by Pink Ball » 30 Jul 2020 Read
1. Alex Higgins
He was hated, adored, and never ignored. He never allowed anyone to do that, even when he was an almost-literal shadow of what he’d been. Alex Higgins remains the most charismatic, obnoxious, entertaining, pitiful, glorious figure in snooker history – and it will take a juggernaut of a person to change that fact.
What he did on the table was nearly always overshadowed by what happened away from the baize, and that’s staggering if you think about it – because he was a wonderful snooker player.
He was actually a very slow operator, but deceivingly so, such was his excitable way. His pace didn’t matter, though – he could pot anything from anywhere, and on the rare occasions that nothing was available to him, he could run for cover better than most.
He was a two-time World Champion and won all three of the sport’s majors, and that wasn’t easily done in any era. Weighing up all that success, though – who cares?
Higgins was all about the show, and he turned his sport into a show. Without him, it would never have become the television sensation that it did become. He completed a process that Joe Davis had inadvertently started 50 years previously, dragging snooker from the parlour room and into the consciousness of just about everyone in the UK and Ireland who owned a television set.
His battle with himself was always a struggle, and it was a fight he did not win – he became a quite pathetic, alcohol-and-cigarette-riddled skeleton who died a lonely death worlds removed from his love of being the centre of attention. But before he was laid to rest, he became the centre of attention one last time as thousands crammed onto the streets of Belfast to say goodbye to snooker’s greatest-ever icon.