Mark Williams Would Run the M4 Naked for a Fourth World Title — and He Might Just Do It
There are bold statements, and then there are Mark Williams statements. "I'd run down the M4 from London to Cardiff naked" is how the three-time world champion has chosen to frame his ambitions at this year's World Championship. Coming from almost anyone else, you'd dismiss it as dressing-room bravado. Coming from Williams, you reach for the traffic update app just in case.
He has previous, after all. When Williams beat John Higgins 18-16 in a breathless 2018 final at the Crucible — adding a third world title to those he claimed in 2000 and 2003 — he turned up to his post-match press conference wearing nothing but a towel, honouring a pre-tournament promise he'd made to the world's media. The man is nothing if not a man of his word.
History Within Reach
At 51, the boy from Cwm — a small village nestled near Ebbw Vale in the south Wales valleys — is not merely hoping for a sentimental last hurrah. He is genuinely hunting history. Should Williams lift the trophy at the Crucible this year, he would surpass Ronnie O'Sullivan as the oldest world champion the sport has ever seen. That is a remarkable sentence to be able to write about a man who turned professional in 1992 and has been rattling frames ever since.
He came agonisingly close to that landmark just twelve months ago. Williams reached the 2024 final — becoming the oldest finalist in the tournament's history in the process — before being edged out 18-12 by the brilliant Zhao Xintong, who made history of his own as the first Chinese, and first Asian, world champion. It was a defeat that stung, but one that also proved, emphatically, that Williams belongs in these conversations.
"I'd do anything to get another title," he admitted ahead of this year's tournament. "But the years go by and you're less likely to win it." There's a quiet honesty to that which sits alongside the jokes about motorway nudity — a man who has seen enough of snooker to know how fragile opportunity can be.
The Body Has Questions, But Williams Has Answers
What makes Williams' continued presence at the top of the game all the more extraordinary is that he is doing it while managing a cluster of physical and psychological challenges that would have seen lesser players quietly fade from the scene.
His eyesight has deteriorated significantly in recent years, and he is awaiting lens replacement surgery. It is a procedure he approaches with understandable caution. "If it goes wrong, that's the end," he said candidly. He pointed to the experience of former professional Anthony Hamilton, whose career was compromised by the glare of television lights following similar surgery. "Eventually I'll get my eyes done, but whether or not that's this year, next year, I don't know."
Then, following the Tour Championship in Manchester earlier this year, Williams disclosed something that will have sent a chill through his supporters — the yips. That dreaded word in snooker: a sudden, inexplicable breakdown in muscle memory, most often affecting the cue action's finer points. Williams described it with characteristic bluntness. "I'm like a paranoid mess at the minute, because I'm just thinking, I'm not going to screw it back, and I'm snatching. And yeah, it's not great."
His solution? Old-fashioned graft. "I'm not putting in enough work. I'm going to come in now and try and play most days until the World Championship just to try and get that timing back." No sports psychologist, no retreat. Just Williams and a practice table, doing what he has always done.
Still Winning, Still Fighting
For all the talk of ailments, Williams arrived at Sheffield with a reminder of what he is still capable of. His victory at the Xi'an Grand Prix earlier in 2025 — beating Shaun Murphy to claim the title — made him the oldest ranking event winner in the modern era. That is not a man shuffling towards retirement. That is a man with unfinished business.
The Crucible has a long memory and a fondness for theatre, and few players provide it quite like Williams. He is surly when he needs to be, funny when he wants to be, and brilliant more often than he lets on. Whether he can navigate seventeen days of pressure, battle his own eyes and nerve endings, and join an elite handful of players to have won the world title four times — joining Higgins, O'Sullivan, Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry in that conversation — remains to be seen.
But if he does? Start clearing the hard shoulder. He's promised, and this particular Welshman always pays his debts.
