At the height of his fame, Steve Davis had a reputation of being a boring snooker robot, but this is far from the truth of his character, as Stephen Hendry attests to.
Davis was dominant force on the table in the 1980s, winning six world titles during the sport’s greatest boom.
He was handed the nickname ‘Interesting’ because he appeared to be the opposite, but over time his sense of humour has come to the fore.
As has the fact that he has plenty of interests away from the baize, now as busy with his band The Utopia Strong and doing DJ sets as he is working on snooker events.
Hendry was the man who took over as the dominant force in snooker when he became the youngest world champion in history in 1990 and went on to win seven titles at the Crucible.
Davis was still a force in the 90s and, as fierce competitions, the two greats were not close at all while they were still playing at the top of the game.
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However, as Davis slipped away from competing for titles and Hendry followed, the barriers fell away and the Scot remembers witnessing a whole new, and genuinely interesting, side of the Nugget.
Hendry wrote in his CueTipsPlus newsletter: ‘Over the years, we became closer. As we started to go down in our careers we both became friendlier with other people.
‘We started talking more and we’d sometimes spend time slagging off the other players. It sounds evil, but it was all done with a dry sense of humour, which is what Steve is known for.
‘We once played a tournament in Thailand. We both lost and went out for a night in Bangkok. We had dinner and then went to a bar.
‘I went up to order some drinks, turned around and there was Steve in the middle of the dancefloor, dancing on his own. I just burst out laughing, it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I wasn’t expecting it!
‘He’s got a brilliant sense of humour and is great company. We’re not competing with each other any more, so we can just be friends.’
The two legendary cuemen get on brilliantly now, but Davis has admitted in the past that he found it very hard to deal with Hendry’s emergence as the best in the world.
Being knocked off his perch left the Nugget resenting the Scot personally, as he revealed in a Eurosport interview back in 2015.
‘One minute I had all the sweets locked up in my own little sweet jar, the next minute they were spilled on the floor and Stephen had them all,’ said Davis.
‘For most of the 90’s I didn’t like him at all, hated him, hated the thought that he was better than me, I didn’t even want to acknowledge he existed. But that is your own personal problems, dealing with something like that.
‘Losing to Dennis Taylor (in the 1985 World Championship final) was a shock and it was awful, but I could get over it because I knew that I was better than him.
‘Hendry played a stronger, more aggressive game that I had not grown up with and I didn’t know how to teach myself new tricks. My problem was “how do I cope with this new player playing this new aggressive game when all of my career I was able to wait for people to make mistakes?”‘
Davis had a theory that Hendry accepted new challengers better than he did, but when he put that to his old rival, it was not necessarily the case.
‘When you came on the scene I hated it. Of course you’ve got to hate it,’ Davis said to Hendry on his CueTips channel. ‘But I always thought that you took the fact that Ronnie O’Sullivan was maybe a natural successor, far better than I took the fact that you came on the scene. It seemed like you went “yeah, he’s a great, great player.”
‘I thought that if I’d done that I’d have probably not beaten myself up as much.’
Hendry explained: ‘That’s what I was projecting outwardly. I enjoyed it at the beginning, near the end when I didn’t feel I had the game to compete I didn’t enjoy it.
‘Ronnie beat me in the semi-final of the Worlds 17-6 [in 2008] and I just didn’t feel I had the game to compete.
‘That was horrible at the end, I hated that.’