All cued up for a Chinese snooker future

From an early age, try as I might, I was never much good at cue sports.

Whether it was down the pub with my dad, at a pool hall with my university friends or on a night out later on, I always struggled to get those multicolored balls to go where they're meant to.

But my ineptitude didn't stop me, every time the start of summer rolled around, from tuning in to the annual World Snooker Championship on the BBC.

Maybe it was the fact that it was held in Sheffield, a dozen or so miles down the road from where I lived. Or maybe it was the hypnotic nature of those brightly colored billiard balls rolling around the glorious green baize.

To this day, I can't be sure. All I know is that I was enthralled. I would happily spend hours watching the likes of Stephen Hendry, John Higgins and Ronnie O'Sullivan moving wordlessly around the table. The long silences only occasionally interspersed with a gasp of appreciation from the audience or the tense excitement that comes when a player is going for a maximum break.

This was around the turn of the century and the sport was dominated, as it still is, by players from the Home Nations - the term we Brits rather pompously use to refer collectively to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

It always seemed slightly absurd to me that. How can it be that snooker's most prestigious competition is held each year in a somewhat rundown, postindustrial town, with all the prime contenders coming from a few hundred miles away, at most?

It's akin to how the Americans insist on calling Major League Baseball's annual championship The World Series, despite having only one team playing in it that hails from outside the United States.

But this "parochial" snooker mindset is set to change soon, according to Barry Hearn, head of the commercial arm of the sport's world governing body.

In an interview with the BBC, Hearn identified China's Ding Junhui "as one of the fundamental reasons why snooker has got so big".

The 30-year-old has "inspired hundreds of thousands of Chinese" and "brought the game into the living rooms of the entire population", Hearn said.

Last year, Ding was the first Asian player to feature in the finals of the World Snooker Championship, and he only narrowly missed out on taking another shot at the top this time following a hard-fought encounter with defending champion Mark Selby.

Former world No 1 O'Sullivan reckons that within the next decade, "you'll probably see the majority of the winners being Chinese" and while the time scale may be up for debate, the outcome surely isn't - especially seeing as roughly the same number of people play cue sports in China every week as there are people in the UK.

Sheffield has a deal to host the world championship until 2027, but as more and more young players graduate from the World Snooker Academy that opened in Beijing four years ago and follow in Ding's footsteps, it's easy to see where the future of the sport lies.

Contact the writer at gregory@chinadaily.com.cn