LOCKERROOM:Alex Higgins changed snooker and made it theatre. Hating him was the flipside of loving him but he was never less than compulsive viewing, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

GROWING UP, the sporting world seemed filled with eccentric geniuses, true originals who, loved them or be chilled by them, you couldn’t ignore. In my memory they form a trinity. Ali, the greatest sportsperson ever. George Best, the most charismatic soccer player ever. And Alex Hurricane Higgins.

I once spent a week in London hoping to interview Ali and would have been happy when the interview fell through just to have been allowed touch the hem of his garment. When eventually years later I found myself in the same room as Ali I felt literally weak at the knees. He was that sort of idol and still is. There are scenes in When We Were Kings which still bring a little water to my eyes at the memory of the endless hours of discussion of Ali I enjoyed with my grandfather.

George Best, or Georgie as his fun-loving alter ego was known to us, was a different stripe of genius, flawed in ways that were so human and so saddening and which suggested to us for the first time that in the interior lives of great sports stars, sometimes greatness might not be enough. And we always wanted it to be enough, always wanted it to be thoroughly fulfilling.

One of the first gigs I got for this paper was to interview George after one of those pathos-flavoured pub gigs he used to do. Amid the kegs and slops in the back of the bar in Ballymun we spoke for an hour and when it was over like almost everybody that had ever met the man I was left with this desire to take him under my wing and sort him out. Luckily for George he escaped that cruel and unusual fate.

Anytime it was ever suggested I seek a feature interview with Alex Higgins I made my excuses and left. No sports star ever made me feel so uneasy or so old. My grandfather was an old-school sort when it came to snooker. We played in the years before I found other things upon which to mis-spend my youth in Terry Rogers in Fairview, in the Cosmo in town, and on the old table in the old O’Tooles club in Seville Place. I was useless and my grandfather was elegant and immaculate, chalking his cue thoughtfully, lapping the table in his suit and tie with his hat and coat dripping from a hook beneath the scoreboard.

We would watch the old Pot Black programme in black and white. I would follow the matches through my grandfathers knowledge of which ball was which and where each had ended up after the previous shot. The men we liked were old Fred Davis, then the grinder Cliff Thorburn, Ray Reardon with his Dracula fangs. And then suddenly through it all like a punk at a waltz evening blew Alex Higgins. He won the World Championship first time out of the gate in 1972. He was crowned the people’s champion. We hated him.

If he ended the year of old gentlemen playing snooker in dickie bows well we liked that era and the characters that populated it. And we found Higgins strangely charmless, his baleful stares as he sat fidgeting and chain smoking while his opponent was at the table, the twitchy style, the brittleness of his temper.

Through the years he headbutted referees, punched officials, urinated in flower pots threatened to have Dennis Taylor shot. On the side of the angels, as we would have seen it, Ray Reardon was replaced by Steve Davis as the most steady and consistent player in what was becoming a travelling circus played for the benefit of TV.

Davis played with the thrill-seeking tendencies of an insurance actuary. Higgins located his genius only rarely but those little patches and his volatile personality were undoubtedly what changed snooker, bringing in TV money and mass audiences. As wayward players went, Jimmy White was more loveable and stole a little of Higgin’s constituency away from him.

It ended I suppose with that 1982 win over Reardon in the world final of 1982. Those slightly creepy scenes afterwards of him calling his wife Lynn down and weeping copious tears won over a lot of people but it was too much for many of us, too volatile, to unpredictable, not enough to make up for the battery acid temper and sheer nastiness.

He ploughed on for a few years afterwards and duly became a walking talking public health warning. Smoking does to you what they warn you that smoking does. And the huge amounts of free cigarettes chucked at players and journalists for years and years had an almost criminal irresponsibility behind the gesture. I can recall being in press rooms at the few snooker tournaments I ever covered and watching with fascination whenever a PR person would come in and lay down hundreds of boxes of cigarettes for the hacks to descend upon like ravening seagulls.

By the 1990s Higgins mouth was festering with cancer, his fortune was fast dissipating and he was drinking too much and too unwisely. And it’s odd but as he crumbled he acquired a certain louche elegance, a sad dignity underneath the inevitability of it all. I recall seeing him filmed in a sunlit pub in Belfast, wearing a hat which was too stylish for a man of his dwindling means and health and he spoke wanly about the good old days, the hell raising and what it cost.

There was a lesson which he seemed to learn late but clearly that being a people’s champion didn’t guarantee you the warmth of the people when they turned away from you. He seemed to be cripplingly lonely in his late years, he spoke of suicide and ended up hustling for few quid in the bars and clubs of Belfast. There was a certain horrible irony in the man who drank so much being unable to consume solids in his latter years, the man whom the people claimed to love seemingly lying dead for a few days in his Belfast flat before his absence from this earth was noticed. The man whose mouth brought him so much trouble was reducing in the end to a whispering skeleton.

You couldn’t write a more bitter or more sad end to a story of wasted talent and misbegotten fame. Like Best but with less obvious charm Higgins seemed to be a warning against getting what you wish for. Sometimes it will kill you.

He changed snooker and made it theatre. Hating him was the flipside of loving him but he was never less than compulsive viewing. In the wake of Ali and in the wake of Best the arenas they graced have always seemed a little bland, a little bit too sickeningly perfumed by posturers who see controversy as a cynical career move. So it shall be with Alex Higgins. The rise in popularity of snooker which he sparked drew in a new generation of pencil waisted, etiolated youngsters who play the percentages. And the last, fleeting irony is that the game is more bland and characterless now than ever it was in the Pot Black days.

Love him or hate him you would love to see him scourge some of the grey accountants of the baize who have inherited his kingdom.