EVEN now, the thought of playing World Championship snooker under the lights at the Crucible Theatre is enough to get Stephen Hendry's blood pumping. Having to slog through three rounds of gruelling qualifying at the Ponds Forge Leisure Centre in Sheffield, less so.

Five years on from his retirement, Hendry flirted briefly with a sensational return to the cathedral-like home of world snooker last month when he entered the World Seniors Championship in Scunthorpe. While he fell narrowly short of the win which would have granted him entry to the qualifying event when he went down in the semi-final to eventual winner Peter Lines, it is hard to miss a certain note of relief in his voice.

"I was involved in co-promoting the seniors, getting it back off the ground and re-vamping it a bit," Hendry said. "But I didn't really have an eye on World Championship qualifying at all. I was just going to cross that bridge when I came to it. In fact I was probably more relieved not to have to go and qualify. I don't think I read the small print properly."

Hendry is 48 now, still physically robust enough to make a pretty decent fist of things on the main tour if he so desired. The big problem is committing to the five hours a day of practice it would require for him to have any hope of returning to the sharp end of the sport. Instead his days are happily filled with broadcasting, poker, golf and frequent travel out to China to promote a variant of 8-ball pool out there. He has no drive to return to the grind and certainly no desire to go day tripping at the Crucible just to be a shadow of his former self.

"I wouldn't come back and play in it just for some kind of publicity stunt," he said. "If I came back to play in it I would want to do myself justice. And to do that would mean putting the hours in. If the World Seniors led to a place directly into the Crucible then I would take it very seriously because to play there again would be incredible. But I still had three qualifying rounds to play at Ponds Forge Leisure Centre in Sheffield which, you know, no disrespect to the place, but it doesn't really inspire me to put the hours in."

As it was, Hendry did get his hand back on the green baize on a single-table set-up at the Crucible last week. It was for a one-off exhibition event against his old adversary Steve Davis on Wednesday night, and tickets were snapped up as eagerly as they would be for any session at the actual world championships. He admitted that the memories came flooding back at a venue where he captured a record seven titles during between 1990 and 1999. Typically, he pleased the crowd with a century break to go with the 775 competitive ones he managed during his career.

"It was just a little exhibition, but it was sold out, just the one table, and when we had a little practice during the afternoon the place was empty," he said. "It still gives me goosebumps going in there. It has always been my favourite place to play snooker and in the 90s my pipe and slippers were almost under that table because I spent so much time there. They will always be special memories. When you are standing on the Monday evening watching the final now and you have a microphone, you would much rather have a cue in your hand."

Asking Hendry to chose just one memory is almost as impossible as asking a Beatles aficionado to pick his favourite album.

"The first of the seven [beating Jimmy White 18-12 in 1990] was special, because obviously that was always my ambition to be world champion and I am still the youngest to do it," he says. "And obviously the seventh, to break Steve Davis and Ray Reardon's record of six."

Hendry would inflict a further hat-trick of Crucible theatre final misery on White between 1992 and 1994, the first of which saw him roar back from 14-8 down with 10 straight frames and the latter which he clinched with a nerveless clearance in the final frame. But it says something about the Scot that his favourite of the trio should be the 1993 final, where he remorselessly took White apart 18-5 with a full session to spare having never been in trouble all tournament long.

As for this year's Championships, which start on Saturday, Hendry is already looking out his crystal ball.

"It is wide open this year, although I know most years people say that," he said. "But with the way it has gone this season, it is almost like bingo, you could put the names in the hat, pull one out and say he is going to win it. We have winners on the tour this year like Mark King, Anthony Hamilton, who are good players in their own right but at the start of the year no-one in their right mind would have dreamed that they were going to win a tournament.

"We have had John Higgins' resurgence in the middle part of the season he was back to his best, maybe even better, when he won two tournaments in a row. Ronnie has been off form for a long while now. There are a lot you could make the case for. But if you put my head against a wall I would say Mark Selby is the favourite because I think the long-frame format suits his game."

When Hendry speaks of travelling the globe with a snooker cue in his hand he means it literally. The late 80s and early 90s after all, were pre-Sky, and with the old fixed cameras zooming in to their faces on close-up, snooker heroes back then had as much of a media profile as footballers. When you find yourself mobbed in some of the less travelled corners of this planet, you know something strange is afoot.

"I have done more than 50 cities in China," he says. "It is quite surreal when you go to places up the north like Inner Mongolia and you are getting mobbed at the airport."