Ronnie O’Sullivan has become one of the deep-thinkers, not only of snooker, but of British sport.
The world number one has gone through struggles on and off the table during his hugely successful career and has come up with various ways to overcome them.
The Rocket admits that he has had to battle his own addictive personality over the years, and continues to try and avoid temptations, which he believes are ingrained in Western philosophy.
‘I went through a lot of denial in the early stages, thinking I didn’t have an addiction problem,’ O’Sullivan told BBC’s Don’t Tell Me The Score podcast. ‘I’d get a month of training and eating well practicing, and I’d play a tournament and do really well and then the next two or three months I’d binge on food and drink and going to nightclubs. It was never me, but it was my addictive side.
‘I could never have one meal or one night out and get back to training the next day, I kept falling off the wagon.
‘It wasn’t until I started looking at addiction and how it’s not just about food, it can be about women, relationships, gambling, spending, working too hard. It covers so many different areas.’
O’Sullivan has now accepted the problem and learned to manage it, focusing his addictive personality on positive outlets like running.
The 43-year-old believes that addiction has become difficult to avoid in modern Western society and points at the contrast between boxing rivals Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather as an example to illustrate his point.
‘The Western world has become a world of addiction in many ways, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to sit down as a community and just do things together and do things together, support each other,’ Ronnie continued. ‘We live a hectic, fast-paced life and everyone’s trying to get on top of each other, climb that ladder and do what they do.
‘I go to Thailand and it’s not like that, they have a different way to measure success.
‘You look at Manny Pacquiao and he wants to feed his village, it’s all about taking back to the Philippines and I think that’s a much better way to share your success.
‘You’ve got the Manny Pacquiao way and the Floyd Mayweather way. Mayweather will get his money and buy loads of cars, spend it on all bling, bling, bling and the Western world aspires to that.
‘I don’t. I aspire to be more like Manny Pacquiao. For me he’s got the balance right, he’s doing it for the greater good, he’s trying to take poverty out of his country and make it a better place.
‘For me, that’s the side I’d much rather be. I have to force myself to be like that because I’m around a lot of Western and it doesn’t always fit in.’
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