In the original dustsheet. Red cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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Aged 16, Jimmy White was the youngest player to win the English Amateur Championship. By 1984 he was a professional success, and married but not settled. He has survived a life of gambling, women, and marathon binges with showbiz friends, to tell in candid detail the story of his own life.

Review: Jimmy White has been beaten six times in the final of the snooker world championship and on at least two of those occasions it was easier for him to have won than lost. But at the death White always managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. It is now likely he will be remembered only as the people’s champion but he isn’t complaining. White has made a fortune and then lost a good chunk of it, mostly through gambling. He’s been in trouble with the law, had his share of tabloid exposes and pushed his marriage to the edge of collapse. But if one thing comes out of this sparky autobiography it is that White is a chancer and he will always keep going.

Behind the White Ball starts with an illiterate teenager getting both a street education and an income hustling in a south London snooker hall and ends with an older, a bit wiser, and literate man still making a living from his cue. But in between there is all the mayhem you could ask for; escaping irate locals after taking the money off the customers in a Liverpool snooker hall; fetching up a bit too often for his wife’s peace of mind at Ronnie Wood’s place–“although when I hang out with The Stones I end up making the tea”–and, bizarrely, attending Chelsea matches with Peter Cook. Whirlwind stuff indeed. –Nick Wroe

James Warren White MBE (born 2 May 1962) is an English professional snooker player who has won four senior World titles. Nicknamed “The Whirlwind” because of his fluid, swift and attacking style of play, White is the 1980 World Amateur Champion, 2009 Six-red World champion, a record four-time World Seniors Champion (2010, 2019, 2020, 2023), 2019 Seniors 6-Red World Champion and 1984 World Doubles champion with Alex Higgins.

White has won two of snooker’s three majors: the UK Championship (in 1992) and the Masters (in 1984) and a total of ten ranking events. He is currently tenth on the all-time list of ranking event winners. He reached six World Championship finals but never won the event; the closest he came was in 1994 when he lost in a final-frame decider against Stephen Hendry. He spent 21 seasons ranked in snooker’s elite top 16. In team events, he won the Nations Cup and the World Cup with England. He is one of a select number of players to have made over 300 century breaks in professional competition. White was also the first left-handed player, and the second player overall, to record a maximum break at the World Championship.