Terry Griffiths, a Welsh snooker player who won the world championship as a qualifier and later became a coach to top players like Stephen Hendry and Mark Williams, has died. He was 77.
World Snooker announced Griffiths’ death early Monday. His son, Wayne, wrote in a post on Facebook that his father died on Sunday, surrounded by his family, and had been battling dementia.
Renowned for his slow and methodical style of play, Griffiths was one of the most recognizable figures in British sport during snooker’s heyday in the late 1970s and 1980s. The undoubted highlight of his career was becoming world champion in 1979 after beating Dennis Taylor in the final at the Crucible Theatre, but he is also one of 11 players to win the so-called “Triple Crown” of major events after capturing the Masters in 1980 and the U.K. Championship in 1982.
“He is a legend of the game,” top-ranked player Judd Trump said.
Griffiths turned professional in 1978, by which time he had worked as a bus conductor, a postman and an insurance agent. That’s after starting off working in the mines in south Wales at the age of 15.
It made his run to the world title a year later a great underdog story — and it included a 1:40 a.m. finish in his semifinal against Australia’s Eddie Charlton, another famously slow player.
Griffiths was sharp and witty, and by the end of his playing career had bouncy, coiffured hair he even mocked himself in popular 1980s song “Snooker Loopy” — by Chas & Dave — when he sang the line: “I’ll buy another eight hairbrushes for me barnet.”
He retired in 1997 after a first-round loss in the world championship to Williams, a fellow Welshman and world champion and one of a number of top players who went on to be mentored by Griffiths.
The list included seven-time world champion Hendry, Mark Allen and China’s Ding Junhui.
“What a legend of a man who helped shape my career and life both on and off the table. Absolutely heartbroken. He wasn’t just a coach, he was family,” Allen wrote on social media platform X.
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