Alex Higgins, snooker's anti-hero, dies aged 61Alex Higgins was the people's champion who was loved by everyone
Alex Higgins, won two world titles, constantly undermined his brilliance with self-destructive excess. Photograph: Paul Marriott/Empics Sport
Alex "Hurricane" Higgins was snooker's anti-hero, seeking neither acceptance nor respectability. A fast, flamboyant shotmaker in his prime, whose acute non-verbal intelligence instantly read the implications of any configuration of the balls, he constantly undermined his extraordinary talent with self-destructive excess.
Higgins died yesterday, aged 61, after a long battle with throat cancer. When he won the first of his two world titles in 1972, the venue for the final, a now demolished British Legion function room in a Birmingham suburb, symbolised snooker's status as a down-at-heel folk sport. By the time he regained the title 10 years later at the Crucible theatre, Sheffield, it had become a major television entertainment.
His 16-15 semi-final win over Jimmy White provided the most often reprised item from the BBC's snooker footage. Trailing 0-59 in the penultimate frame, Higgins produced, like a gunfighter down to his last bullet, a clearance of 69 to level the match and added the decider comfortably. This was the death or glory situation in which he revelled. His compulsive urge to live on life's dangerous edge, stronger than any mere desire to win, was like an addiction to the thrill of gambling. Always at his most dangerous and most fascinating in a situation of peak emotional intensity, he accessed a similar seam of inspiration in the final when, from 15-15, he ran through a trio of frames to beat Ray Reardon 18-15.
Crying with emotion, he beckoned his wife, Lynn, and 18-month-old daughter, Lauren, to join him in a surreal but spontaneous winner's tableau that has remained one of snooker's most iconic images. Three years later, though, he and Lynn were divorced.
He served his snooker apprenticeship in the Jampot, a Belfast billiard hall where older men would unforgivingly take his money if they could. He lived on fizzy drinks and chocolate bars. At 18, he won the Northern Ireland Amateur Championship and, playing for Belfast YMCA, won the British team championship at Bolton almost single-handed. A couple of local enthusiasts arranged exhibition engagements for him and he based himself in Blackburn, at one point being successively resident at 9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 Ebony Street, moving along as each house was demolished.
Tales of dashing centuries, bust-ups, punch-ups, drinking, gambling and women spread through the snooker world. His challenge matches against the late John Spencer, then the reigning world champion, packed venue after venue as he acquired an army of supporters who were to give him their unqualified support throughout his career.
In those days, the world championship lasted for a year. Each match took at least three days and the latter stages were a week's duration. The organising body, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, was simply a group of leading players, some of whom did not think Higgins was "the right type" to join their ranks. They were overridden by those who saw that as a box-office attraction he was clearly going to help them all make money.
The semi-final provided an archetypal clash between snooker's traditional and revolutionary forces: Rex Williams, meticulous in his application and calculation, versus Higgins, impulsive, inspirational, hustling round the table to assess his shot instinctively and let fly with the minimum of preparation. The outcome of a week's endeavour was in doubt until its last five minutes but Higgins won 31-30 and then displayed the same dashing, sublime confidence in beating Spencer 37-32 for the title.
The national press sensed snooker had changed and that there was an unusual character at the centre of it. Promoters began to sniff commercial possibilities. One of them condensed the 1973 world championship into a fortnight and BBC television, which then screened snooker for only 25 minutes a week through its own Pot Black on BBC2, awarded it some coverage. Higgins's title defence was snuffed out by Eddie Charlton in the semi-finals and even at that early stage many questioned how long he could last with such an uninhibited lifestyle. He drank heavily; only a boxer could have collected more black eyes than he did; he was thrown out of clubs; a tour of India lasted only a day before he was sent back to England in disgrace on the first available plane.
For the next 15 seasons, he was invariably in contention for titles. He lost the 1976 and 1980 world finals but won the 1978 and 1981 Masters. Remarkably, his 16-15 victory over Steve Davis, his first for four years, in the 1983 UK Championship final came from 7-0 down.
Just as Reardon, though, with six world titles, was the dominant force of the 1970s, Davis, with six world and six UK titles, bestrode the 1980s with his consistent textbook excellence usually proving too much for those, like Higgins, reliant on more fitful inspiration.
