Evening Standard (London): Knight of the pound table

DOWN in the bowels of Suzy Q's pool shack, my game with Steve Knight is mercifully interrupted when his mobile rings.

Rather than taking a break, though, he just conducts a cheery conversation, phone cradled in his left hand while simultaneously gripping his cue with his right, and somehow still managing to pot every ball. It's unreal.

Beforehand, I'd have happily wagered that, absentminded and one- handed, he couldn't possibly clear the table. Yet you shouldn't back against a man who is not only Britain's best pool player, but can also hustle the hustlers.

His talent for gambling almost outstrips his talent on the table.

Knight's a creature of the night, whose weird twilight existence centres on casinos, poker clubs and pool halls. Sometimes, he'll hit the road in the United States, living out of motels for weeks on end, a strange Limey who gets suspicious looks when he turns up in Hicksville halls.

He wins more from these games than he ever has as a tournament pro. Yet the punt is the thing. The other week, when pounds 8,000 down in a casino, he won pounds 9,500 on a single spin of the roulette wheel. On one night during the World Cup, he had a grand on Ecuador to beat Croatia, winning pounds 7,000.

I'd been told to meet him at 2pm in his local Victoria club where this week he's been preparing for the world pool championships which begin in Cardiff tomorrow. At about 3pm, though, he apologetically calls to explain he'd only just woken up at Steve Knight, one of the leading Britons in the world pool championships which begin tomorrow, makes more from hustling than he does as a professional player home in Vauxhall. His playing partner, Tony Drago, the Maltese snooker star, smiles.

That was Steve; long nightshifts and long lie-ins. He wins far more events than any other Brit but if he practised more, reckoned Drago, he'd be up there alongside pool's legends like the American showman, Earl 'The Pearl' Strickland, and Efren Reyes, a 40- something genius who enjoys Beckham- like adulation in the Philippines.

"Yeah, but rather than be chained to a table for eight hours a day, I'd rather enjoy my life," explains the likeable, surprisingly down-to-earth Mancunian when he finally shows up. "I like to be free, like a bird, flying all over the place."

His kick is always in the unknown.

Like whenever he enters another new pool hall in the US with his sidekick Charlie Williams, a brilliant American player, and there are greenbacks in the air. He makes them sound like something out of The Color of Money, even if a spikyhaired 28-year-old Brit and a babyfaced lad from Florida are hardly Paul Newman and Tom Cruise smooth.

Knight, who turned down offers to become a snooker pro, first tried his hand in the US five years ago, winning a tournament in his first 24 hours in Tulsa. On each visit, his confidence grew. Local legend Williams was amazed when Knight walked into his hall and won $200 off him. Nobody ever did that, so Williams reckoned together they could make a mint on the road.

The well-known Williams waited outside having pointed out potential cash cows for Knight. It could be daunting, but Knight says: "I've got things in my makeup which enable me to lead this life, Americans have a kind of arrogance, so you've got to have front too. You have to be streetwise enough to feel out the place and the opponent. Say or do the wrong thing, and it could get ugly."

Like the night he was at a club outside Miami where the locals had staked a fortune on their baldheaded star man to beat him.

"They were hustling us, we ended up giving a guy who was as good as me a handicap. Everyone's put their shirt on him yet amazingly I win and the whole place goes mad.

"Charlie ends up counting this massive, $4,000 stack of twenty- buck notes, and this big angry guy comes up saying 'You shouldn't bring a hustler into the hall'. But Charlie mutters 'You didn't have to play, did you?' and the bloke punches him in the face, knocks him down. I'll never forget Charlie getting back to his feet, still counting his money, and he hasn't dropped a single cent."

Occasionally, he'll be the victim; the most he's lost on one game is $7,500.

And it's harder these days.

"I'm dead in Florida now. Everyone knows me," he shrugs.

He doesn't bet on pool tournaments these days now that, deliciously, he's sponsored by bookmakers Stan James.

But on the pro circuit, he's known as the 'Knight Rider' and has been known to roar into the arena on a chopper. "People tell me my life's one big party and that's pretty much the way I see it too," he says. "I'm a gambler but I've got a comfortable life, with money to spare and to enjoy myself."

After he's wiped the floor with me one-handed, I ask him what he's got planned for the evening. "Who knows?" he shrugs. "At night, anything could be going."

From the glint in his eye, you can sense why the Knight has a thousand highs.