Tooting's loveable Artful Dodger

Wafting his snooker cue like a wand that could and did produce millions, Jimmy was the wizard of the baize who made his money disappear in a waft of alcohol fumes and crumpled betting slips.

On the table, Jimmy was a winner. Unfortunately, he was most often found under the table, wrecked by yet another pot at the drinking game.

He tells his story in Behind the White Ball (Hutchinson #16.99). Famously, Jimmy, betting slips aside, ain't much of a writer.

He pleads guilty to ignorance and cites mitigating circumstsances. Jimmy regarded days spent in school as a misspent youth.

His lack of talent with a pen was seized on gleefully by his mates. A friend would whisper the letters into Jimmy's ear as he signed autographs after a tournament. However, as Jimmy was asking instructions on some anodyne piece of well-wishing, he was writing on his friend's instructions something to the tune of: ''You are ugly, sod off, Jimmy White.''

Jim relates this with no malice. But when it came to relating his biography he opted for the gentler muse of Rosemary Kingsland. Sometimes you can detect her whisper in Jimmy's ear.

White was always enamoured of the game but it was surely Kingsland who articulated: ''When you are at the table, bathed in that pool of golden light, you are touched by magic.''

Whatever, Kingsland and White splendidly recapture the Whirlwind's trail across the snooker halls of his youth.

These were not the antiseptic and sober centres of today. These were the halls of shame, where good boys were forbidden to go, and the baddies gathered to conspire. Jimmy relates of Zan's, a grubby hall with a murkier clientele: ''The place fascinated me before the game did.''

This then was Jimmy's playground. These were the sort of halls where a man was once stoned to death with snooker balls, a place where a man could be shot in the legs for some liberty-taking.

The Runyonesque characters of Victor Yo, Flash Bob, Mad Ronnie Fryer, Dodgy Bob and Johnny the Arab played lively cameo roles but Jimmy was the star turn.

He started frequenting Zan's when he was eight. By 14 he was routinely compiling century breaks, beating Hurricane Higgins, and sinking vodka as fast as he potted snooker balls.

Life was a gas. Jimmy was simply electric. His talent earned him hundreds as he was carted off throughout London to play with Tony Meo against the best that the halls could offer. There was no hustle. Jimmy knew better than to take liberties. The only person he conned was himself.

For as Jimmy was ascending the snooker ladder, earning huge amounts of money, he was also sliding into trouble through drinking and gambling. He tells this with honesty, served with an element of relish.

He worked a scam on fruit machines, was on collision force with the police over drink-driving, and was charged with looting during the Brixton riots. He was cleared of this charge but pleads guilty to fights with his childhood sweetheart and wife Maureen and testifies to many drunken debauches.

These tend to lose something in the telling. Drunken stories are often amusing for the participants but for the outsider it is easy to see the tragedy amid the farce. Jimmy did not so much venture on binges as go missing in action. He would head off for a pint and seven weeks later Maureen would find him holed up in a Dublin wardrobe, sheltering from her wrath.

Snooker was initially an escape from school. Drink and gambling became an escape from reality. It all bemused Jimmy. ''I never mean to let people down. It just sort of happens.''

It began to happen with such an alarming regularity that the gambler decided he did not want to lose it all.

Jimmy is now giving himself a break. He attends meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous. The man who has lived life in the glare of TV lights and press publicity is looking at a brighter future.

The Artful Dodger of Tooting seems to be growing up at last.