The day Steve Davis got uptight on my living room carpet

A young Steve Davis was a frequent house-guest of Chris Holland who is celebrating his 50th season playing snooker in the Southampton & District Social Clubs league.

13-time Southampton Town Champion Chris Holland

Needing somewhere to stay while competing in an under-21 tournament in Portsmouth, the future six-time world champion made the first of many visits to the Holland household to sample wife Angela’s bacon and sausage sandwiches.

Holland recalled: “He pulled up in an Austin Maxi and the front wing was rusty. The next car he had out there was a Porsche and the one after that was the extended Cadillac.

“We had a Commodore 64, one of the early computers, for the girls and he used to lie on the carpet with them playing games. He used to get really uptight because he couldn’t beat them.”

The late John Spencer was another to chew the fat in Holland’s living room and he remembers sharing a pot of coffee and sandwiches with Patsy Houlihan, who Jimmy White once described as “the greatest player I’ve ever seen”.

While working at the Castle Club, which closed last year, Holland cooked a jacket potato for Ray Reardon and beat Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins in a money match.

“He gave me 28 (points start) best-of-three for a fiver and I done him 2-0.”

Holland described John Pulman, world champion during most of the 1960s, as a “sociable animal” who was great at telling stories and entertaining the crowd.

“I’ve seen him at the Castle and someone’s said to him ‘get you a drink John?’ he’s looked up and down the bar and seen who was there and he used to say ‘I’ll do this round’. He knew full well that he’s got them all there until they’ve all bought a round back.”

Holland, now 66, scored the league’s first ever century, 108, in 1980 and has won the Town Championship a record 13 times over a 40-year period.

“I was a bit of a hustler in those days. I never came out of a points’ school losing money because I always played a little bit in hand. The year I made the 108 my income took a sharp dive,” he laughed.

 Picture: Kevin Legg