'Paul was fun': Honoring the sport's taken talent two decades on.

Everything the Leeds-born talent always wished to do was practice the game.

A sporting bug, developed at the tender age of three with the help of a small snooker set on his home's central table in the city of Leeds, would lead to a pro playing days that saw him claim six significant titles in a six-year span.

This year marks a score of years since the adored Hunter succumbed to cancer, mere days prior to his twenty-eighth birthday.

But notwithstanding the passing of a phenomenal skill that went beyond the game he loved, his legacy and impact on snooker and those who were close to him endure as vibrant now.

'The game was his life': Early Beginnings

"We could not have predicted in a million years the boy would become a pro on the circuit," Hunter's mum recalls.

"However he just loved it."

His dad recounts how his son "wasn't bothered about anything else" besides snooker as a youth.

"He never stopped," he says. "He practiced every night after school."

After repeatedly pleading with his dad to take him to a community venue to play on professional-standard tables at the age of eight, the budding player made the jump from table top snooker with remarkable ease.

His raw skill would be coached by the 1986 World Champion Joe Johnson, from neighbouring Bradford, at a now defunct club in the north Leeds suburb of Yeadon.

Quick Success: A Star is Born

With his mother and father's requests to do his homework increasingly falling on deaf ears as the game dominated, his parents took the "gamble" of taking Hunter out of school at the fourteen years old to fully concentrate on carving out a career in the game.

It paid off in spades. Within a short period, their adolescent had won his initial major win, the Welsh Open of 1998.

Considered one of snooker's most difficult competitions to win because of the involvement of exclusively the best, Hunter triumphed a trio of times, in consecutive years.

'Paul was fun': His Enduring Personality

But for all his achievements in competition, away from the game Hunter's down-to-earth charisma never left him.

"He had a great temperament did Paul," Alan says. "He got on with everybody."

"When encountering him you'd like him," Kristina adds. "Paul was fun. He'd make you feel at ease."

Hunter's widow Lindsey, with whom he had a daughter, describes him as an "wonderful, youthful, and fun personality" who was "funny, kind" and "typically the final guest at the party".

With his natural likability, handsome features and straight-talking media manner, not to mention his prodigious ability, Hunter quickly became snooker's poster boy for the new 21st Century.

No wonder then, that he was nicknamed 'The Beckham of the Baize'.

Courage in Crisis: Illness and Resilience

In that year, a year that should have been the height of his career, Hunter was told he had cancer and would later undergo cancer therapy.

Multiple stories from across the snooker circuit highlight the man's extraordinary willingness to keep promises to exhibitions, events and press interviews, all while enduring treatment.

Despite difficult symptoms, Hunter continued to compete through the illness and received a standing ovation at The famous Sheffield venue when he turned out for the World Championships that year.

When he died in autumn 2006, snooker's close-knit fraternity lost one of its best-loved members.

"It is tragic," Kristina says. "No parent should experience any mum and dad to go through that pain."

An Enduring Legacy: Inspiring Youth

Hunter's true contribution would be felt not in high society but in snooker halls and clubs across the UK.

The charity in his name, set up before his death, would provide accessible training to children all over the country.

The scheme was so successful that, according to reports, local youth crime rates in some areas plummeted.

"The aim remained for a program to help get kids off the street," one official said.

The Foundation helped establish the basis for a major coaching programme, which has opened up playing opportunities to children globally.

"Paul would have loved what we've done with the sport and where it is today," a senior official in the sport stated.

Never Forgotten: Two Decades On

Archive videos of their son's matches on YouTube help his parents stay "in touch with his memory".

"I can bring it up and I can watch Paul anytime," Kristina says. "It's wonderful!"

"We don't mind talking about Paul," she adds. "Initially it was painful, but I'd rather somebody remember him than him not be recalled."

Even though he never won the World Championship, the widespread belief that Hunter would have gone on to lift snooker's greatest prize is etched into the sport's folklore.

The Masters, the competition with which he is most synonymous, starts later this month. The winner will lift the Paul Hunter Trophy.

But for all his successes, two decades after his death it is Paul Hunter's personality, as much his dazzling snooker ability, that will ensure he is always remembered.