The Wise Guy

It could be said, without much of a stretch, that what Wiseman has sought so desperately as an adult is simply what he lacked so desperately as a child - that dazzle of excitement he could never find amid the factory fumes and lunch buckets in Windsor, as well as that sweet scent of money that all too often was in short supply growing up.

After his parents separated when he was 9 years old, Wiseman and his three brothers - Richard, Douglas, and Daniel - lived with his mother, Patricia, for five years in a low-income housing project.

"Things weren't always easy, especially for my mom, who not only was raising four young boys all by herself but the oldest suffering from epilepsy," he said. "I know I gave her problems, too. I missed school, I cussed, I didn't always do my chores on time, and once I tried skipping my newspaper route by throwing all the papers into some empty field. My mom found out about it, drove me back to that field to get the papers, and made me deliver them."

His mother, who died a decade ago, was his "hero," "a very strong lady" who eventually became a bank manager and whose "genuine heart" he's convinced he inherited. His father, Douglas Sr., a furniture salesman with a gift-of-gab but who drank himself to death, was an entirely different matter. "He didn't play a big role in my life," Wiseman said. "He wasn't a family type of guy, and after my parents divorced, he'd come around once a week, on Sundays, sometimes to take us to the poolroom. But there were times that I would sneak out of the window just to avoid being with him that day."

Wiseman added: "Because of the way my father was and the split between my parents and the hardship on my mom, I think it just made [mom and us boys] tougher, made us stick together very tight."

His older brother, Richard, the one with epilepsy, was the first of the boys to play at Gilly's, a flight upstairs from the K-Mart-type store in which he worked. "But Richard wasn't very good, was uncoordinated," Wiseman said. "And he used to blow his paycheck [playing for money] up there all the time."

Although Ronnie, unlike Richard, showed great natural ability from the get-go with a cue in his hand, he was more the baseball player, a third baseman as well as a right-handed pitcher with a nasty curve. But, by 20, it was the accumulation of all those prematurely hurled curves that ultimately did him in, caused him to throw his arm out so badly that he needed an operation to correct a severe case of tendinitis.

"My arm hurt so much I couldn't even lift it to play table tennis," he recalled. "That's why I started playing snooker so much. It was one of the few sports that didn't require me to lift my arm."

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