SPORT ON TELEVISION: At a time when none but the brave would have contemplated such an undertaking, this newspaper invited Alex Higgins over for a weekend in Dublin, at the company's expense. It had to do with an annual sports award which we were co-sponsoring with BMW and the weekend included a day at the races as the guest of the sports editor, the late Gerry Noone.
When it was all over and our award-winner had departed to the next snooker tournament, it fell to Gerry to submit a claim for expenses incurred during the Hurricane's visit. As he recounted to me later, it wasn't a task he relished.
In the event, he went into the office of our esteemed accountant and placed the expenses claim face down on the desk, with instructions that it shouldn't be perused until he was out the door. But bean-counters being bean-counters, Gerry had no sooner turned his back to depart than the voice behind him emitted the pained exclamation - "Jesus!" Higgins tended to have that effect on people.
This was around the mid-1980s, the hey-day of tournament snooker, when a record 18.5 million BBC viewers were glued to their television sets from midnight onwards, to catch the climactic stage of the 1985 World Championship final in which Dennis Taylor gained a breathtaking victory over Steve Davis.
Of course we will never see its like again. And as was emphasised in the documentary Like a Hurricane, which was given a timely, repeat screening on BBC2 on Saturday night, a key player in that extraordinary boom was the bould Higgins.
As it happened, his impact on the game was heightened all the more, albeit unwittingly, by the programme screened immediately afterwards.
This included a brief profile of last year's champion, Ronnie O'Sullivan, before it went on to screen his first-round victory over Drew Henry in defence of the title.
If one were looking for colour and talent among the current bunch, O'Sullivan would be rated in the front rank.
So it was that I found myself nodding in total agreement with the words of Patrick Collins in yesterday's Mail on Sunday when he referred to: "anonymous, pale-faced automatons with blank eyes and hacking coughs; sad and dreary young men who have not seen daylight since infancy."
But as the living embodiment of the 1960s, Higgins was different. Even his hacking cough commanded our attention. In the Irish Masters alone, there was his miraculous recovery from 4-0 down to beat Cliff Thornburn 5-4; the occasion when, tired and emotional, he had to grab the side of the table to avoid falling in a match against Ray Reardon; his amazing performance in the 1989 final when he literally limped to victory over Stephen Hendry, and the determination of Taylor to beat him at the same venue after Higgins had issued a death-threat against his fellow Ulsterman.
The documentary captured this extraordinary sportsman wonderfully well. Like: "Alex, could you face life without snooker?", to which Higgins replied "Could snooker face life without me?" As other competitors in other sports have learned before and since, the game will always prove itself to be bigger than the player.
Everything about Higgins was pure theatre - his youthful arrogance when first winning the World Championship in 1972; his tearful regaining of the title with his baby daughter in his arms 10 years later. "He could be a pain in the neck but he also had a vulnerability about him," admitted Steve Davis's manager, Barry Hearn, who was never a Higgins admirer.
"He was the one player the public wanted to see," said former world champion John Spencer, "mainly because they didn't know what to expect." Yet, with regard to the situation little more than 10 years later, after the Hurricane's countless brushes with the game's authorities, Davis was quite correct in reflecting: "He (Higgins) had caused so much aggravation that they were happy to get rid of him." Interestingly from an Irish standpoint, his last appearance at The Crucible was in 1994 when he was beaten comfortably by Ken Doherty.
That was when the documentary pictured him as a thoroughly pathetic figure, still sitting in his seat beside the table, while the theatre lights were being turned out all around him.
Later, at a press conference, he complained bitterly about how snooker had destroyed his life. Whatever about the game, we can speculate that his own smoking in the atmosphere of snooker halls would have contributed to the throat cancer which had rendered him the frail, ailing figure we witnessed at the end of the documentary.
Minutes later, O'Sullivan was telling us: "I'm not the sort of person that lives or dies by snooker." And to be brutally honest, I didn't really care very much either way.
For while noting his undoubted skill in demolishing the hapless Henry, the prospect of watching O'Sullivan for a further 15 or 16 days wasn't especially appealing.
Still, the BBC are doing their best to lift matters. For a start, their presenter, Hazel Irvine, is decidedly easy on the eye while possessing the most delightful Scots accent. Then there is the back-up of former world champions Davis and John Parrott.
And yes, appearances do matter in a sport which television brings so close to us. Which is why Higgins is so sorely missed.
Meanwhile, it was difficult to find a channel on Friday night which wasn't dealing with some aspect of golf. We had Pat Kenny with a putting competition on the Late, Late Show for prizes of trips to Druids Glen, while his UTV counterpart, Gerry Kelly, was interviewing Michael Hoey about his professional debut in Italy later this week. "If I play my game, I'll be good," said Hoey with admirable confidence.
But from my standpoint, the really interesting stuff was on Sky Sports, which had the Worldcom Classic from Harbour Town. There, only a week after Augusta, we could observe Phil Mickelson, Davis Love, Justin Leonard and Lee Janzen, confidently striding the fairways like giants of the game.
It could have been my imagination, but their demeanour seemed very different from the cowering figures we witnessed during the Masters. Could it have had anything to do with the fact that a certain Mr Woods was otherwise engaged over the weekend?
