Reanne Evans aims to bridge gender gap at World Snooker Championship

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/mar/05/reanne-evans-gender-gap-world-snooker-championship

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Reanne Evans’s life could be about to change forever. The 29-year-old is a 10-times world snooker champion but until this week when it was announced she is attempting to become the first woman to qualify for next month’s world championship at the Crucible, few outside the sport knew her name.

That is because outstanding talent does not earn you many plaudits beyond the women’s game. It does not earn you any media coverage, and it certainly does not earn you much money. Evans still lives at home with her parents and nine-year-old daughter Lauren – practising in the snooker hall her dad built in their back garden – she simply cannot afford to move out.

However, should Evans win only one of her three qualifying matches for the men’s world championship she will pocket £6,000 – more than the total prize money she has earned in five years of winning world titles. “The most I’ve ever won was £1,500 and the lowest was £450. That was when Ronnie [O’Sullivan] won it and he got £250,000.” O’Sullivan himself has eulogised over Evans’s technique – she uses her left hand instead of the rest – but despite support for Evans from some of snooker’s biggest male stars the gender pay gap remains huge.

“It is ridiculous,” says Evans. “You’d expect to earn a little bit of a living for being the top sportswoman in your sport. I just find it flabbergasting. I don’t expect to be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds because we don’t play in big tournaments or on TV, and the standard isn’t as good as the men’s, but you shouldn’t be losing money. I’d like to see if the men were in that situation whether they’d all still be playing now. Would they be playing for £450?” she asks. Would they also be happy playing in front of paltry crowds? It is jaw dropping to hear Evans state that the crowd watching a women’s world title match is between five and 20 people.

Sexism, too may be a barrier. Evans says derogatory comments are par for the course. “You get it a lot. I was in one tournament, the world under-21s, and there was a New Zealand referee who was refereeing ladies’ matches and saying they shouldn’t be playing. He got kicked out the tournament for it. I complained straight away. He got a ban from his association as well.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Evans might pick up a snooker cue having been born into a family where her mum, dad and two older brothers all played. However, it was not until she was 13 – milling about at her family’s snooker hall in some “bunny slippers” – that she first played a game. “My brother was late for a tournament, and the guy he was meant to play said: ‘Pick up a cue and give me a game’.”

Evans played a 20 break that day but was unsurprised by her instant affinity with the sport. “It’s in the blood,” she says. At 16 she was given forms to enter the women’s world championship – at the time she says she did not even know that ladies’ tournaments existed, and at her first attempt she made the semi-finals.

Over a decade later she has won 10 successive world titles and established herself as the most dominant female player in her sport. But in the past 12 months Evans has ventured beyond women’s snooker, and in May last year began competing against the men. It started with a Snooker Legends tournament at Newbury, playing doubles with Jimmy White – “His first frame he made a century, then I made a century. I was shaking so much I don’t know how the ball went in the pocket. It was a fantastic experience. Hopefully it will hold me in good stead when I play these sorts of matches against the men.” In 2013 she became the first woman to compete in the final stages of a world-ranking event when she qualified for the Wuxi Classic beating Thailand’s Thepchaiya Un-Nooh.

Asked about the proudest moment of her career, however, and Evans beams. “For me personally, it was in the ladies’ worlds when I was seven-and-a-half-months pregnant. I think that’s my biggest achievement. I was on a run of so many world titles, I wondered if I should be entering. Then I thought: ‘Oh just go for it and enjoy it,’ so I entered. I couldn’t even use the table properly, I had to use a rest which I don’t like using. But I won it. It’s because I had my daughter’s help – two against one, you see,” she laughs.