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Steve Davis

Davis offered more evidence to support the theory that snooker players don’t necessarily have to fall away with age by recording some excellent results during the 2008/09 season. He climbed six places in the official rankings to 23rd, and starts the 2009/10 campaign provisionally inside the top 16.
Early in the season, Davis reached two consecutive ranking event quarter-finals; the first time he had done so since 1996.
At the Roewe Shanghai Masters, he beat defending champion Dominic Dale 5-4 then came from 4-1 down to beat Dave Harold 5-4 before losing to eventual champion Ricky Walden 5-2.
At the next tournament, the Royal London Watches Grand Prix in Glasgow, Davis scored a surprise 5-4 victory over Neil Robertson, then beat Adrian Gunnell in another final-frame decider, only to see his run ended with a 5-3 defeat to Ali Carter.
The Nugget’s season looked set for a premature end when he trailed Lee Spick 5-0 in the final qualifying round of the Betfred.com World Snooker Championship. But he fought back to win 10-8 and book a 29th appearance at the Crucible. “I don’t give it 100 per cent like I used to, but it still hurts when I lose and I still consider myself a player. I’m half decent and I can get by,” he said. "It’s fantastic to play at the Crucible. The excitement of the build-up is like Christmas."
But, come Davis’ day at Sheffield, Neil Robertson wasn’t in any mood to give away presents as he beat the six-times champion 10-2. Despite the margin of defeat, snooker legend Davis insisted he has no plans to put his cue away for good. “I’m not sure it’s about bowing out in style, more like hanging on for grim death really,” he said. “I’m going down the walls slowly with my finger nails embedded, screeching down. To me it’s nature, you go up the rankings and then you down the rankings. The challenge is how long it takes.”
In 2007, Davis achieved his ambition of retaining his official top 16 place when he turned 50, though he dropped out of the elite the following year.
He achieved a remarkable milestone at the 2005 UK Championship by reaching his 100th major final.
After knocking out  Mark Allen, Stephen Maguire, Ken Doherty and Stephen Hendry, his run was finally ended by Chinese whizzkid Ding Junhui who triumphed 10-6.
His previous major final was at the 2004 Welsh Open when he led Ronnie O’Sullivan 8-5 only to lose 9-8. The Rocket was his victim when Davis won his last major title – the 1997 Masters when he took the last six frames of the final at Wembley to win 10-8.
Emerging in the early days of snooker’s development as a major television sport, Davis came to dominate the green baize throughout the 1980s. He won his first world title in 1981 when he beat Doug Mountjoy 18-12 in the final and his sixth in 1989 with a record 18-3 thrashing of Parrott.
Perhaps more famous than Davis’ victories, though, were his two defeats in the Crucible final. In 1985 he lost 18-17 on the final black at 12.20am to Dennis Taylor in one of the most memorable occasions in all of sport, watched by 18.5 million BBC2 viewers. "It’s all there in black and white," Davis observed with typical deadpan humour. The following year he went down 18-12 to rank outsider Joe Johnson.
The man nicknamed the Ginger Magician recorded snooker’s first televised maximum 147 at the 1982 Lada Classic and received a Lada car for his troubles. He has won 28 ranking titles in all. He was made an MBE in 1988 and an OBE in The Queen’s New Year Honours in 2001.
Father-of-two Davis is a keen poker player, having become a regular competitor in the annual World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas. He loves collecting and listening to soul and prog rock music and once hosted a radio show called Interesting Soul. He is also an accomplished chess player and a former president of the British Chess Federation.

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