What is it that separates the good from the great? I’m going to give you an example using a subject I have been studying for more than 30 years, the game of snooker. An old pal Rory once described me in unfavourable terms “You’re one of life’s natural excuse makers Wilson”. Now a lot of people might have taken this as an insult, mainly because it is an insult, but I was beating this guy on the snooker table at the time, not losing to him. So why am I the loser he is making me out to be?

Simple, he was right, I had not lived up to what I could have been, and he could see it. What looked like an insult had layers of disappointment and of frustration built right into it, and sometimes when we criticise we are not being rude we are trying to be helpful. This is often how pals are, they feel certain frustrations on behalf of people they are somewhat close to, often also wrapping their comments in an insult, a barbed comment, that is designed not to hurt enough to inspire greater efforts or a realisation that something is being wasted. Time is short, potential is obvious, success leaves clues. I’m not saying I was any good, but I wasn’t as good as I could have been, and that is the disappointing thing for me and him at the time it would seem.

Each one of us knows what our barriers are, why we do not achieve the maximal from our potential, we do not really need it pointed out, even though sometimes we need to know that others can see it. I think there are two methods by which people interact, in competition or in cooperation, criticism can be either. For me it has always been fear of swinging and not hitting that has driven me to be an obvious excuse maker. I could give you a hundred excuses why I never made good on a promising career in the armed forces, another hundred why I didn’t do really well in sports I pursued, a thousand why I didn’t do well academically, none of which are true 100%, all of which are attempts at not thinking that I am often my own problem. This is my type of personality, I am, as Rory so non-eloquently described, a natural excuse maker. I reach for it instead of trying, not succeeding and then owning that failure like a real man should.

It did not matter that I was a mostly superior player to my friend, what irked him was that I could have been a better player. He’d been around a while, he was an astute man, he’d heard all the excuses and seen those that succeeded, and I think spotted why. They did not make excuses, they owned their defeats and learned from them. In the same vein I felt exactly the same way about a friend of ours who achieved good things but not great ones. Colin Bingham was one of Northern Ireland’s top snooker players of the late 90’s and early 00’s but his work ethic was extremely poor, and he hardly spent any time crafting his game (practising), yes he developed as an enthusiastic youngster, but when he was at the top of amateur snooker in NI and made the transition to the professional ranks he just didn’t put the time in, it was half-hearted. Occasionally he would set up an afternoon session of a few hours with another aspiring player from NI, but that was quite rare. This was to the frustration of everyone that believed in him.

I say that this is all psychological, I’ll give you an example of what I mean… I played in the Northern Ireland Snooker Championships on three occasions, one time in the southern area of Northern Ireland in a nice club that I was only in this one time for this one tournament, and I did very badly, losing in the second round to a player that I considered to be not my equal. I was in great form, developing my game well, I was well practiced and full of confidence thinking I might put a dent in the tournament that year (my third go). On the other two occasions I participated I was beaten by better cueists, no excuses they just outscored me and outplayed me. This time I had a favourable early draw, and like I say I was up for it. On the day my game disappeared and I played the first frame, a close one, in a manner that shocked and embarrassed me. Nothing was going right, but remember this isn’t a story about me and my failings, it is a story where we are going to examine what a person starts to do in the dark recesses of their mind when they find themselves at the point I was at.

By the middle of the second frame there has been no improvement and I am getting very annoyed with myself. I’m supposed to win this but I am struggling, and I don’t get it. Obviously there are thoughts racing around in my head, just like there would be for anyone, but mine fall into a different category than my pal Bingham’s would, or those of the emerging superstar of NI snooker at the time Mark Allen’s. It is this that is most interesting, and what I wish to think about. At this point forget anything I have said about me, this is not about me and a snooker table, I’m just one of the examples because I don’t want to run anyone else down. It is about approaches to thinking. We take the three players I have mentioned, me, Bingham, and Allen, and we speculate, based on what the usual outcome of their matches indicates about what is likely going on in their heads. What is going on in the second or third frame when this player has lost those that preceded it?

