Who's Snooker's Greatest Player of All Time?

Joe Davis.

Disagree? Me too and now we've reached the point where we agree that number of World Titles is not what makes a player better than another. Well, we'll need to look back on the history of the sport a bit to reach a conclusion...

Joseph Davis OBE (1901-1978) was a very decent billiards player, who fell in love with the game of Snooker before everybody. That was special, more than potting balls, it had complicated rules and involved a lot of strategy.
Joe Davis himself organised the first World Snooker Championship back in 1927. Not many people even knew the rules at all, but Joe Davis dragged 9 of his friends to enter the tournament with half of the entry fee to be split between winner and runner-up. As expected, Davis won the championship and became Snooker's first ever World Champion.
As time went on he attracted more people to come and watch the game, but the World Championship was only in fact the World Championship because Joe called it this way, and in fact what attracted people was the game itself, not the quality of it's players.
The event kept being held year after year, and Joe Davis kept unbeaten. In fact he was someone who knew the game very well and could pot a few more balls than the others, and that's why the finals used to last so long (in 1946 Davis had to win 78 frames in the Final to be crowned). Nobody could compete with him, his opponents were nothing more than mere spectators.
Davis won 15 World Championship's in 20 years, never lost one (it wasn't played for 5 years because of World War II), and retired after winning his 15th in 1946 remaining to this day the only player never beaten in the history of the World Snooker Championship.
And when he left, who took his crown? His brother Fred - twelve years younger - who won 8 World Titles. If you search some old archives you'll find that Joe was considered better than Fred Davis, what means the bar wasn't raised there.
Snooker remained a popular sport in the UK, but it was a very elite's sport because you couldn't earn a lot of money, you couldn't make a living out of Snooker.
In the late 60's Snooker was the sport chosen by the BBC to promote coloured TV for obvious reasons. That made Snooker very popular and in the 70's everybody was hitting a few balls on the table for fun, and with more people playing more talents were discovered and now we've reached the name of Alex Higgins. He was very talented and won the World Championship at his first attempt in 1972, and his way to play got people so impressed that straight away he was called the greatest.
But there was something missing, we had Higgins - and Ray Reardon who won 6 World Titles in the 70's - but the bar hadn't been raised yet, the margin between the amateurs and the bests of the World was still very short; Well now we reach the point where we've got to talk about evolution, that's a natural and unstoppable process for humans and every other animal. Snooker was big, but it wasn't seen as a very professional sport, it was meant to be some fun and people used to drink and smoke while playing - that includes the professionals. That's when Terry Griffiths and Steve Davis (no relation to Joe & Fred Davis) appeared, in the late 70's - early 80's. They were great professionals, dedicated to put the hours in practice, being sober when playing, and studying which was the best way to play the game in terms of body's position, strategy, etc. They basically presented safety play to Snooker and showed people that it was possible to win frames in one visit, it was possible to make Century Breaks become a regular thing that can be made multiple times every tournament.
They were true sportsmen, everybody that came after them knew they had to be as much dedicated as them otherwise they'd have no chance, and the players that came before them knew they had to raise their level, in fact you can count in the fingers of one hand the amount of players from the 70's that raised their own game and competed in the 80's. Griffiths won the World Championship at his first attempt in 1979, and in fact it didn't came as such a big surprise, because everybody knew that boy was unstoppable, players from that time didn't knew to do what Griffiths did. Davis won 6 World Titles of his own.

