this is a big deal. It's really big.
And I'm like, well, what is really big? I mean, I play in pro events, right? Just like that.
Like, that's bigger, but they can't describe it cause there never been one. So nobody really understands what we're getting into. And then you go there and it's live TV.
Barry Hearn had so much clout that before the first 1994 Moscone Cup, he'd had tremendous success in snooker world. And he calls up Sky TV and says, I'm putting this together and we don't do anything taped. So we want this live.
And they acquiesce to his, that he would do that. And before the first Moscone Cup ball was ever struck, Barry had prospered on the thing. Now, not wildly, but it's better today.
But I'm just saying, he didn't lose on the first one. And he was that kind of a forward-thinking go-getter, can-do kind of a guy. I mean, between Steve Davis and Barry Hearn and Jimmy White, they're all heroes to me.
That's Michael Jordan and LeBron James. And just such a cool group of guys that I just idolize even today, what they did for the Cue Sports in terms of the way they carry themselves.
To be clear, at least on the golf side, I know, the Ryder Cup, which happens only every two years, and they have the President's Cup on the odd years, but those players are never compensated directly. I think that's beginning to change a little bit.
Did they pay you guys?
Yeah.
Surely did, yeah.
No, we got $3,000 first year. Yeah. Yeah.
Then they started to make it where the winner got more after that. But it was really a fascinating competition. I'd never heard of this.
Naturally, there had never been one, so you don't know what you're getting into, but it was fantastic.
And to look at, from being there from the beginning to what it's become now, it's unbelievable. It's one of the best events on the calendar for the people to watch and the viewership.
Most entertaining, most exciting, and it really proves just what ESPN had said years before. It's got to be short matches, it's got to be entertaining, it's got to be exciting.
Remember the bartender that used to spin bottles in between matches and stuff? Do you remember that in the first one where he'd be twirling, throwing bottles up in the air like that, Ali?
Oh, not so much, I don't really.
Oh, I just took in every day. It was just fascinating the way they did the set and everything. They had a lot of good views and it was just a fantastic memory.
Just to remind our listeners, on the American side, you'd remember the names Lou Butera, Dallas West, Vivian and Jeanette were mentioned as well, but there was also Paul Gurney, Bobby Hunter and Mike Gugliese.
Is that how you pronounce it?
Gugliese, yeah.
Yeah, and we're not going to go through every match, but I would encourage our listeners to go to YouTube and cue up the final match. Anybody remember who was in that final match?
Oh, would it be Mark?
Would it be Mark Wilson and machine gun Lou Butera?
Really?
I love watching him play. Boy, you talk about pace of play. We need the guys like that on the golf side of the sport.
He didn't waste any time, did he?
He was a character of the highest order. Naturally, I was paired with him in the finals, but it happened to be against the two players I really wanted to play against was Jimmy White, Steve Davis.
And so our heart was beaten and we had a chance to close it out and it was exciting. And then Lou is, he's kind of a, I guess he would embolden you because he's super confident guy that, like you said, doesn't not dawdle over the shot.
He kind of doesn't give himself a chance to second guess. He just commits. Now once in a while, he doesn't make a great decision, but he always supports it with great execution.
So he kind of gets away, it kind of works for him. It was a real oddity and then you got me slowest could be. I mean, the slowest backswing ever and trying to do it right.
I'll never forget that I got a shot to win and the cue ball lined up nice on the nine ball. Everything was good and they're like, everybody's acting like it's going to go in.
But I remember my heart was pounding so hard and I just thought to stick with the routine. But I was praying if God would just let this nine ball go in and make me miss every ball the rest of my life, I will trade you, but please, God, help me now.
And it went in and it was like, holy cow. And everybody's like, yeah, he knew he had it. I'm like, it went in.
I mean, did you see that?
You opened your eyes and there it was.
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. But what a great experience and certainly one of my career highlights for sure.
Just a fun thing and but really contributing to the fact that we won was who we're against. I mean, it's all the elites. It's Allison Fisher, Steve Davis, Ralph Sucay.
I mean, all killers, every one of them.
All the famers too.
Yeah. I mean, it was just a wonderful thing. So yeah, blessing.
For all the failures that I had and all the sub-horrible play I did to begin with, there were little crests of moments of something that came to. No, I'm just saying, it wasn't like, oh yeah, and then I just won. Wasn't like that at all.
It was respected and appreciated at any time because you'd suffered so much along the way as far as getting better. That's what people minimize.
A lot of times you always hear old guys, and the older they get, the better they played when they were younger. I mean, that's just the way it is. No, I remember the reality of it.
There was some hideous times in there, some heartbreaks and got overlooked and second-guessed and kicked around. So I appreciate any kind of little moment of positive that was good.
The shot I remember from that last match, Mark, I don't know if it was the sixth ball or the seventh ball, but you remember the shot. It was a little two-rail kick shot back into the side pocket.
Yeah, that was earlier in the rack. That was probably about like the three ball. Yeah.
Whoa.
I know.
Well, God did that. I mean, I can hit it, but I can't make it. No, it was in the middle of the table, Ali.
I kicked two rails out of the corner and hit it. I know I'm going to hit it, but it doesn't have to score it inside and then cash it in. You know, it's one thing to kick it in, you still got to cash it.
Yeah.
