For 17 days in 1997, Ken Doherty was at the centre of the Irish sporting universe.It had been a difficult season for the 27-year-old snooker player up to that point. He spoke about leaving Ireland down with a disappointing performance at the Irish Masters at Goffs and he needed a first-round win at the Crucible to retain his place in the top 16. Three weeks later, he was the new world champion and the “Darling of Dublin”.This morning, the 56-year-old announced his retirement from the sport. “I probably should have hung up the cue a few years ago,” he told the Irish Independent. “But I just love the game, love playing, doing the exhibitions.” That was never more obvious than in Sheffield in 1997.Doherty’s run to the world title transfixed the country. Few gave him a chance against five-time defending champion Stephen Hendry in the final. But Doherty believed. He told Johnny Watterson in 2020: “I knew he didn’t like playing me. I knew he didn’t like my style of game, a tough match player, a good safety player.”Former champion Ken Doherty made his last appearance at the World Snooker Championships in 2014. Photograph: Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images That’s how it played out, Doherty earning a 15-7 lead. Hendry wasn’t done though. “He started off like a train in the evening session. It was the first time I had got a little nervous,” said Doherty. The Scot won five frames in a row to cut the deficit to three. But Doherty composed himself to see it out and become the only man from the Republic of Ireland to claim snooker’s most prestigious title. He returned home in an open-topped bus ride through Dublin to Jason’s club in Ranelagh where he had begun playing as a child, standing on a biscuit tin to reach the balls. Doherty ended the year as Ireland’s Sportsperson of the Year.His Crucible victory began a 10-year spell when Doherty consistently competed for the biggest honours in the game. But after his stunning initial success the rest of his career was a case study in heartbreak.He made the final in Sheffield in 1998 as well but lost out to John Higgins. There were three defeats in UK Championship finals and he twice made the final of the Masters in London, again losing to Higgins in 1999, before an even more agonising defeat in 2000. Matthew Stevens got the better of the Irishman 10-8 in the decider but the match is best remembered for Doherty missing the final black of a maximum break attempt. He later told The Irish Times missing that black was worse than losing the match.Ken Doherty at Goffs in Co Kildare in 1998. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/Inpho “There was only one maximum at the [Wembley] Conference Centre before, that was Kirk Stevens in 1984, which was like 16 years previous. There’s only been five maximums I think in the 50 years of the Masters. To have been on that rostrum would have been lovely,” he said before last year’s edition in London.A magnificent tactician and competitor in his pomp, Doherty’s fighting qualities made him easy to support. Perhaps that determination can be traced back to a challenging upbringing in Dublin. His father died when he was young and Doherty says his mother “was fighting all her life” for better for her family. Money was tight and Doherty procured a cue from Jason’s for £2. He told a 2022 documentary: “Anything I ever won from the Saturday morning handicaps in Jason’s to the money that I might have hustled in the Cosmo [snooker hall in Dublin] over the years, all won with this cue. It was the best two pounds I ever spent.”He became renowned for comebacks, none more so than in his remarkable run to the world final in 2003.He won 10-9 in the first round, 13-12 in the second and then came from 15-9 down against Paul Hunter in the semi-final, before hauling Mark Williams back to 12 all from 10-2 behind in the final. He went on to lose to the Welshman 18-16. It was a crushing blow. In 2016, he recalled: “Ah, I was so devastated. I don’t think I ever really got over it.”He never got back to another Triple Crown final but he got to provisional world number one in 2007. The last of his six ranking titles came in Malta in 2006. After years of attempting to recapture his best form, he has decided that enough is enough.He intends to continue to play seniors events and commentary work for the BBC but has retired his card on the professional tour.“It’s just gotten so harder as I’ve gotten older,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland. “When you remember all the good days and you can’t replicate that and you can’t play as well as you used to, it becomes hard work and a bit more frustrating.” We’ll all remember the good days.