Product Description

Aged 16, White was the youngest snooker player to win the English Amateur Championship. By 1984 he was a professional success, and married but not settled. He has survived a life of gambling, women, and marathon binges with showbiz friends, to tell in candid detail the story of his own life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59049 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 298 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jimmy White has been beaten six times in the final of the snooker world championship and on at least two of those occasions it was easier for him to have won than lost. But at the death White always managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. It is now likely he will be remembered only as the people's champion but he isn't complaining. White has made a fortune and then lost a good chunk of it, mostly through gambling. He's been in trouble with the law, had his share of tabloid exposes and pushed his marriage to the edge of collapse. But if one thing comes out of this sparky autobiography it is that White is a chancer and he will always keep going.

Behind the White Ball starts with an illiterate teenager getting both a street education and an income hustling in a south London snooker hall and ends with an older, a bit wiser, and literate man still making a living from his cue. But in between there is all the mayhem you could ask for; escaping irate locals after taking the money off the customers in a Liverpool snooker hall; fetching up a bit too often for his wife's peace of mind at Ronnie Wood's place--"although when I hang out with The Stones I end up making the tea"--and, bizarrely, attending Chelsea matches with Peter Cook. Whirlwind stuff indeed. --Nick Wroe

From the Publisher
One of snooker's most poluar heroes. Story of a life lived on the edge - of triumph and despair, illness, bankruptcy and success.

About the Author
From those early 'amateur' years when he learned to hustle under the tutelage of someone known as Dodgy Bob, Jimmy White has earned a reputation on the professional snooker circuit as 'The Whirlwind'. One of snooker's most popular heroes, he is the 'People's Champion'.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic and Emotional!
Hello, One year ago , in January 1999 , I spent a year in England and discovered snooker. One day I went to a library called Waterstone's and found a book called "Behind the White Ball" written by a certain Jimmy White who became one of my ten favourite players. So when I began to read his book , I was so impressed by his fantastic and emotional own autobiography that I couldn't stop reading it. He had the courage to write his own life from his childhood spent in snooker halls to his unfortunate world championship finals but also to tell his life problems and his good and bad adventure with his friends using his own word.You may not believe me but some extract made me cry so it was sad and emotional. So Congratulations Jimmy ! (My dream is to see you World Champion for the first time.Finally keep playing an absolutely fantastic snooker. Love , Laurence.

Spot on for the White
I sometimes think this book should have been called "The Jimmy & Alex Show". The capers of Jimmy White and Alex Higgins will have you whizzing along at breakneck speed. Thoroughly interesting starting with Jimmy hanging out in the local snooker hall when he should have been in school, breaking his leg and then playing snooker with the walking stick, playing the amateur circuit and finally to his professional status. The stories are legendary (especially where Alex Higgins is involved) and, at times, you wonder is this book a dream with some of the things Jimmy White got up to.

The book is open and doesn't dodge the issues between Jimmy and Maureen. The reader gets to see, albeit through a haze of drink at times, Jimmy's World of snoooker and all the associated characters. Towards the end of the book we get an interesting insight into why Jimmy White is one of the best snooker players never to have won the World Championship.

It is one of those books which is hard to put down as you want to find out what mischief Jimmy White gets into next. The saga where a car load of them try to get through Lucan, Dublin and stopped by a garda is something out of a comedy show, especially when you read the outcome. I think the lack of dates tends to leave you being in one period of his life, then we have another story from another period and we wind up completely somewhere else but, in a way, it keeps it interesting - just like Jimmy White's life.

You'll get drunk just reading it...
For the armchair sporting public, Jimmy White remains an icon of the days when snooker was fun, when players knocked back the vodkas instead of poncy mineral water, and when they hit the front pages as often as the back ones. White contributed (much) more than his fair share of the debauchery and tells us about some of it in this book.

Behind the White Ball mirrors Jimmy’s life in form as well as content. It tells like a good round of stories in the pub. The chapters veer unsteadily from drinking binges in London, the ensuing hangover (in Dublin), taking in Canada, Tasmania, Hong Kong, India and anywhere else where the balls are set up and the bar is open. Jimmy was there, getting up to God knows what. The book has a habit of avoiding dates and times. They don’t matter. Jimmy probably doesn’t remember anyway. Whatever happened was just one more comedy of errors in his life. Who cares what year it was?

He tells his tale exactly as you’d expect, free of both arrogance and false modesty, a thoroughly likeable character whose treatment of his wife is the only black mark. Unlike Alex Higgins and other Professional Lads, he never seems like someone you’d cross the street to avoid. Even when, perhaps inevitably given his lifestyle, Jimmy hits the rocks with personal difficulties and serious illness, everything is told with humour (he’s still Jimmy after all) but a contrasting poignancy as well, particularly when recounting his late brother’s unconventional send-off.

The misses? Well, a blurb on the back regards the book as ‘refreshingly free of snooker’. It’s true that BTWB sensibly avoids the endless rehashing of old matches, Player A won a frame, Player B scored a 75 to draw level etc. But perhaps Jimmy could have reminisced a little more about his great matches. How did he really feel about the missed black in 1994? What did he do afterwards, who did he speak to? We learn very little of the pin-drop moments when the green baize enthralled the nation, and of which he was such a big part. His matches with Higgins, Hendry, and Thorburn. He remarks early on of how enchanting he found the ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ of a snooker hall. Could he not have elaborated as he progressed from dingy clubs to Wembley and the Crucible?

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t thoroughly enjoy BTWB. You can read it in a couple of hours but you’ll come back to it (or certain chapters) far more often. And Jimmy WILL win the world title. Just you wait.