Who Is Terry Griffiths? What Happened To Welsh Retired professional snooker player? – Terence Martin Griffiths OBE is a retired professional snooker player from Wales who is currently working as a coach and doing commentary. He was born on October 16, 1947. At the age of thirty, Griffiths made the transition from amateur to professional sports in June of 1978. Prior to that, he had already won a number of amateur championships, including the Welsh Amateur Championship in 1975 and the English Amateur Championships in 1977 and 1978.
After competing in his second professional competition, he was able to earn a spot in the 1979 World Snooker Championship. He made it all the way to the championship match, when he triumphed over Dennis Taylor by a score of 24 frames to 16. After Alex Higgins in 1972, this was only the second time that a qualifier had won the World Snooker Championship. Since then, only Shaun Murphy in 2005 has been able to replicate this feat. Griffiths once again made it to the final round of the competition in the year 1988. As the match progressed, he was even with Steve Davis 8–8, but ultimately lost 11–18.
In each of the nine years that Griffiths competed in the World Championship, beginning in 1984 and continuing until 1992, he advanced to the quarterfinals or higher. Through his victories at the Masters in 1980 and the UK Championship in 1982, he was able to complete the Triple Crown of snooker matches. Griffiths finished in second place at the Masters golf tournament three times and made it all the way to the final of the European Open in 1989, when he was defeated by John Parrott in the deciding frame.
Griffiths’s ambition to equal Davis’s technique led to modifications in technique, which observers have suggested lost him his natural flare for playing. Despite the fact that he also won numerous other events, Griffiths’s determination to match Davis’s led to these adjustments. In 1996, he made the announcement that he would be retiring from professional snooker in order to take on the role of director of coaching for the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. He went on to create a teaching career that includes working with some of the most accomplished players in the sport, including Stephen Hendry, Mark Williams, and Ding Junhui.