Stephen Gordon Hendry MBE (born 13 January 1969) is a Scottish retired professional snooker player and a current commentator and pundit.

Hendry's form became less consistent after his sixth world title in 1996 and his career declined in the 2000s, his play increasingly affected by the yips.

He qualified for the 2012 World Championship, where he made his 27th consecutive Crucible appearance, but he announced his retirement from professional snooker at age 43 following a 2–13 defeat to Stephen Maguire in the quarter-finals.

[3] Irene, who worked as a secretary, became pregnant, and she and Gordon moved into a bedroom of his grandmother's flat in St Leonard's, Edinburgh.

[3] By the late 1970s, Hendry's father and a business partner were running three greengrocer's shops, located in Inverkeithing, Dalgety Bay, and Dunfermline.

His father moved to a small flat in nearby Broxburn but travelled frequently with Hendry to snooker tournaments around the country.

[8] After winning both the Scottish and British Under-16 Championships,[9][10] he made his first televised appearance in 1983 on Junior Pot Black, where he defeated Nick Pearce but then lost to Steve Ventham in the semi-finals.

[21] In his debut season as a professional, Hendry earnt his first ranking point at the 1986 Classic, eliminating Dessie Sheehan, Graham Miles and Silvino Francisco before losing 4-5 to Neal Foulds.

[10][24] He won four qualifying matches to reach the main stage of the 1986 World Snooker Championship, losing 8–10 to Willie Thorne in the first round.

[31] Having won three qualifying matches to reach the main stage of the 1987 World Championship, he then eliminated Thorne and Steve Longworth to progress to the quarter-finals.

[40] By the end of his third professional season, he had reached number four in the world rankings and was named the BBC Scotland Sports Personality of the Year for 1987.

Aged 21 years and 106 days, he superseded Alex Higgins as the sport's youngest world champion, a record he still held as of 2020.

[54] In the 1993–94 season, he reached the final of the UK Championship but lost 6–10 to 17-year-old Ronnie O'Sullivan, who won his maiden ranking title at the event.

[58][59] In the 1994–95 season, he won his third UK Championship, defeating Ken Doherty 10–5 in the final and setting a new record for the most centuries in a professional match, with seven.

[citation needed] Hendry regained the world number one ranking for the 2005–06 season due to his consistency in reaching the latter stages of tournaments without, by his own admission, reproducing his form of old.

[73] Afterward, he expressed his frustration with his form and revealed that he has been suffering from "the yips" for ten years, leaving him unable to cue through the ball and causing him to miss routine shots.

[78] In the 2011–12 season, after losing to Robert Milkins in the first round of the Shanghai Masters, Hendry fell to 21st in the world rankings, ending his 23 years in the top 16.

[82] He lost 1–5 to James Wattana in the German Masters qualifiers, failing to reach the final stages of a ranking tournament for the first time in 15 years.

[83] He qualified for the Welsh Open by whitewashing Kurt Maflin 4–0 and then defeated reigning Masters champion Neil Robertson 4–1 in the first round.

[92] However, after losing 2–13 to Maguire in the quarter-finals, Hendry announced his retirement from professional snooker at the age of 43, citing dissatisfaction with his standard of play and difficulty balancing competitive, commercial, and personal commitments.

[94] After delaying his return to competition several times during the 2020–21 season,[95][96] he played his first professional match in almost nine years at the 2021 Gibraltar Open, losing 1–4 to Matthew Selt in the first round.

[117] At the 2023 World Championship, he lost 4–10 in the first qualifying round to his ex-wife's nephew James Cahill, after which he said he still had "a very distant dream" that he would one day compete at the Crucible again.

[119] After losing 0–4 to Fergal O'Brien in qualifying for the 2023 English Open,[120] Hendry stated in a podcast interview that he was considering retiring again, calling his performances "embarrassing" and acknowledging that he had not been practicing for events.

John Higgins, Neil Robertson, Mark Selby, and Judd Trump have also surpassed Hendry in terms of career century breaks.

In August 2011, HM Revenue and Customs successfully applied to Glasgow Sheriff Court to liquidate the assets of Stephen Hendry Snooker Ltd, the company set up to manage his sponsorships and promotion, following its failure to pay an £85,000 tax bill.

[146] In 2014, two years after his initial retirement, Hendry—then aged 45—left his wife to pursue a relationship with 26-year-old children's entertainer and actress Lauren Thundow, whom he had met while she was working at Snooker Legends exhibition events.

[149] Amanda Hendry subsequently accused him of cheating on her with a woman half his age, of leaving her "destitute", and of rarely visiting his children.

[150] During divorce proceedings, accountants failed to uncover significant wealth held by Hendry; his wife said she did not know what happened to his tournament winnings, commenting "we never spent any of it".

[11] In 2022, he launched a YouTube channel, Stephen Hendry's Cue Tips, which presents instructional content as well as conversations over frames of snooker with players and other personalities.

[153] Hendry has a single-figure golf handicap and enjoys poker and football; he supports Scottish team Hearts of Midlothian.