Crucible characters day one: Bill Werbeniuk
The charismatic Canadian liked pints and pots.
For every Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry, snooker also boasted its bit-part players: the what-might-have-beens and never-minds, who left their own small but indelible mark upon the sport.
For the duration of the postponed World Championships, the PA news agency is turning its focus on the Crucible characters who never quite made the competition’s last three days.
Bill Werbeniuk
Werbeniuk reached the Crucible quarter-finals four times, and briefly equalled the tournament’s record break with a 142 in the course of his second round defeat to John Virgo in 1979.
Briefly ranked as high as number eight in the world, Werbeniuk suffered from
a tremor which he believed could only be controlled by the consumption of an extraordinary quantity of lager during matches.
Werbeniuk confessed to drinking 50 pints of lager a day, and would routinely down six pints before a match and one pint per frame, singularly undaunted by progression to the Crucible’s best-of-25 frame matches.
Werbeniuk’s alcohol consumption meant his weight ballooned to more than 20 stone, leading to a notorious incident in a World Team Cup match against Dennis Taylor in 1980, in which he split his trousers live on air.
Werbeniuk was forced to curtail his career in 1990 because the beta-blockers he was using to combat his alcohol consumption were deemed performance-enhancing. He died of heart problems in 2003, at the age of 56.