Umpteen fines for miscellaneous disciplinary offences were shrugged off until Higgins prevaricated over giving a urine sample for a drug test at the 1986 UK Championship. When the tournament director tried to hurry him, Higgins headbutted him. Higgins was at the centre of the ensuing scrum that spilled out into a corridor and resulted in his being fined £200 for assault and £50 for criminal damage to a door by Preston magistrates. A disciplinary tribunal chaired by Mr Justice, now Judge, Lightman fined him £12,000 and suspended him from five tournaments. On his return, he was again in the news after a row with his girlfriend, Siobhan Kidd, a psychology graduate he had met while she was working as a waitress. When she locked him inside her flat, he attempted to crawl round her building on a ledge only to plunge 25 feet to the pavement, breaking bones in his foot.
A couple of weeks later, on crutches, he displayed farcical courage in getting through a round of the 1989 European Open and, as his condition improved, won the Irish Championship shortly afterwards. No longer hopping but limping, he won the Irish Masters by beating Stephen Hendry, who was to win seven world titles in the 1990s, 9-8 in the final. It was the last title he ever won.
Siobhan was the love of his life but she departed finally with a fractured cheekbone for her trouble. Out of his mind with rejection, he threatened, backstage at the World Team Cup, to have his team‑mate Dennis Taylor shot the next time he visited Northern Ireland, reducing him to tears with vicious verbal abuse of his late mother. Disciplinary action was pending from this when, after losing in the first round of the 1990 World Championship at the Crucible, he punched the WPBSA's duty press officer on his way to the obligatory press conference. This was nothing personal, simply an expression of his consuming rage against any form of authority. He was suspended for a year and docked so many points that his ranking fell to 120. On top of this, a management entanglement with Howard Kruger, whose group of companies left several players out of pocket, dealt him a financial blow from which he never recovered. Higgins claimed he was owed £51,536 and it was on his application that Kruger's Framework Management Ltd was wound up with debts of £374,361. In October 1991 in a Brighton court, Kruger was disqualified for five years from holding a company directorship.
Higgins qualified for the world championship in 1994 for the last time but was beaten 10-6 by Ken Doherty and was in troublesome mood when he gave a urine sample. Words were exchanged with officials and Higgins smashed one of the two full sample bottles against a wall. The disciplinary case was so imperfectly presented by the WPBSA that Robin Falvey, for Higgins, successfully argued there was no case to answer. On the spur of the moment, Higgins was found guilty of two other charges which had not been notified to him. Falvey filed 17 complaints against the WPBSA but neither these nor other outstanding complaints against Higgins were proceeded with. Higgins never paid the £50,000 in fees he had run up with Falvey.
His last match on the circuit was in August 1997 in a qualifying event in Plymouth. He lost 5-1, became truculent, was escorted from the venue by police and was found at 4am sprawled on the ground outside a nightclub, the victim, so he claimed, of an unprovoked assault with an iron bar. Quickly discharging himself from hospital, he made his way to the Manchester home of a girlfriend, Holly Hayse, who stabbed him with a kitchen knife when an altercation broke out. Higgins declined to give evidence against her.
In 1996 he was operated upon for cancer of the palate and in 1998 the disease returned to his throat. Some 50 radiotherapy sessions virtually cinderised his teeth; his face and frame grew ever more gaunt; he joined some 200 other smokers to sue Embassy and Benson & Hedges, two prominent snooker sponsors. Both actions lapsed.
Dave Moorhouse, a former policeman with 30 years' service, twice had him resident at his hotel, Pymgate Lodge, as he tried to help him. "When he's good, he's charming," he said. "On Christmas Day and Boxing Day, he helped us serve guests and tidy up. I just feared it was too good to be true. I'm genuinely fond of him and so were the guests but then he snaps. Alex suffers from great highs and great lows. He has sung love songs outside my window at 3 o'clock in the morning, woken me up and asked me if I wanted a sleeping tablet."
Sporadic attempts to compete on the fringes of the professional circuit were cruelly unsuccessful as he lived out his declining years in a small flat in sheltered accommodation. In his prime, he could play brilliantly in an imitable way even, at times, well enough to give himself the illusion of the omnipotence he craved to keep at bay the vulnerability he feared. When snooker could no longer serve as the glue to hold his life together he made no concessions, no pleas for sympathy.
The one‑man play, Hurricane, written and acted by Richard Doormer, ends with its eponymous hero standing , fag in one hand, glass in the other, trademark fedora on his head, amid the detritus of his life – money, beer cans, fag packets, betting slips – declaring defiantly: "Don't pity me. I've stood on top of the world."
On the plus side im glad to say i bought him a fair few drinks over the years and funded a few of his bets 
he's a great legend of Irish sport
