By John Higgins?
He’s talking about appealing but he should just chalk this down to experience.
His career earnings to date will no doubt cushion the blow.
Not a great outlook for Stephen Lee.
Stephen Lee always wanted the best of everything. The nicest house, the flashiest car, the biggest bar bill. He was among the world’s finest snooker players, famed for his smooth cueing action. But he also drank too much, ate too much and, more crucially, spent too much.
Hard graft? ‘I don’t practise as much as the others,’ he would boast before joking about his legendary alcohol consumption, convincing himself that he could provide for his wife and four children on natural talent alone.
More of a Jimmy White than a Steve Davis, he liked to think. Until, that is, he started running out of money.
Now Lee is potless, a record 12-year suspension for seven counts of match-fixing cutting off his income stream. The house has gone. According to one insider, the home in Trowbridge that was sold last year for £375,000 was actually a repossession.
There are eight outstanding county court judgments totalling more than £70,000. Not to mention the £40,000 fine that remains unpaid to the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association.
‘Stephen was always someone who lived way beyond his means,’ said one much-respected member of the snooker community.
The solution, in his own misguided mind, was to fix matches. Throw the ones he thought he’d lose anyway. Or throw the first frame in others in the belief that he was good enough to bounce back and win. Double- bubble. Quids in.
Even to the unsuspecting eye there was something not quite right. Neal Foulds, commentating alongside John Virgo at The Crucible for television, was so staggered by Lee’s sudden inability to make simple shots against Ryan Day he described it as ‘a comedy of errors’ after he opted for ‘the wrong shot’.
With the benefit of hindsight, the real comedy was in Lee’s facial expression when he missed an easy blue into the corner. A new career in acting is not something he should pursue.
He was caught because the worst case of corruption in snooker plumbed staggering depths of stupidity. Once the WPBSA investigated suspicious betting patterns, they discovered that friends, business associates and even sponsors were betting huge amounts on him to lose. They found money being paid into his wife’s bank account. In that match against Day, bets were placed on three possible outcomes. One was the 10-4 score by which Lee lost.
In summing up, the chairman of the independent tribunal branded Lee ‘a weak man’ rather than ‘a cynical cheat’. Corrupt, yes, but corruptible, too.
He appealed against his ban, but this appears to be a man who already knows he has only one payday left — whatever a newspaper will pay for his side of the story. Except that nobody is interested in the denials against a mountain of damning evidence. Nobody wants to pay a cheat.
He’s desperate to talk, of course. You could see that in the interview he gave outside his rented home in Trowbridge last month. He looked exhausted but he had to drag himself away from television reporters because he knew he was giving it away for free.
‘He’s desperate because he’s finished,’ said Barry Hearn, the World Snooker boss who set up the dedicated integrity unit that built the case against Lee. ‘And the fact that he’s got some muppet trying to sell his story just says it all.’
Lee, I was told, had gone underground. He’d changed his mobile telephone number and was not taking calls. But one voice message left with his friend Adam Quigley, the owner of the Pockets snooker hall in Cheltenham, and Lee was on the phone.
You could quickly hear that sense of desperation in his voice. Didn’t want to say too much until we’d discussed how much. I said we had no money to offer him. He said he’d ‘press the button’ for as little as ‘5k’. ‘I’ve said nothing for 11 months,’ he explained. ‘I’ve not hung out my dirty washing.’
Lee said he intended to blow some ‘big holes’ in the WPBSA’s case. But the real story to tell is how his attempt at a short cut to wealth ended in disgrace. In 20 years as a professional, Lee earned more than £2million in winnings. ‘When he reached No 5 in the world I was so proud of him,’ said Hearn this week. ‘And I liked Stephen. He was a nice bloke.
‘But now we have to hold him up as an example of someone who has thrown away a successful career because he took the wrong road.
‘It’s a very sad situation when he has a family to support. If he was still at that top-five level now he’d be making about £500,000 a year. As it is, he’s lost everything.
‘His problems started when he first got into money trouble. Corruption is a short cut. You start by throwing a game to pay your hotel bill. Then you throw a game to try to pay off your mortgage.’
Concerned by the stories of corruption across sport as well as in snooker, Hearn turned to retired police officer Nigel Mawer, a detective chief superintendent who had headed the economic and specialist crime unit at New Scotland Yard. Before leaving the force he was involved in the Pakistani cricket match-fixing scandal. Hearn says Mawer has introduced the most sophisticated detection system in world sport as part of a zero-tolerance approach to match-fixing.
‘There can be no coming back,’ said Hearn. ‘Not even if Stephen admits to everything.’
Mawer said: ‘The key word here is greed. We have broken new ground and I have to thank the gambling commission for their assistance. They have been phenomenal.’
