'Paul was fun': Remembering the sport's taken talent a score of years on.

Everything the Leeds-born talent ever wanted to do was compete on the baize.

A sporting bug, sparked at the age of three with the help of a tiny snooker set on his parents' coffee table in the city of Leeds, would culminate in a pro playing days that saw him win half a dozen major wins in a six-year span.

This year marks two decades since the adored Hunter succumbed to cancer, mere days prior to his 28th birthday.

But notwithstanding the tragic departure of a once-in-a-generation player that transcended the game he loved, his influence and memory on snooker and those who followed his career persist as powerful today.

'The game was his life': Early Beginnings

"It was impossible to foresee in a million years our son would become a pro on the circuit," Kristina Hunter recalls.

"However he just loved it."

Hunter's father remembers how his son "cared little for anything else" other than snooker as a youth.

"He never stopped," he notes. "He competed every night after school."

After successfully badgering 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 transition from miniature games with remarkable ease.

His natural ability would be nurtured by the former world title holder Joe Johnson, from neighbouring Bradford, at a now former establishment in the area of Yeadon.

Rapid Rise: From Teenager to Champion

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

It paid off in spades. Within half a decade, their young son had won his initial major win, the 1998 Welsh Open.

Considered one of snooker's most difficult competitions to win because of the lineup featuring exclusively the best, Hunter was victorious a trio of times, in the early 2000s.

'Paul was fun': The Man Behind the Cue

But for all his achievements in competition, away from the game Hunter's approachable nature never left him.

"He was incredibly composed did Paul," Alan says. "He got on with everybody."

"If you met him you'd take to him," Kristina continues. "Paul was fun. He'd make you comfortable."

Hunter's wife Lindsey, with whom he had a daughter, describes him as an "wonderful, youthful, and fun personality" who was "funny, kind" and "always the last to leave the party".

With his effortless appeal, handsome features and straight-talking media manner, not to mention his immense skill, Hunter quickly became snooker's pin-up for the new millennium.

No wonder then, that he was dubbed 'The Snooker World's Beckham'.

A Brave Battle: A Fight Against Cancer

In 2005, a year that should have marked the zenith of his talent, Hunter was diagnosed with cancer and would later undergo cancer therapy.

Multiple accounts from across the professional tour highlight the man's extraordinary dedication to fulfill commitments to exhibitions, events and press interviews, all while enduring treatment.

Despite difficult symptoms, Hunter played on through the illness and received a tumultuous reception at The World Championship arena when he turned out for the World Championships that year.

When he succumbed in the mid-2000s, snooker's family-like circuit lost one of its most popular brothers.

"It is tragic," Kristina says. "It is a terrible thing for any mum and dad to suffer such a loss."

An Enduring Legacy: Inspiring Youth

Hunter's true legacy would be felt not in royal circles but in snooker halls and clubs across the UK.

The Paul Hunter Foundation, set up before his death, would provide free snooker sessions to youths all over the country.

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

"The idea was for a platform to help get kids off the street," one official said.

The Foundation helped pave the way for a significant coaching programme, which has provided playing opportunities to children all over the world.

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

Always Remembered: 20 Years Later

Archive videos of their son's matches on YouTube help his parents stay "close to him".

"I can access it and I can watch Paul whenever I wish," Kristina says. "It's wonderful!"

"We are happy to speak about Paul," she adds. "Before it would be tears, but I'd rather somebody talk than him not be recalled."

Although he never won the World Championship, the common opinion that Hunter would have gone on to lift snooker's top honor is ingrained in the sport's folklore.

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

But for all his accomplishments, 20 years after his death it is Paul Hunter's spirit, as much his spectacular skill with a cue, that will ensure he is forever celebrated.