Ronnie O'Sullivan is happy and he isn't sure exactly why. It could be the Nevada sunshine, though he hasn't seen much of that in the past three days, playing eight-ball pool from 10 o'clock in the morning to 10 o'clock at night, stuck inside The Venetian, a windowless self- contained town that calls itself a hotel in this bit of Las Vegas. It could be the thrill of learning a newish sport, though it didn't seem to be thrilling him too much on Tuesday when, frustrated at some pretty miserable play, he broke his cue over his knee in anger.
It could be the chance to get away from the UK for a bit, away from the recognition, the pressure, the expectation that comes with being the best at a sport that people still care about despite itself. But actually he thrives off that, he says. And anyway, he misses his girlfriend Jo and their five-month-old child Lily too much to be really enjoying the break. Maybe, ironically in a town that celebrates fakery and escapism so joyously, the real reason Ronnie is happy here is that Ronnie feels he is able to just be Ronnie.
"I'm not allowed to be that person back home," he said, sipping a bottle of iced water beside The Venetian's fourth-floor swimming pool on Friday, after failing to get through to the last 36 of the world's richest eight-ball event, the $2m (£1.1m) IPT North American Open, and taking home a mere $10,000. "When I broke the cue over my knee I thought I'd be in trouble. I thought, 'They don't need me coming over here and giving them bad press.'
But Jon [Denny, the executive director of the American pool tour] just said, 'Hey, we want Ronnie to be Ronnie. Dude, if you want to snap the cue on your knee just go ahead. It looks great on TV.' Normally I'm not allowed to be like this."
The cue was borrowed anyway - O'Sullivan hasn't bought one for himself yet because he says he doesn't know a good one from a bad one. He hadn't even played eight-ball pool until a week before this tournament.
So how did he end up here? "I was reading a snooker magazine - I'll read everything about snooker: clubs, juniors, leagues - and right at the back of the magazine is this advert about a million-dollar tournament. I thought they must be having a laugh but I rang them up. I said, 'I'm Ronnie O'Sullivan. Could I please speak to Kevin Trudeau [whose $14m is paying the prize money and bills for this first year of the tour] about the pool.' He rang back about five minutes later, we talked, boom, boom boom, and here I am."
So is he thoroughly sick of snooker and about to defect? "No. I've been telling people for 13 years that I'm sick of snooker but people still keep thinking that me saying it is interesting. The thing with me is that when I'm up it's obvious and when I'm down it's obvious. But that's just the way I am. Snooker is the guv'nor, the king of cue sports."
But can it really be a buzz to be a born-again journeyman, to go from top dog to enthusiastic puppy, back in L plates, learning his trade again, among the middle-rankers of a sport that has, up to now, clung to the small-time, smoke-and-grime feel that snooker has spent 30 years trying to scrub off its fingernails?
"It's not about winning for me, I get the buzz being out there knowing that I'm entertaining people. I don't need the cash, I invested my snooker money well, I have a nice portfolio of property. But I need the buzz. I started feeling it again here the other night when I got knocked out, I started feeling, 'This is my arena.' Like Alex Higgins, when he walked into a room, you couldn't take your eyes off him. I felt like that on Thursday. There was an atmosphere in the room, an air of danger."
And, he's too loyal to say it, the only danger in a snooker tournament nowadays is that you might catch something from all that coughing. He loves it, but sometimes, like a family, it drives you mad.
O'Sullivan doesn't want to talk about his mum and dad. Every single one of the people around him and around the IPT make it clear that I am not expected to talk about them. And it wasn't my intention to. But it's impossible to understand why he might feed off that sort of dark electricity without thinking about his dad's Soho sex shop business, the murder that put him in jail and the tax-evasion charges that put his mum inside, too. It can't have been a childhood without its share of shadows.
And under O'Sullivan's very real contentment there's still a granite-hard street kid egging Ronnie on. While we were chatting in the cafe of the well-appointed spa, sipping banana smoothies among women in white gowns, a couple of drunken American college boys came and sat down at the table next to us, to join a couple of girls. It got noisy. Ronnie, quietly, asked if we could go somewhere else where we could hear ourselves talk.
One of the idiot college kids heard him and said something along the lines of "Eat your food or get the hell out of here" to Ronnie and me. I pretended not to hear him because I'm a thoroughly middle-class wimpy grammar-school boy who has never started a fight in his life. O'Sullivan, however, isn't. As we left, Ronnie lurched towards the college kid but didn't actually touch him. The kid shouted abuse as we moved away. Ronnie shouted some back. We walked away. Nothing happened really but, two minutes later, Ronnie was angry at himself for even thinking about getting into a situation.
Despite not talking about his mum and dad, family does obviously mean a lot to O'Sullivan. He is, after all, a dad himself now and he thinks that his daughter and girlfriend's influence have changed the way he approaches life and sport. "I'm the first to admit I was the most selfish man on earth, totally with the blinkers on. Nothing would ever have got in the way of work. I wanted to be tops, don't even talk to me about slowing down. At first after Lily was born I tried to carry on like that and I soon found out that it didn't work. Now I try to be there whenever I can, not be out at my mates' house drinking cups of tea. Now I just have to look at Lily's photo and I crumble."
All of which makes you wonder why he doesn't just pack it all in and build the house in the country with the swimming pool, horses and tennis court that he has already promised himself on Lily's behalf. In the end maybe it's all about being the best at something for even longer, keeping the buzz going as best he can despite being pulled in other directions as well.
"I've got maybe another five or six years at the top in snooker. But the guy to beat here is Efren Reyes and he's 51. You aren't going to have 51-year-olds as the guys to beat in snooker. I can have a longer career here if this ITP tour succeeds. But I won't be playing pool in minor tournaments over here if it doesn't."
And when O'Sullivan talks about what he has to learn to get better at pool you can see the passion he has for the sport, hands waving, words spilling out, you can see the kick that not being the best has given him. "I phoned Jo up on Thursday and I told her that I lost. She said that I sounded happy. She knows what I'm like when I've come home from tournaments having lost. I said I was happy, because I thought I was starting to get to grips with the game.
"I told her I'd got that old fire back, that I could feel the warrior back in me. It's what I miss. Two days ago I thought it would take me two years to conquer this sport. Now I think I can do it in six months."