On our last evening in Townsville – I was having second thoughts about the editing and wondering if my full stops oughtn’t to have been commas after all, which meant that it was definitely getting time to leave – I ran into the greatest living Australian snooker player, Eddie Charlton, in the hotel lift. He was in town for a few days, playing exhibition matches and taking on the local hotshots, as part of a five-month tour, promoted by Fosters, of Queensland and the Northern Territory. As the hotel was only four storeys high and the lift was pretty nippy I didn’t stand on ceremony. ‘What’s this about Joe Johnson?’ I blurted out.

I’d only recently read in the papers that Steve Davis had been beaten by a rank outsider in the final of the World Championships at Sheffield. Eddie of course had played in them himself. So I wanted to hear, as it were from the horse’s mouth, all about another faltering of Steve Davis’s nerve.

‘Joe? Didn’t he play well?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I never saw it.’

‘Gee, he played well. He played very well.’ He somehow managed to make this sound heartbreaking, but I knew, from having listened to him on television, that this was just his manner of delivery, and that he could sound sunk in inconsolable sorrow even when he was in the very best of spirits. And he looked in good shape today – tanned and healthy in a sports shirt and business shorts. I confess that it was strange, though, not seeing him in a waistcoat.

I didn’t really care about how well Joe Johnson had played. If Eddie wasn’t going to tell me that Steve Davis had wept and broken his cue and head-butted the referee, then the final wasn’t interesting to me. I might as well hear about earlier rounds. So I said, ‘So who knocked you out this time, then?’

The question didn’t come out the way I intended it. It seemed to imply that someone was always knocking him out. But he took it well. ‘Kirk Stevens,’ he said. ‘In the quarter finals. 13–12. I was leading 12–10. I should have had him. I missed a green in the 23rd, just like the last time we played. And that let him in. You don’t have to give Kirk more than one opening. In the final frame I had another chance, but . . .’