And then had a leave, I think, after the shot too. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm telling you, God helped me.
You know, he came through once. Normally he didn't, but that one time.
That's all you need.
That one time. Yeah. So the US side prevails.
The next year, they decide to exclude the women. What was that all about, Allie?
I have no idea. I don't know. I think that was just a decision to make it a men-only tournament.
And yeah, I have no idea what happened there.
Yeah. Here's what happened. And my beloved, I sometimes refer to her as my daughter, her and Allison.
I used to say sister, but both of them have told me privately, they prefer me to call them my daughter. So that's okay. I love them the same either way.
But nevertheless, Jeanette had said that she needed more pay. And Barry's a little bit chauvinistic and just thought, no, I'm not going to pay her more than I do Steve and Jimmy or whoever, or he's not going to be mandated to.
I don't know exactly what happened.
But anyway, and thereafter, women have never participated again, which I think looking back now, we should, I mean, I don't think, but I think it was kind of a knee-jerk reaction that she's going to demand to the great Barry Hearn this and the great
Barry Hearn says no, and then it's just been left that way. Yeah. And I'm not picking on Barry at all. I really respect all he's done.
And also I don't deny Jeanette, you know, she was an attraction and she was a great player. And so, you know, she probably did deserve more. But anyway, that was kind of where that dissolved.
Well, so I think fans would have expected looking back at the history and not knowing it that, okay, year two, the following year, you're going to come over to America and play.
But that was the case.
Well, we weren't that organized. Yeah, no, it wasn't strong enough. No, it just wasn't the whole thing.
It was just a conceptual thing. Right now we're in the proof of concept phase of that. So.
So it's still in England in 1995, and you have a chance again to participate in Moscone Cup number two.
Some of the same players, a couple of new ones.
Yeah, one of the greatest ones ever. And maybe you know them, Alex Hurricane Higgins.
Oh yeah.
At this juncture, this is 1995, he's a shell of himself from abuse of his body, but a phenomenal talent. And paired with Jimmy, who's a little bit of a rounder, much like Alex, you know, and the two of them together, there was a synergy there.
And that whole weekend, Alex resurrected himself and the crowd got behind them. And it was the most exciting thing. And we did lose, okay?
We did lose to Europe that year. But if I was ever going to lose a match with Alex and Jimmy together, that was the one to lose. It really, because he was just a shell of himself.
He kind of lost his way. He lost all his money. He was just, this was his last vestige of maybe doing something good in the sport.
And he had Jimmy to bolster him. And he performed better than he should have, you know, for his, how diminished he become. And he's kind of now impoverished.
And I'll never forget the last day, Jimmy and Alex were playing. And in the practice room, they have the TV in there and they showed this clip that Sky Sports have put together of Alex's highlights and of his career as he went through.
All of us had tears coming down. I'm not prone to cry, but it was just that compelling of a video, if you ever got to see it. And it was just about, and then at the end, we're cheering for Alex.
I mean, even the American guy like, oh man, do it, guy, you can do this. And it was, so it was if we were going to lose, that would be the way I would like to lose right there. Yeah.
Yeah, he really made snooker because it went from being played not on TV.
And when it went to TV, Alex made it interesting and drew the viewership and made snooker popular on television. So the sport has a lot to thank him for. Great character.
And back then, interestingly enough, there was just one practice table.
So both teams just stood around that one table with the TV feed. That's the way it worked. And then you go out and play your matches.
But we're all, there was a camaraderie. There was a, and I'll never forget that last day. I was standing next to Steve and I just adored him and idolized him.
And we'd become peers at that point and we're talking and chatting. And he then invited me to come to his home the next day and train in Snooker. And I was smitten at the offer.
I actually, the year before, I'd been so fixated on winning, I didn't see the sights of London. And then every time I came back, my friends would go, but you were in London last week? You didn't even go to Buckingham Palace or something like that?
I go, no, no, no, I didn't. I just played the pool. And they go, well, wow, that's weird.
So then so many people said that. I thought, well, maybe I should. So the next year I planned to stay an extra day because it's just cost an extra day.
And so I should do it. So I guess I will do it. Well, Steve goes, hey, I got to get off this nine footer.
I got a tournament in 10 days. I got to get on my 12 footer. What are you got going tomorrow, Mark?
And I go, oh, nothing at all. Why? What was you thinking?
You know what I mean? And he says, I thought you could come to my home and we'd train together. I can't even sleep.
I'm so excited. You know what I mean? Like, oh my God, Steve Davis, any kid in England will trade their right arm, Mike.
Oh yeah. This is a big deal. And I was just adored.
But in Steve's way, that when I look back, he knows I'm not going to do any good and I will rack the balls all afternoon and put the eight ball back or the seven ball back up on the black spot and go on and keep counting the points, which I did.
But it was amazing. Just what an opportunity. And then I'll never forget it.
The way he warmed up, put the cue ball on the spot and just practice going straight up and down the table. And I thought that was a remedial for me, but he's making too many in the air and he did it.
And then he goes, okay, now you can have 10 minutes to warm up by yourself. Well, now it was a shame to miss the pocket by as much as I'm going to. So I did what he did, but I wasn't planning on it.
I was just ashamed to do what I was planning on doing. So I tried to act like, oh no, that's what I do too.
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