A photo of snooker player Ronnie O'Sullivan taken from just behind the ball he's about to pot

#MentalHealth

A fly on the wall documentary chronicling the run up to Ronnie trying to win his seventh World Title in 2022. But the documentary is not overly interested in his sporting achievements, instead it’s far more focused on Ronnie’s often public battles with his mental health. To which Ronnie quips:

all of a sudden it’s cool…I was twenty years ahead of the game, mate.

Ronnie is extraordinarily open and engaging about his problems and methods of coping with them. And the fact that he’s such an engaging and frank personality makes this film endlessly fascinating.

And yet for all that is open and honest about what is talked about, what’s not said left me with more questions than answers. Whilst some of Ronnie’s celebrity friends are free to talk about everything he’s been through, and his father’s prison sentence is discussed with great sensitivity, no mention is made of his past partners. And I didn’t know he had kids until they turned up in footage at the end of the film. His sister appears in family photos but is never even mentioned.

Ronnie talks at great length about his relationship between snooker and his mental health, but there are contradictions that never get questioned. He claims he would rather play well and lose than play badly and win. And yet he seems to hate losing and the documentary never digs in to that dichotomy.

None of this is a criticism, it’s admiral that there are certain areas of his life that he wants to keep private. And just letting him get everything off his chest, unguarded without needing to be defensive is incredibly revealing.

But it does mean that the closer I got to understanding what drives Ronnie O’Sullivan on, the further away I got from understanding him as a complete person. The more answers I got about how he copes with the pressures of his life, the more questions I had about why he did so.

Given Ronnie’s extraordinary life, career, talent and personality, it felt perfectly apt. One of the best sporting documentaries I’ve seen.

For further reading, I’d also recommend this fantastic article at Little White Lies. Mental health and masculinity at the movies There’s a few ‘spoilers’ (as much as you can spoil a documentary) but if a far deeper discussion of the subject matter than I can manage.