Stephen Hendry admitted he still gets asked about the moment Ronnie O’Sullivan walked out of their UK Championship quarter-final in 2006.
O’Sullivan left Hendry and the watching audience in complete shock when he shook hands with his opponent and just left the arena.
The snooker legend’s issues over the years have been well documented, once going into rehab in 2000.
Hendry asked O’Sullivan on his YouTube channel in 2023 about whether it was in relation to that.
He replied: “Nah, that was other problems. I can’t blame it on that. I was struggling with stuff at home.”
Hendry said: “People still ask me about that. Have you ever watched it back and seen my face?”
O’Sullivan continued: “It’s the best! You were absolutely dumbfounded.”
He added: “I had a lot going on off the table at home and I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to play. I’d nearly done it in a few matches before.
“You were 4-1 up and I thought ‘I can’t take this, I need to get out of here’.
“My head just wasn’t right for playing. I just needed to be out of there. I can’t put it down to anything other than my life being in chaos.
“I’ve definitely calmed down a lot now.”
That is not the first time the seven-time World Champion has opened up about this incident.
“Pre-Steve Peters, I think I walked out in a match against Stephen Hendry,” O’Sullivan recalled on Eurosport.
“My head was gone. I wasn’t playing well and I didn’t want to be there. I shook hands and walked out.
“A lot of it was in-the-moment stuff. It was just reacting, ‘I’m playing rubbish, don’t want to be here, can’t win this match’. So it was just kind of trying to ignore that voice, even though it is still there.
“Even though I still thought I wanted to act on impulse, I kind of stopped becoming impulsive. I realised that is the devil inside me.
“There have been probably a handful of matches since I’ve been working with Steve Peters where I’ve not thrown the towel in, but not fancied it. Whereas pre-Steve Peters, I would have had eight or nine tournaments a year like that where I would have been like ‘I’m out of here’.
“So that is a huge turnaround and I have allowed myself to compete more often. I am not a better player but I am a better thinker.”
