Tubberlad wrote:How did you become a snooker fan to begin with? And which players contributed most to maintaining your interest to the point where it became your passion? Also, have you ever grown tired of the game at any stage or fallen out of love with it?
Watching Pot Black together as a family, grandparents, parents and myself in the '70's. And watching World Championships in particular with my Pa (grandfather), who I was closest to as he was effectively a third parent to me.
Funnily enough, trying snooker at church youth club and finding I was VERY useless (never potted more than two balls in succession, never potted a black! High break? that'd be SIX
) got me more rather than less interested - just knowing how difficult it was, I guess.
Maintaining and gaining interest in the game? Try not to all laugh, but Steve Davis contributed to that more than anyone, friends saw him as a bit boring but I saw it as watching a master craftsman at work.
Since the 90's really it hasn't been so much that I've lost interest in snooker, but a lot else competing for my time (family, community involvement), and also the draw of other sports I follow (motor sport, the college version of American Football, Cycling, Athletics, non-league football too in the past 3 or 4 years). However, a couple of things have happened in the past year or so to re-kindle an interest - my son starting to get interested in watching games (though not as much as he loves NASCAR racing ... though he hates Formula 1!), and I've found the whole process of re-organisation as interesting as the matches (!) and (I think because of this) the play in the matches seems a whole lot sharper, whereas I'd felt everything had been getting very lacklustre. Plus what's on the Internet helps - some great blogs - 'though I'm surprised in retrospect that I've only very recently found this site.
Additionally, frustration in recent years with cycling and athletics (drugs issues, and with athletics, runners names instead of numbers which is great for television, but we were very disappointed when we went to the Crystal Palace (which I used to do regularly from childhood to early 20's) ... and we couldn't work out who was who in the races as no numbers - being next to a great pole vault competition only half made up for that .... so I'm watching much less of (and hardly any time reading about) those sports, giving more time for snooker, non-league football and NASCAR (always lots of time devoted to college football, that hasn't fallen off since seeing a Georgia Tech game on honeymoon 20 years ago).
All in all, looking forward to the coming season, must start remembering to set the video more often for late games, which tend to be a problem given the need to get up early (and I just can't burn the candle at both ends anymore
)