Gambling brought Willie Thorne to the brink of suicide but the snooker commentator, who returns to York in December for the UK Championship, tells STEVE CARROLL he has no one to blame but himself.

WHEN times were good, Willie Thorne had to take scissors to the lining of his coat to make enough room to stuff inside all the cash he’d won.

Like a “kid in a sweet shop”, he’d return from a great day at the races and spread the money out on the bed – losing himself in hundreds of notes – thumbing through the huge sums.

“That happened many, many times,” Thorne recalls.

“I would have £40,000 to £50,000 wrapped around me in cash. I had 20-odd accounts. I could get £100,000 on a horse – I never had a bet that big – but a couple of times I put money on for other people because I knew I could get on. It was bravado, really.”

The good times never last.

By the time he owed the Inland Revenue £250,000, Thorne was at his wits’ end.

Betting bigger sums to try to buy his way out of his debts – “robbing Peter to pay Paul” as he puts it – he once put £38,000 on John Parrott to lose a match after learning he had lost his cue.

“To win without your own cue was impossible,” Thorne says, still incredulous at how things turned out. “It’s like a golfer playing left handed when he is actually right. It would take me two to three days to get used to a new tip.”

Parrott defied the odds and won and, worse still, Thorne was commentating on the match for the BBC.

“I could feel the blood drain from my face as I sat in the box and went into a kind of auto-pilot mode,” he writes in his newly published autobiography, Taking A Punt On My Life.

“I…remember getting into my car for the short drive to the hotel. When I got there I went straight to my room and sat on the end of my bed with my head in my hands.”

The breaking point was a suicide bid, in March 2002, when Thorne “took enough pills to kill an elephant”. Today, he calls himself a coward for that act, which left him slumped unconscious to be found by his 11-year-old stepson James.

He was lucky. He was taken to hospital in time.

That Thorne could find himself in such a dark place will surprise those who know him only from his on-screen persona. Early baldness arguably made him the most recognisable face of snooker’s revolution in the 1980s – a time when the players were superstars and the cash looked like it would never stop rolling in.

Thorne was the sunny personality, the game’s Mr Maximum – who could knock in 147s for fun. As snooker reached its zenith with the 18 million viewers who tuned in to watch Dennis Taylor overhaul Steve Davis in the 1985 World Championship final, he was an attacking player the crowds flocked to watch.

“It was a super time,” he says. “Everything was. We were earning fortunes. There were only four TV channels so everyone became household names. They were lovely times.

“But being brought up in a billiard hall, you get to hear of plenty of information and everyone gambles. Maybe if I had been with athletes I probably never would have gone to the bookies.”

His is a salutary tale. He has come out the other side, although he admits he still bets in small sums. He wants his book, a brutally blunt account of his addiction and financial troubles, to act as a warning to others.

“I know what trouble I got into earning decent money,” he continues.

“I know there are four or five footballers in trouble and there will probably be another 50 on top of that. That’s just footballers.

“These are young kids and I am trying to make a point about what can happen. I was lucky to be at the top of the game for some time. It was towards the end when I was out of the top 16 and things were getting harder and harder.

“I must admit, towards the end, I was a bit of a mug punter when the chase was on. I would make myself busy and try to find out what was fancied and have a bet without any knowledge but only when I was on the chase. I never guessed beforehand.

“I am definitely an unlucky gambler. I had a horse fall on the Flat that won its next four races. I only needed it to be placed.”

Then there was the time he had a £250 treble, watched the first two come home and was then left apoplectic when his final leg runner, a horse called Statajack, lost its saddle cloth when leading by 15 lengths on the run-in and couldn’t weigh in properly after the race.

“I understand the difference between good and bad luck but things happened to me that were impossible,” he says.

On the table, Thorne won 14 tournaments across the world but his only major UK success was the 1985 Mercantile Credit Classic.

He’s better known for blowing a 13-8 lead against Steve Davis in the UK Championship that same year – a title that seemed destined for his mantelpiece until he missed a straightforward blue in the first frame of the final session.

Thorne concedes that defeat had a huge impact on his form.

“It was a massive turning-point. I was probably the second best player in the world at that time. Davis was obviously number one but everyone else was struggling. It definitely set me back a couple of years.

“I couldn’t get over the line and people knew that. I lost so many matches from in front. The good players can knuckle down and it cost me a couple of years of my life.

“At the time, I was playing great. I was playing like I could have won 16-4 but it was Davis and I was still winning 13-8.”

When he could no longer hit the heights on the table, Thorne reinvented himself off it and continues to be a key cog in the BBC commentary team that will again set up camp in York as the UK Championship returns to the Minster city after a five-year absence thanks to World Snooker chief Barry Hearn.

It’s a comeback of which he approves.

“I am looking forward to it enormously,” he says. “Telford or York, what do you think? York is just beautiful at that time of year. It’s lovely. The Christmas trees and the lights are up. I go to the Blue Bicycle for dinner and stay at the Hilton. It is great.

“Barry Hearn has done a wonderful job (promoting the game). He gets things moving and got the prize money up. It has gone up from £3.7 million to £7 million in a recession. What will it be when the recession isn’t here?

“Players need to realise how lucky they are. The game changed when players thought they didn’t have to sign autographs and walked around the place in jeans. They got what they deserved. They didn’t try to promote the game properly.”

• Taking A Punt On My Life by Willie Thorne, priced £18.99, is available from all good bookshops and online.