• PSW (me) is angry, frustrated, and most crucially of all is formulating excuses to explain why things are going so badly.
• Bingham is continuing to play his game, thinking he can still win, believing in himself always, but maybe knowing that the effort has not been put in and the sharpness is not always there.
• Allen is hungry, the score does not matter because he just needs and wants that next opportunity, he can turn it around, he is well practiced and confident. This guy isn’t going to beat him..

I ask you at this point, which one of these attitudes is most likely to contribute to success, and which is least useful?

Rory was correct about me. I always made excuses, as if the excuse would be sufficient to satisfy anyone that had invested in my success (I mean psychologically, not with money), or silence my potential detractors. As what we might call ‘stablemates’ each person from a club wishes for success for members of their cohort, I wished for success for the Fountain Snooker Club at the time, even for persons I had no particular friendship with. I had a stablemate and fellow team member for many years in the leagues that I have often had a bad relationship with, yet I have continued to enjoy and celebrate and encourage his successes, unless they were against me of course. This is not unreasonable or unnatural, it’s like that asshole friend you have that you stand up for even when he is wrong, cos he’s in your tribe and for no other reason. We were all members of an entity and a movement, the Fountain Snooker Club at the time, the Antrim Sports Club it would be now although I am not part of that cohort, and we all wished success for all members of that club against all outsiders.

Let’s stop talking about me completely and concentrate on the other two guys I mentioned, Mark Allen and Colin Bingham… Mark is one of the worlds best and has been for 20 years or so, winning many trophies and achieving stardom in the sport. He is the product of his own determined will to succeed combined with an undeniable work ethic and an attitude that there is always the potential for further improvement and further success. An example to any young snooker player, he has reaped the benefits associated with his efforts while entertaining millions of people and making his club and his country proud. That does not mean that he understands himself though, it’s not always the case that a person does, but we know him because of his bulging trophy cabinet and we can speculate that he has something that separates him from the other players that merely achieve “good”. I would contend that this is psychological, not physical. Many players can in physicality do all the same things as he can, it is the mind that makes the difference.

Bingham is well known amongst NI snooker players my age, but often mediated wrongly in my estimation. I heard a very young NI player, himself a professional now, say of Bingham that “he just didn’t score enough”, a statement that anyone from Colin’s era of NI snooker dominance would strongly dispute. The guy knew how to win, bottom line, and he did win a lot of the time, a lot more than his contemporaries and those that would say this of him now to younger players that were not alive when he was at his best. Bingham was a strong force in NI Snooker, among the best of a generation that followed Joe Swail and Patrick Wallace who went on to success in the professional ranks, and Paul Doran who chose a career away from the table despite his undeniable talent. Of course there were notable others from that time also, apologies if you feel left out guys…

“It might not be an easy time,
There’s rivers to cross and hills to climb,
Some days we might fall apart,
And some nights might feel cold and dark,
But nobody wins afraid of losing,
And the hard roads are the ones worth choosing,
Someday we’ll look back and smile,
And know it was worth every mile”

Chris Stapleton – Starting Over

There is a cost to trying and failing, often the fear of unrewarded efforts holds a person back from giving it their best go, and I believe, even though I do not know for sure, that Bingham didn’t go further because he feared failure and its reward just like we all do us non-greats. It’s easier to sit back and make excuses than to be 100% all in and have everyone else and yourself find out that you were just not good enough. Now I may be totally wrong, he may have gotten distracted by other wants, he may have run out of desire, he may feel he hit his zenith and maybe got all he could out of the game, but I think, just like me, he may be an excuse maker, just on a very different level. I’ll actually ask him after this piece is published what he thinks, I may have gotten this all wildly wrong.

Allen wins because the consequences of not giving it everything causes him more fear than he thinks the failure would, it’s this attitude I wished I had had. Not that I might have achieved anything at all, but the failure might sit better in the psyche. Stephen Hendry used to say that he’d rather lose on a missed pot than a bad safety shot, the older I get the more I know what he meant. Desire makes us want, then fear makes us not try.

Paul S Wilson