The seven-time world champion on his duels with Davis, Higgins, White and O’Sullivan and how his famed mental strength disintegrated leaving him no choice but to quit
“It was a mixture of embarrassment, anger, frustration, sadness, everything,” Stephen Hendry says as he remembers how his dominance of snooker unravelled into, in his mind, a shambling wreck of a game. When the end came, in the quarter-finals of the 2012 world championships, Hendry was so besieged by psychological demons “there was nothing positive left.”
Hendry’s favourite sportsmen are Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher, Nick Faldo and AP McCoy and he was once as imperious as they had been. He holds the record for the most world titles, with all seven being won in the 1990s, and he was world No 1 for eight successive seasons. But the great champions feel it most when vulnerability takes over.
Written by Donald McRae
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/oct/15/stephen-hendry-yips-snooker-interview under the title “Stephen Hendry: ‘I hate the word yips, it trivialises it. It was much more than that’ | Donald McRae”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
