Skip to main content

How snooker star Willie Thorne found the bottom of life's deepest pocket but climbed out again

SNOOKER BOOKS

Willie Thorne: Taking A Punt On My Life


Published by Vision Sports Publishing

What’s it about?


At the peak of his fame, former snooker star Willie Thorne led a life that presented him pretty much as a walking caricature. A leading player during snooker’s boom years in the 1980s, he did everything that the media wanted from the central characters of their new back page soap opera.

He worked hard at the table and partied hard away from it; he made good money from his skill with a cue and if it didn’t last him long there was plenty more where it had come from as sponsors and television executives queued up for a piece of the action. He revelled in his celebrity, indulged his hangers-on and when there was female attention to be enjoyed he was not inclined to resist.


And he gambled. A lot. Not only on snooker matches -- mostly his own, and always on himself to win -- but on card games and horse races and anything else that took his fancy. But this was not to conform to an image, even though it did fit nicely with the tabloid stereotype. This was an addiction, and one that would only deepen.

In Taking A Punt on My Life, Thorne tells the full, sorry story of this false existence, one which concealed the flaws and weaknesses that he came to realise had been there all along, and that explained not only his gambling but his failure to make the most of his talent, why so often the major prizes would slip through his grasp.

The gambling led to a bankruptcy from which he recovered but then to depression and -- 10 years ago next month -- a suicide attempt when the debts stacked up again.

Taking a Punt on My Life is a candid and harrowing tale but Thorne leads the reader on a journey into his soul. Interestingly, it is one he made without any counsellor showing him the way yet he understands what he learned about himself no less clearly for that. It is an absorbing, insightful read and, thankfully, one with a happy ending.

Who is the author?


Although the story is Willie Thorne’s and his name appears on the cover, Taking a Punt on My Life was written with the help of freelance writer Kevin Brennan, who has written about sport for more than 30 years. He has collaborated previously on books with boxing manager and promoter Frank Moloney and with former Charlton and West Ham manager Alan Curbishley, as well as Coronation Street actor William Roache.

Buy Willie Thorne: Taking A Punt On My Life direct from Amazon


Browse more sports books at The Sports Bookshelf Shop


Five more snooker biographies you might like to try:


Ronnie: The Autobiography of Ronnie O'Sullivan
Let Me Tell You About Alex, by John Virgo
Frame of Mind, by Graeme Dott
The Hurricane: The Turbulent Life & Times of Alex Higgins, by Bill Borrows
Who Was Hurricane Higgins? by Tony Francis


Follow the links for more details


Home
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Leave a comment or submit your own sports book review

Popular posts from this blog

2018 Cross Sports Book of the Year Awards: all the winners are named

Brave Paralympian Martine Wright scoops Autobiography prize Add caption The inspiring story of the GB Paralympic athlete Martine Wright has been named Sports Autobiography of the Year at the 16th Sports Book Awards and will be a strong contender for overall Sports Book of the Year for 2018, which will be decided by a public vote. Written in collaboration with journalist Sue Mott, Unbroken , published by Simon & Schuster, tells the remarkable story of Martine’s incredible fight back from the horrors of the July 7 atrocities in London in 2005, when she was sharing a carriage on a tube train on the Circle Line with a suicide bomber, who detonated his device just outside Aldgate station. Seven passengers around her were killed among 52 who lost their lives that day but she survived, albeit at the cost of both her legs. Martine, who took up wheelchair tennis and sitting volleyball as part of her rehabilitation, represented Great Britain in the latter at the 2012 Paralympics...
19 comments
Read more

Secrets of Mickelson the Master

No instruction manual could teach a golfer to play the extraordinary trees-to-green shot that Phil Mickelson produced at the 13th on the way to winning his third US Masters in Augusta. There is much a player can learn, nonetheless, from the winner of the 2010 green jacket and his phenomenal skills with wedge and putter in Mickelson's Secrets of the Short Game , which can now expect a spike in sales. Mickelson believes that even a golfer of only average ability can become a highly effective short-game player by paying proper attention to mechanics and set-up and combining that scientific approach with a willingness to be imaginative. Published last autumn, the 224-page manual passes on some of the wisdom Mickelson has acquired over 35 years, since his first steps in the game as a small boy. By holding off Britain's Lee Westwood, Mickelson joined the company of Nick Faldo, Sam Snead and Gary Player in having won three Masters titles.  But for the presence of four-times win...
Post a Comment
Read more

No Nonsense: Joey Barton's autobiography on the William Hill Sports Book of the Year longlist after just one day in the shops

Joey Barton Controversial footballer Joey Barton's autobiography No Nonsense has been included on the longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year even though it was published only yesterday. Written in collaboration with Michael Calvin, the award-winning author and sports journalist, Barton's book promises to deliver a candid account of a life never far from the headlines on and off the field. Calvin is the third writer to work with the player, who began the project in 2014 with Times journalist Matthew Syed and made one attempt to write it himself, which he did not sustain beyond nine chapters. There is much detail, some of it quite harrowing, about his upbringing in hard-edged working class Liverpool, where many of his associates and even family members were involved in crime at one level or another.  His brother, Michael, and his cousin, Paul Taylor, are serving jail sentences for the murder of an innocent black teenager. The book has no short...
18 comments
Read more