The most challenging time of Rob Milkins’s life began with a jokey text from his sister.
It was approaching Christmas in 2021 when she messaged to say she had Covid, mentioning in light-hearted fashion that she had never felt so rough.
Heartbreakingly, it was the last string of messages the pair exchanged before her death.
His mother died when he was 19, his father eight years later, and now his only sibling had passed away, too. With that, life unravelled for Milkins, not just because of his sister but, he suggests, because he had not fully come to terms with the deaths of his parents.
It all reached a head on his 46th birthday while preparing for the opening ceremony of the Turkish Open. One drink turned to considerably more before, as he puts it, “things got out of hand”. “The one good thing about it is I can’t really remember much about it,” says Milkins. “But I made a big mistake.”
He became embroiled in an altercation with World Snooker chairman Jason Ferguson and ended up in hospital, for which he was fined £7,000. Apologies were quickly delivered and he sought help in the immediate aftermath with Tony Adams’s Sporting Chance.
Within one meeting with his counsellor, he felt the fog begin to lift and the lows quickly turned to highs. “If that Turkey experience hadn’t happened, I might not have won Gibraltar,” he says.
That success in Gibraltar in 2022 — his first ranking tournament win in 27 years as a pro — and a significant £300,000 payday for winning the Welsh Open in February paved the way for him to be seeded for the World Championship, which starts this weekend.
“I’ve had so many ups and downs,” he says. “After that first Sporting Chance session, I knew it was the best thing I could do. I thought it was all to do with my sister but it was a lot to do with my mum. I didn’t realise how much I was struggling mentally.”
By the end of six sessions, Milkins and his counsellor decided help was no longer needed, although the option for further counselling is there if required.
World Snooker clearly think that he is going in the right direction. In the aftermath of the Turkey low, his walk-in song I Am a Cider Drink by the Wurzels was replaced by another of their records, I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester.
Milkins has never made it past the second round at the Crucible, but going into this year’s tournament his belief is completely different. “I’m going in as a seed with a bit more pressure,” he says. “But what’s the pressure really? If I lose, the worst that can happen is I walk away for a couple of months and reflect on a great season. But I’m feeling sharp, I’m hoping for a half-decent run.”
That attitude is helped by him having been able to pay off his mortgage this year and bank some money.
He cannot entirely explain quite how the turnaround has come so late in his career. “When I won Gibraltar, it was like somebody was looking down on me — actually a few of them!” he says.
“It was like fate, like it was meant to happen. I’d been to six ranking semi-finals before but never behind that. Now I know I don’t bottle it at the business end of tournaments.”
