Pot back for players of yesteryear

JIMMY White is the great exception to the maxim that no-one remembers a loser. It's probably the one thing for which he will be most remembered - losing six world snooker championship finals.

Another player, however, can match White for world championship final defeats - albeit from the days when snooker was a different ball game.

Walter Donaldson lost in the world final six times between 1948 and 1954. But unlike White, he also won it twice (1947 and 1950).

It was a lot different set-up in 1947 to the tournament which is played at The Crucible. That year's final, at London's Leicester Square Hall, lasted a whole week and was the best of 163 frames.

After winning his semi-final, Donaldson prepared for the final by shutting himself up in a loft. It worked, as he beat Fred Davis 82-63 to become the first Scot to take the title.

Fred and Walter went on to meet each other seven more times in the final (some of them in a players' breakaway event, the world matchplay championship, which most regarded as the world championship). Donaldson won only one of them.

He became so fed up with the poor state of snooker that he turned the billiards room of his home in Buckinghamshire into a cowshed and broke up the slate of his table to make a footpath.

The name Gary Owen is not one you hear these days in snooker, but in the '60s and early '70s he was among the elite. Welshman Owen became the first winner of the world amateur title (1963) and in 1969 he reached the final of the first knockout world championship, losing 37-24 to John Spencer at the Victoria Hall, London.

After going to Australia for the 1971 championship (which was actually played in November 1970), Owen decided to settle there. He got to the world quarter-finals in 1973 and 1975 but today is now one of snooker's forgotten men despite having had a strong career.

Aussie Warren Simpson is another little known former hero. He got to that 1971 (played in 1970) marathon final in Australia when it was a round robin tournament, and lost 31-42 to Spencer after having collected the scalps of John Pulman, Aussie Eddie Charlton and South African Perrie Mans along the way. But that was the peak of Simpson's career and he never got back to those heights.

Charlton, the former miner and all-round sportsman (athletics, boxing, cricket, football, surfing, speed roller skating among them) who became known to millions of television viewers as 'Steady' Eddie, first came to notice in snooker when he lost the 1968 world challenge final to Pulman over a week at Bolton's Co-operative Hall.

But the only reason Charlton played at all was thanks to a wealthy snooker fan called Jack Chown sponsoring the match.

Seven years later, Charlton got to the knockout world final when it was played in Australia, losing 31-30 to Ray Reardon after having beaten Canadians Bill Werbeniuk and Cliff Thorburn. And for the rest of Charlton's career the world crown continued to elude him.

One of the strangest frames ever seen was when Welshman Doug Mountjoy, who played a number of exhibition matches in York in the late '70s and early '80s, lost 18-12 to Steve Davis in the 1981 Sheffield final, the first of the Nuggett's six world titles.

Davis led the frame 49-48 when referee John Williams ordered a re-rack after both players had between them played 37 shots with the blue close to black, which was hanging over a pocket. It was a record aggregate points total for a frame when a re-rack took place.

During his semi-final win over Reardon, Mountjoy had made a new world championship highest break of 145.

The former coal miner and pub landlord's snooker career slid away in the mid '80s but found a new lease of life at the end of the decade thanks to coach Frank Callan changing Mountjoy's technique.

At the age of 46, he won the UK title in 1988 and took two ranking titles the following year, but ill health ended his career at the top.

Though many strive, few attain world dominance but snooker has produced some great 'nearly' men.