Alex Higgins:THE BELFAST-BORN former world snooker champion Alex Higgins, who has died aged 61, led a life clouded by drunkenness, drug abuse, gambling, violence and tempestuous personal relationships.
Yet for many of his fellow players and millions of fans, hooked on snooker with the advent of colour television, he will be forever viewed as a flawed sporting genius whose rock’n’roll lifestyle and brushes with officialdom made him all the more appealing.
His sometimes astonishing natural talent allowed him to brush aside opponents and carried him to two world snooker titles.
He was aptly called “Hurricane” because of the ferocious speed of his play. He would sniff, twitch and fidget at the table, while careering around it with a near manic zeal, speed and an almost comic Chaplinesque gait. Yet, when he set himself to pot balls and build a break, no other player can have shown a greater natural aptitude, nor can any have taken more delight in the moment of victory.
Higgins grew up with three sisters in the Protestant Sandy Row neighbourhood of Belfast. The son of a wheel tapper and a mother who augmented the family’s meagre income by working as a cleaner, Higgins was a reasonable student at school. However, his life changed forever when he was 11 years old and began to visit The Jampot, a rundown snooker hall where he learned the rudiments of the game and began to earn money by challenging and beating his seniors.
The young Higgins had also cherished ambitions to become a jockey and went to England aged 14 to work for the Berkshire trainer Eddie Reavey. However he was unable to control his weight, lost his job having never ridden competitively, and returned to Belfast to pursue his love of snooker.
By the time he was 16, he had compiled his first maximum 147 break and, in 1968, confirmed a burgeoning talent by becoming the All Ireland and Northern Ireland amateur snooker champion.
He won the 1972 world snooker championship, receiving £480, an insignificant sum when set against the estimated £4 million he would earn throughout his career. He was runner-up in the 1976 world championship and was once more defeated in the final four years later. Another world title remained elusive until 1982, when he had begun styling himself as “the people’s champion”.
After claiming the final frame of the final against his old rival Ray Reardon to win 18-15 with a brilliant 135 clearance, the sight of a tearful Higgins embracing his second wife Lynn and their baby daughter became one of British televised sport’s most emotional and enduring images.
Although Higgins was a five-time Irish professional champion and won 24 professional titles over a period of 19 years, including the 1983 UK Championship, the lack of prestigious “ranking” tournament successes beyond his 1982 world championship win at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre suggest he was a lesser player than some of his contemporaries.
But there is little doubt that a dissolute lifestyle contributed to his sometimes erratic form and to a long period of decline. He was in effect a spent force as a tournament player long before his time.
He was twice married, first to Cara and then Lynn, with whom he had a daughter, Lauren, and son, Jordan. Both marriages were dissolved.
A heavy smoker since his youth, Higgins was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997. As the wins became ever more sporadic, despite attempts to return as a player, and the money he earned from exhibitions dried up, Higgins relied ever more on handouts from friends and strangers alike.
Returning to Belfast, where he lived in sheltered accommodation close to his childhood home, Higgins endured years of cancer treatment, becoming a near-skeletal figure who would still attempt to hustle in snooker clubs for money and drinks.
His teeth had fallen out, and he was reduced to living on baby food. But still he dreamed of making a comeback, and managed to play in a recent legends tour organised by the promoter Barry Hearn, although he was forced to pull out of it due to his ill health.
Alexander Gordon Higgins, born March 18th, 1949; died July 24th, 2010