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Ronnie O'Sullivan is at home in Essex watching the final of the French Open between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. "Great players don't choke. Djokovic should have got beaten by [Jo-Wilfried] Tsonga, but he whupped the geeza. I love the Djok. I'm a Djok man. I think if he beats Nadal here, Nadal will crumble. It'll do him." I tell him I've spoken to Peters and O'Sullivan tells me that he wouldn't have won the world championship last month without his help. I also tell him that he doesn't think choking is a problem in sport and O'Sullivan says he couldn't disagree more. "Thank God for 'em." What does he mean? "Well, without chokers I wouldn't have won so many trophies."

Can he tell when it is happening? "Oh yeah. You can smell it. There's only two players I've played who don't choke, and that's John Higgins and Stephen Hendry."

How would he define choking? "It's when you can't get over the winning line. They just keep falling short, and you know they're going to fall short. They're good at falling short." O'Sullivan thinks people are more prone to suffer in certain sports. "Golf can be a tough one. On the green, putting. Snooker is a tough one. Anything with a still ball, it's like a penalty – if you're playing football and a cross comes in and you hit the ball, anything can happen, but when you've got a penalty, that's different. Boomf!"

I ask him if he's ever choked. No, he says, in 2006 his problem was simply not wanting to be there. "I was just so unhappy. I thought: it's only a poxy game of snooker, I just want to get out of here. But I probably wouldn't do the same thing now because I've been taught by Steve to put those emotions to the side."

He's still thinking about whether he has ever choked. Actually, he says, as a kid he hated it when his dad came to watch him. "He expected me to pot every ball. It was a pressure I could have done without. I started winning only when he stopped coming to watch me. I can still hear his voice in the background now: 'Well, why'd you play that shot, why did you miss that one?' I'm four times world champion, I shouldn't really be having that dialogue in my head."
Professionally, he says, one time does come to mind. "I played Hendry and tried to protect a lead. I thought, I'm in front here, and I missed one ball and never saw another and he beat me. That was the biggest lesson I ever learned. I was never a choker, never a bottler, never one to defend a lead, but I thought on that occasion maybe I could play conservative. Afterwards, I thought never again am I going to go out like that. The best players in the world are the aggressive ones – it makes opponents choke when they feel they've got you breathing down their neck."

Djokovic is serving to stay in the match. The most nerveless player in today's tennis double-faults and is done for. "He just missed," Ronnie says. "Great champions don't choke. I don't think the moment got to him. I think he just made a mistake." Isn't that a choke? "Nah. If Tim Henman had done it, yeah." And Andy Murray? "Yeah, he's a bit of a choker, isn't he?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jun/22/sports-stars-who-choke