Why Ronnie O'Sullivan will end career as snooker's final People's Champion after Alex Higgins and Jimmy White, amid Judd Trump 'flag-bearer' calls
By Desmond Kane
Published 19/02/2026 at 14:34 GMT
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Alex Higgins, Jimmy White and Ronnie O'Sullivan are the three most popular players in the modern history of professional snooker. Higgins was the first player to be crowned 'The People's Champion' after winning his second world title in 1982 amid the televised boom period in the UK, with White and O'Sullivan also carrying the crown, but there is unlikely to be a fourth iconic flag-bearer.
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There will be an array of blossoming snooker champions from the People's Republic of China in future years, but the concept of a new 'People's Champion' in the sport looks likely to be consigned to a bygone era.
Certainly, the fandom and widespread popularity which greeted, and to some extent stalked, the life and times of Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, Jimmy 'Whirlwind' White and 'Rocket' Ronnie O'Sullivan will never be replicated in a brave new world beyond the UK.
Higgins, White and O'Sullivan are the three most popular players to carry the considerable mantle of 'People's Champion' in snooker over the past five decades, but there is unlikely to be another figure to inherit such a lofty moniker.
That is not a slight on the modern generation of players, just a sign of the times in an increasingly fragmented wider market of exploding content and time constraints which makes it nigh-on impossible for the public to become fully engaged with such potting personas.
And the fascinating and flawed human traits which made them.
Despite the heartfelt belief of John Higgins that Judd Trump should be considered the fresh flag-bearer for the sport, the undisputed world No. 1 will never command as much interest because the ingredients to achieve such adoration cannot be manufactured upon demand.
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"I’ll be brutally honest. I hear a lot of people saying this, and I don’t know what Judd Trump has got to do in the game to actually be classed as the next flag-bearer," Higgins told reporters at the Players Championship.
"Because he’s won just as much as anybody in the game."
He could try being born in another period of time when snooker players were treated as sporting gods in the UK, but even then his habit for gobbling up trophies would not have commanded universal respect.
Like Trump, Steve Davis was a winning machine in the 1980s, but was curiously never adored as much as his old foes Higgins or White. Or even the emerging obstacle of O'Sullivan a decade later.
The majority of a record TV audience of 18.5 million rejoiced in glee when Higgins' fellow Northern Irishman Dennis Taylor famously recovered from 8-0 down to defeat Davis 18-17 in an elongated battle of nerves in the 1985 world final.
What commanded attention back in the day with only three, then four, mainstream TV channels in the UK, is probably impossible today amid rising standards in professionalism.
Higgins, White and latterly O'Sullivan were genuine crowd-pleasers who changed the face of snooker since the Crucible first housed the World Championship in 1977, bringing a greater popularity to the green baize beyond working-class blokes potting balls in darkened halls set against the sweat of heavy industry.
But it was their life stories, their relatable behaviour - good, bad and ugly - to the fan in the street and their penchant for the unpredictable, which ensured legendary status in living rooms up and down the land.
When Higgins lifted his second world title in 1982, a decade after his first, the Northern Irishman memorably cradled baby daughter Lauren, wife Lynn and the trophy as the tears flowed.
An 18-15 win over Ray Reardon saw him proclaimed 'The People's Champion', with as much fanfare as Muhammad Ali in boxing, but uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Higgins was emotional and mixed up; a character whose brilliance on the table was outdone by the torrents that raged in his private life where gambling, drugs, booze and random explosions of violent behaviour saw him become a figure of fascination the public could relate to.
He was the lead news story on the BBC after headbutting an official for refusing a drugs test at the 1986 UK Championship, but was allowed to continue in the tournament despite police being called.
"If Higgins was playing you the next day, he'd try and ring your hotel room at two or three in the morning," White told me.
"He would try to send someone to you with sandwiches at two or three in the morning. He was a bit of a boy for that. We used to give out false room numbers, so he never got to me."
During an interview alongside close friend White at the World Doubles on ITV in 1986, Higgins once stood up and began singing to his daughter, who was appearing in a theatrical production at school.
It prompted presenter Dickie Davies to comment: "He's amazing, isn't he? One week its hue and cry, the next its song and dance. You never can tell with Alex, can you?"
Like Higgins, White loved socialising as much as snooker in his pomp with the stories, too many to mention here, forming part of a folklore that continues to carry an edge of disbelief in modern times.
The hoary old snooker tales of largesse remain majestic tabloid fodder - he apparently once visited HM Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight to give notorious gangster Ronnie Kray tips on how to improve his snooker game - and part of a classic White tome as much as potting blacks.
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The free-wheeling, much-loved Whirlwind of old London town, a figure who lost half a dozen world finals in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways between 1984 and 1994, enhanced his standing with the British public, who traditionally love a loser.
O'Sullivan was loved because he was never quite content with winning, preferring performance points for the style in which he delivered his ultimate aims, his maddening sense of successful frustration becoming part of his enduring charm.
His 10-6 win over Hendry in the 1993 UK Championship at the age of 17, the youngest ranking winner in history, saw him earn overnight adulation set against the background of his father being imprisoned for murder a year earlier.
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Like Higgins, with O'Sullivan you are never quite sure what you are going to get. Which has only added to his allure his rise to becoming the greatest player in history.
O'Sullivan has become the sport's most successful player, winning seven world titles, eight UK Championships and eight Masters amid an overall haul of 80 major tournament wins, all the while making a record 1,313 centuries and 17 maximums since turning professional in 1993.
He recently watched a TV production about infamous Hollywood hell-raiser Charlie Sheen, which centred around his alcohol addiction and saw familiar similarities between himself and the Wall Street actor.
"I just watched the Charlie Sheen documentary, and he went for about 30 years," said O'Sullivan. "And I looked at him and I went, well, I got out early. I got out after three years. So I had a result.
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"Charlie's dream went for like 30 years. And I was with him, and I was thinking, 'Wow, man, he's lucky to be alive'. And there are times when you feel like that could have been me.
"Binges, long binges. Days. Days, yeah, days. And don't get me wrong, the first two or three years were great. We had a great time.
"But then it gets to a bit of a point where, like he says, it's like fun, and then it's fun with problems. Then it's just problems."
Trump tried to play the role of bad boy earlier in his career, but was berated by Neil Robertson after a bad-natured encounter at the Masters in 2012 which the Australian won 6-3.
"Some people I know are a bit fed up with Judd," said Robertson. "If you were filming him 24 hours a day you would know that he is nothing like the character he portrays on Twitter.
"Why does he want to be the next Mario Balotelli, why doesn't he just want to be Judd Trump?"
At the age of 36, Trump has become the epitome of professionalism.
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He is only 10 behind Ronnie O'Sullivan's record career haul of 41 ranking titles, and within potting distance of becoming the heaviest century maker in the modern era of professionalism, having rolled in 1,132.
But the preserve of Higgins, White and O'Sullivan as flag-bearers for snooker lay beyond merely delivering trophies, with all three selling a sort of ongoing snooker soap opera that you couldn't make up.
If acknowledging such astonishing levels of significance sounds like living in the past, it is only because it is all true.
Watch and stream the 2025/26 snooker season, including the Welsh Open, live on TNT Sports and discovery+
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