![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinbobinHendry bowed out as a veteran, frustrated with losing to players he would have pummelled in his prime
There were no tears and there was no fanfare.
Stephen Hendry retired from snooker yesterday at the age of 43 with the minimum of fuss, barely with a flicker of emotion.
Typical Hendry. His career was founded on being calm at the most difficult moments. Why should that change now?
The Bairn, a nickname that stuck through his career, bowed out as a veteran, frustrated with losing to players he would have pummelled in his prime.
He has business interests in China, such a lucrative market for cue sports, to attend to. A family life to uphold.
Life as a professional snooker player no longer held the appeal it had for the young Hendry, for the player who lost only three matches at the Crucible in a decade.
Opinions will always be split on the issue of snooker's greatest player.
Many will still go with Steve Davis, but Hendry is by a distance the most successful of the modern era.
He never possessed the crowd-charming appeal of the likes of Jimmy White and Ronnie O'Sullivan, but bows out after a record seven Crucible titles, 36 ranking event triumphs, and 775 centuries.
Fittingly he bids farewell after another outing on his most famous stage too.
Hendry likes to joke that he passes his pipe and slippers on the way into the Crucible arena, the message being that this is where over the 27 years of his career he was at his most comfortable, his front room.
It was as a 16-year-old that Hendry turned professional, since when he has amassed £9million in prize money and racked up 127 centuries at the Crucible, three of which have been 147 maximum breaks.
The third of those maximums came in the first round this year, a day after Hendry landed back in the UK from his sixth trip to China of the year.
He was, in 1990, the youngest world champion at the age of 21, and that record stands.
Until this year he was the youngest debutant too, having been 17 years and three months when he was beaten in the first round by Willie Thorne in 1986, but Luca Brecel, the Belgian prodigy, took that mark away from Hendry.
Perhaps Brecel will have a similarly fulfilling career. He can but dream.
Hendry, who was born near Edinburgh and now lives in Auchterarder with wife Mandy and their two children, ranks right in the top bracket of Scotland's greatest sportsmen.
He also won the UK Championship five times and the Masters on six occasions.
Hendry said he "could write a book" on his great Crucible memories.
He can leave that to the historians though. There are records he set which will surely stand for decades to come, footage of his great victories lives on.
The day he came from 14-8 behind to beat Jimmy White in the 1992 World Championship final stands out.
He beat White in four Crucible finals, and White always vowed he would fight on to prevent Hendry winning an eighth.
Hendry will play exhibitions and has already shone as a broadcaster.
He was supremely calm tonight in announcing his career was finished, but as he remarked earlier this year, being behind a microphone is a poor second best to being in the thick of tournament play.
"Nothing is going to substitute being in there and playing," Hendry said.
"Being in the commentary box in the Crucible theatre as I was last year for the final, it kills you not to be out there and playing.
"It's not a bad second best though and I enjoy it very much.
"It's a new thing for me but snooker is all I know so I'm sure it's something I'll be involved in for a while."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/other-sports/snooker/stephen-hendry-retires-his-career-in-pictures-814942
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-05-02 06:46 pm (UTC)