John Virgo, who has left the green baize aged 79, was the snooker professional whose greatest talent lay not in potting the black but in impersonating those who could. In a sport that prides itself on monastic silence and geometric certainty, Virgo brought the music-hall tradition of the cheeky interjection, and for that alone the gods of baize should be grateful.
Born in Salford in 1946, at a time when the city’s chimneys still outranked its crucibles, Virgo discovered snooker in the kind of smoky working-men’s clubs where the air was thick enough to cushion a miscue. He turned professional comparatively late, at thirty, and promptly announced himself by winning the UK Championship in 1979, dispatching Terry Griffiths in the final with the calm assurance of a man who knew the table better than his opponents knew their own nerves. That same year he reached the World Championship semi-finals, only to be halted by Dennis Taylor. Thereafter the major titles eluded him, as they elude most, but Virgo never allowed mere statistics to cramp his style.
His true métier emerged when the cue was laid aside and the microphone taken up. On Big Break, that improbable 90's confection hosted by Jim Davidson, Virgo performed trick shots and impressions with the timing of a born comedian. His Alex Higgins was uncannily wild-eyed; his Steve Davis a study in robotic precision. Viewers who had never previously cared about snooker found themselves oddly charmed by a man who treated the green baize as a stage rather than an altar.
As a BBC commentator he became an institution, his voice a mixture of Lancashire vowels and delighted astonishment. “Where’s the cue ball going?” he would cry whenever physics took an unexpected holiday, a question that summed up both the drama of the shot and the essential absurdity of human endeavour. For thirty years he supplied the soundtrack to countless Crucible epics, never quite impartial, always unmistakably himself.
Off the table, life was less straightforward. Gambling took its toll; marriages came and went; a house was repossessed. Yet Virgo retained the performer’s instinct for recovery, emerging with an autobiography whose title, Say Goodnight, JV, carried the wistful shrug of a man who had learned to live with the rebound. In the end, snooker owed him a debt it can never fully repay: he reminded a solemn sport that laughter is not a foul but a safety. The table is quieter now. Somewhere, though, the cue ball is still going – and we know exactly who is asking where.