Everybody knows the history of the game after that and that other great players appeared, but I had to explain how Steve Davis and Terry Griffiths raised the bar of Snooker. They could easily beat players from the 70's, Steve Davis could easily win 50 out of 50 frames against a peaking Joe Davis for example. Don't get me wrong, Joe was great for his time, but Steve and Terry came with something new, and that was massively important to make Snooker the UK's most beloved sport.
But if Davis and Griffiths were much better than the players they grew up watching, why didn't they win 15 World Titles like Joe Davis? Well, they were too good to have won 15 World Titles, literally. They were so good that they inspired future players, they set a new model for Snooker, all of a sudden everybody knew at what position you had to be during the shot and how you had to deliver the cue. Terry and Steve were so good that it made the other players just as good, you couldn't argue and say there was a flaw in Steve's or Terry's technic because they virtually invented technic in Snooker.
In fact Joe Davis made a 147 but when the pockets were far too large, even though it impressed the spectators because there wasn't anybody who could challenge it. But the first official maximum was made by Steve Davis in 1982, that was simply the first time somebody reached perfection in Snooker.
After Steve Davis we had Stephen Hendry winning the World Championship 7 times and Ronnie O`Sullivan making 13 Maximum Breaks, even refusing making one for fun, something you couldn't even have thought about in the 80's. Does it make them better than Steve Davis? No. Neither Stephen Hendry nor Ronnie O`Sullivan raised the bar of Snooker, making something more regularly or faster than somebody doesn't make you a better player. Hendry and Ronnie might be in fact better than Steve but there's nothing they have done that Steve Davis wouldn't have done at his peak, Hendry and O`Sullivan in fact play the game to a level that was "unlocked" by Griffiths and Davis, and the next level will only be unlocked when a player come around and do something Steve, Hendry, O`Sullivan or anyone else wouldn't do, and this one probably won't win more than 7 or 6 World Titles because he'll raise the bar of the rest of the tour, but even though people will acknowledge he's the greatest like people did when Steve Davis came around. And it might take one year, one hundred years or maybe even never happen again, the only sure we have is that so far, Steve Davis is the biggest Snooker player of all time. But being the biggest doesn't mean you're the best, the discussion on who's the greatest player of all time is endless, you've got arguments to say it was Terry, Steve, Hendry, O`Sullivan, Mark Williams, John Higgins, etc... it's a matter of opinion really.

It's not just Snooker that have this process, actually we're seeing athleticism's bar being raised by Usain Bolt, and tennis' bar raised by Djokovic, someone that haven't beaten many records and yet we know he's the greatest of all time, we know the model of a professional tennis player have changed after his appearance.

Conclusion is that we must give the value deserved by nowaday's players and recognize the past players. Joe Davis, Fred Davis, John Pulman and Ray Reardon were greats of their times but naturally better players appeared, anyway probably if they were born nowadays they would compete at the top because they'd know more about the game's technic, they just weren't "genius" enough to discover it by their own.

Steve Davis in fact has even a bigger impact over Snooker, if nowadays we have thinner cloths and table heaters it's because Steve proved that the game can be played to a level that even those minimum details are important. Almost everything changed after him, even the way cues are made. I mean, Davis' excellence even made it easier for further players to play, he did the impossible with the technology of his time and he would get more credits for that, should we've seen a maximum break if it wasn't for his first in 1982 proving it was possible?
It doesn't end by there, if Bingham won the World Championship and Ronnie O`Sullivan and John Higgins are still right there amongst the elite of the game it's thanks to Steve Davis as well. He was pioneer in the thought that a Snooker player would care about his health as well and keep fit to have a longer and successful career, he proved it by winning the Masters in 1997 (8 years after winning his 6th and last World Title), being Runner-Up in the 2005 UK Championship and Quarter-Finalist in the 2010 World Championship.


Well, I knew a bit of Snooker but I haven't been following the game for several years, but recently at Ronnie O`Sullivan Brasil's Facebook Page I made a feature called "The 15 Most Remarkable Moments of All Time in Snooker", and I studied an awful lot about the game before writing that otherwise it wouldn't be fair to put in the list moments that I remember instead from moments that happened in the 80's and 90's, and also before writing this post I studied even more about the history of the game, and I've loved everything, Snooker have such a rich history and I am so delighted to write about it! Thanks for reading, I hope you all have enjoyed ;-)