Jimmy White's Autobiography

Jimmy White's auto-biography is an amazing journey through Jimmy's life showing his Journey from playing snooker in the dark corners of Zan's snooker club to the bright television lights of the crucible. Jimmy leaves nothing out from his life playing truant in his schooldays to his drink driving offences and beyond.

When he should have been studying at the Ernest Bevin Comprehensive in Tooting, Jimmy White was bunking off, with his friend Tony Meo, to Zan's Snooker Hall. Jimmy's education took place at a green baize table with a borrowed cue. And he was a fast learner.

From those early 'amateur' years when he and Tony learned to hustle under the tutelage of someone known as Dodgy Bob, Jimmy White has earned a reputation on the professional circuit as 'The Whiriwind'. He plays snooker from the heart, not for safety.

But having won £114,000 for scoring 147 on television it wasn't long before he gambled it all away on cards and blew the rest the following day on the horses. And when he was ten frames up against Stephen Hendry in the Sheffield Crucible World Championship in 1995, he famously failed to pot the black, and Hendry went on to win.

But even if he has never won that elusive title, Jimmy White remains the 'people's champion'.

However, he hasn't always been quite so popular at home, where the gambiing sprees, marathon binges and, once, a five week disappearing act have placed severe strains on his marriage.

But Jimmy White has survived all - to tell in candid, often outrageous detail, his story of a life lived on the edge.

'The twisted hand that fate has dealt White in recent years - testicular cancer, the deaths of his mother and a brother, a very public bankruptcy - has only made snooker's vast armchair army of fans draw him closer to their collective bosom'