Gunnell tribute to 'biggest star'

Shropshire snooker professional Adrian Gunnell today paid tribute to "the game's biggest star" after Paul Hunter lost his battle against cancer. Hunter was diagnosed with dozens of neuro endocrine tumours of the lining of his stomach in March 2005 and died at Kirkwood Hospice in Huddersfield last night.

Telford-based Gunnell today joined the rest of the snooker fraternity in paying tribute to a player who won the prestigious Masters title at Wembley on three occasions.

"I'm still in shock and I can't take it in," said a sombre Gunnell, who played Hunter, pictured, as an amateur.

"I got a phone call last night to tell me the news and I nearly took the car off the road.

"I had to sit on the side of the road for 40 minutes just trying to get my head around it.

"I have been in touch with his manager every couple of weeks since the treatment started but we heard last Friday that Paul had been taken into a hospice.

"That was the first time I wondered whether he would make it.

"Before then, the only thing I wondered was whether he would recapture his old form because he was such a super fit-young lad who had so much going for him with a young baby daughter," said Gunnell.

"Paul was an incredible talent and that, coupled with his charisma, made him arguably the biggest star we had.

"There was no doubt he would have won the World Championship because he had too much talent not to.

"But the way he handled his illness was just as impressive as anything he achieved on the snooker table.

"I was with him two days after he was diagnosed in China and, from that moment on, he has been in excruciating pain pretty much all the time and has never complained to anybody once.

"I have known him since he was 13 and the biggest tribute I can pay is that he didn't change one bit from then despite all the success he had - and you can't say that about many sportsmen."

An instinctively attacking player, Hunter turned professional at the age of 16 in 1995 and won his first major title, the 1998 Welsh Open, at the age of 19.

But he will be best remembered for his exploits at the Wembley Masters where a string of memorable comebacks saw him claim a hat-trick of titles.

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