Ali Carter has revealed how Ronnie O’Sullivan’s father offered him unconditional support while he was undergoing cancer treatment.
Carter made the revelation while discussing his long-running relationship with Ronnie O’Sullivan, which he now describes as having “no hate” but also “no nothing”.
The 47-year-old was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2013 before being given the all-clear following surgery.
He was then diagnosed with lung cancer less than a year later and underwent chemotherapy before returning to competitive action in October, 2014.
During that difficult period, Carter received several missed calls from an unfamiliar number.
He eventually answered expecting it could be a consultant, only to discover it was O’Sullivan’s father, who had been released from a lengthy prison sentence just a few years earlier.
“Ali, it’s Ronnie O’Sullivan senior,” he told Carter. “This is unconditional, anything you want, anything I can do for you, consider it done.”
“You’re an Essex boy, and I just want you to know, anything I can do.”
Carter, speaking on the Talking Snooker podcast, admitted he had never even met O’Sullivan Snr at the time.
“I’d never met the guy,” Carter said. “I went: ‘Thanks, Ron. That’s really nice of you to say.’ So there you go.”
Carter, a recent winner of the English Open in Brentwood, said he now gets on extremely well with O’Sullivan Snr having spent time with him in Sheffield and enjoyed several coffees together.
That stands in stark contrast to his relationship with O’Sullivan himself, which has been one of the most talked-about rivalries in snooker over the last couple of decades.
Despite their numerous clashes, Carter insists there is no hatred between them any more.
“I think it’s the Ronnie fans and not necessarily snooker fans that generally want to put the knife in,” Carter said.
“I mean, me and Ronnie…we’re not fine, [but] there’s nothing. There’s no relationship there, there’s no hate, there’s no nothing.”
Carter and O’Sullivan first became close while practicing together as teenagers at Witham Snooker Bowl in Essex.
The pair played against each other every day, with Carter crediting O’Sullivan with helping prepare him for the 1999 Benson & Hedges Championship, which he went on to win.
But the Captain believes their relationship began to change once they started meeting at tournaments on the main tour.
“After spending a lot of time with Ronnie, and he probably knew at the time how good I was, I just felt that when we went to tournaments, he wasn’t really the same towards me,” he said.
“Looking back, I probably took it personally. I think he’s like that with everyone. It wasn’t just me. But I’m not everyone, am I? I can only speak from my own perspective.”
“I just thought, well, if he can’t be bothered to talk to me, then I can’t be bothered to talk to him. That’s fine. We both know where we stand then.”
The rivalry subsequently produced several memorable encounters, none more notorious than their meeting at the 2018 World Championship.
Carter felt O’Sullivan was attempting to dominate the arena through his “table-craft” and decided he would not allow himself to be intimidated.
“On that given day, I thought no, I’m not having this. I’m not going to be bullied,” Carter said.
The pair brushed shoulders during the match, leading to an angry exchange at the table.
Carter won the second-round contest at the Crucible Theatre, and the seven-time ranking event winner revealed that O’Sullivan later approached him at a hotel in York.
“Ronnie came over to me. He said, ‘Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened in Sheffield,’” Carter recalled.
“I said, ‘mate, it’s all heat of the moment stuff. The temperature’s running high. You want to win, I want to win. It’s no problem.’”
Then in 2020 ahead of their semi-final clash at the Northern Ireland Open, Carter told Alan McManus that any needle they had was “water under the bridge”.
When the pair next crossed paths, however, O’Sullivan confronted him about the interview. “He’s gone, ‘Oi Al, I never apologised to you. That was your fault,’” Carter remembered.
“I said, ‘What? So I just made it up then, did I? That you came up to me in York and apologised?’
“He went, ‘Yeah, you did’ and had a little laugh, and that was that.”
Carter said he was left wondering whether O’Sullivan was simply “getting me at it”.
“The only way I can take myself out of that situation is just have nothing to do with it any more, not speak to him. It’s pointless.” he said.
Carter has twice finished runner-up to O’Sullivan at the World Snooker Championship, while the Rocket also defeated him in an acrimonious Masters final in 2024.
They most recently faced one another at the German Masters in January, a match Carter won 5-3.
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