Mawer took charge of the WPBSA investigation in October last year. It followed an announcement by the Crown Prosecution Service, which is bound by an evidential standard of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to bring a criminal prosecution, that it would not be pursuing charges following Lee’s arrest by West Midlands police in 2010.
Within 10 days Lee had been suspended by snooker’s world governing body. Mawer uncovered a vast amount of evidence of unusual betting patterns, not to mention phone calls and texts between Lee and a number of associates, as well as the money paid into his wife’s bank account.
The tribunal concluded that Lee had fixed outcomes in seven matches in 2008 and 2009. It ruled that he had deliberately lost to Ken Doherty and Marco Fu at the 2008 Malta Cup, and that he had agreed to lose the first frame against Stephen Hendry and Mark King at the 2008 UK Championship.
It also found that Lee had lost matches by a pre-determined score to Neil Robertson at the 2008 Malta Cup and against Mark Selby at the 2009 China Open. Lee was also found to have conspired to lose that 2009 World Championship first-round match to Day.
At the tribunal in Bristol, Lee was joined by his former manager Neal Clague, named as a member of one group which bet on him to lose. Clague insisted he was ‘hedging his bets’. However, tribunal chairman Adam Lewis branded Lee and Clague as unreliable witnesses.
The tribunal report said bets were placed by three groups, including his then sponsor Paul Jones — an independent financial adviser — who opened multiple betting accounts with various associates. Clague was the head of the second group, with Lee’s friend from Trowbridge, Ian MacDougall, representing the third.
‘In one case the person collected the successful bet and placed half of the winnings into Lee’s wife’s bank account,’ said a WPBSA statement. ‘The total amount bet on these matches was in excess of £111,000, leading to winnings of over £97,000.’ Lee had tested positive for cannabis in 2001 but this was much more serious.
‘It is established, on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Lee acted improperly in relation to matches that he believed he would lose, or believed that he would win sufficiently comfortably that he could drop the first frame,’ wrote the tribunal chief in his ruling.
‘These breaches occurred when Mr Lee was in a financially perilous state not entirely of his own making and was finding it difficult to obtain entry to enough tournaments. Mr Lee did not strike me as a cynical cheat, but rather as a weak man who, under financial pressure, succumbed to the temptation to take improper steps.’
So what now for Lee when his chances of a successful appeal seem so hopeless? His name is toxic. He turned pro at 18 and snooker is all he knows. He is banned from playing pool or amateur snooker. He has two businesses in his name, but who would want to get involved with StephenLee147 Limited now?
[quote=“Manuel Zelaya, post: 844393, member: 377”]Not a great outlook for Stephen Lee.
Lee said he intended to blow some ‘big holes’ in the WPBSA’s case. But the real story to tell is how his attempt at a short cut to wealth ended in disgrace. In 20 years as a professional, Lee earned more than £2million in winnings. ‘When he reached No 5 in the world I was so proud of him,’ said Hearn this week. ‘And I liked Stephen. He was a nice bloke.
[/quote]
£2 million in 20 years is fuck all really, would you have to pay for your own travel?
Think so
Players get sponsorship to cover such costs. Please amend your post.
No. Tubbs.
You made a bland and factually incorrect post. It’s in your interests to withdraw the comment. Please reconsider.
Not factually incorrect based on a discussion on 5 live a few weeks ago. Back to your extra strength Becks now Tubbs.
Tremendous opening day’s play at the Seniors World Championship at the Lord Mountbatten Centre, Portsmouth. The big name casualties to bow out at the first hurdle were Tony Knowles, Doug Mountjoy, Alain Robidoux and Joe Johnson.
Hardly shocks Sidney, all these guys were rank outsiders. Did Nigel Bond play today?
I don’t know as I wasn’t watching it but I’ll be hoping that Jimmy White can finally get his hands on that elusive world title.
Jimmy beat Steve Davis 4-1 in the world seniors final in 2010. But it would be nice to see him add to that tally this year.
Yes the reigning champion got the better of Dene O’Kane.
Debutant Stephen Hendry finally got the chance to atone for his 1987 exit at the Crucible and he took his chance in eliminating Joe Johnson.
Can Jimmy play Stephen Hendry in the final?
Steve Davis rolled back the years to defeat defending champion Nigel Bond 2-1 in the final. Bond had disposed of pre-tournament favourite Stephen Hendry 2-0 in the semi-final.
gutted hendry lost in the semis, big fan of the wonderbairn. well done steve davis, now a 7 times WC, his first wc since 1989
Thought Doug Mountjoy was dead.
You would have been shit at the Dead Or Alive game they used to play on Cork’s 103FM.