Alex Higgins, snooker's anti-hero, dies aged 61

[Jackal]

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/jul/25/alex-higgins-dies-aged-61

Funny, had a big chat about Higgins on Friday night with a guy from Belfast, his home town.

Wildman. Dead now.

 

[Jackal]

There was therefore always a sense of danger, of imminent explosion, as Higgins exercised his extraordinary gifts with the cue. No one could tell what brilliant shot he might produce next; no one could tell, either, what horror he was about to commit.

He was at once the George Best and John McEnroe of snooker, with crowd-pulling powers enhanced by his haunted personality and little-boy-lost appeal. During matches he would fidget impatiently on the bench, chain-smoking and often the worse for drink, until his chance arrived. Then he would move jerkily around the table, radiating tension and nervous energy, in search of that elusive moment when touch, instinct and will would come together in perfect, irresistible alliance.


To his fans, who were legion, he was simply the most exciting player of all time. For years, moreover, he was a potential winner. In 1972, when he was still 22, he became the youngest ever world champion, winning the title at his first attempt.

In 1978 and 1981 he carried off the Benson and Hedges Masters; in 1982 he regained the world championship; and in 1983 he achieved the most dramatic of all his victories, coming from 0-7 down to beat Steve Davis 16-15 in the final of the Coral UK Snooker Championship.

But there was something more alarming than the light of battle in Higgins's eyes. The name "Hurricane" had originally been given to him on account of the impatient anticipation with which he approached the next shot. As he declined from his peak of the 1970s and early 1980s, and swapped the title of world champion for the more dubious sobriquet of "People's Champion", "Hurricane" increasingly appeared as a reference to his destructive streak.

Though he exhibited no prejudice against drugs, Higgins's principal hobby was alcohol. When Oliver Reed offered him some Georgio Armani scent, he drank half a pint of it off pat. As for women, his habit of alternating violent rows with lachrymose apology afforded unending fodder for the tabloids.

Every year, every tournament almost, brought its crop of outrages. The most sensational, perhaps, was in 1986, when Higgins headbutted an official at the UK Open at Preston, after being asked to take a drugs test. Fined £12,000 by the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, and banned for 10 months, he was asked whether he could live without snooker. "Can snooker live without me?" he returned.

For no disaster was ever serious enough to halt the flow of Higgins's braggadocio. "When they made the Hurricane, they must have broken the mould," he said. "I'm a one-off, a mystery man that would drive the world's most eminent psychiatrist to his consulting couch."

If he lost, there was always an excuse. The cloth was the wrong pace; his cue was badly balanced; the temperature was too cold; the walls were painted the wrong colour; the referee was standing too close, or perhaps wearing an off-putting bow tie. It hardly mattered what was amiss, so long as Alex Higgins was not at fault.

Thus he kept faith with his first principle, that he was the greatest snooker player who had ever lived. He knew he was better than Steve Davis, notwithstanding the detail that Davis won all but four of their 28 matches between 1981 and 1989.

"Davis sends spectators to sleep," Higgins would say. "Spectators have no point of contact. How can you relate to a robot? I'd rather have a drink with Idi Amin." "That," returned Davis, "was because Idi Amin would buy him more drinks."

Higgins was convinced that he had single-handedly turned snooker into a sport which commanded the attention of millions. "I was the prime reason," he declared in 1993, "why this game was taken out of billiard halls and put in such smart places as The Hexagon."

And yet, he complained, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, far from discharging its debt, had subjected him to endless petty persecution. "I have been treated like a leper behind the scenes," he complained, "and that has been heartbreaking."

Nor did he feel that he had achieved adequate financial award. His prize for winning the world championship in 1972 had been a measly £480. The young players who followed him, he said, did not know how lucky they were. Yet Higgins admitted in his book Alex Through the Looking Glass (1986) that he had earned £2 million in the previous 14 years.

In truth, he was beyond satisfaction. "Do you know what really gets me?" he asked when his career was already in sharp decline. "I've never played my best in front of the TV cameras. People just don't know how good I am."

Alex Gordon Higgins was born on March 18 1949 into a Protestant family in the Shankhill area of Belfast; he had three sisters. His father, who had been struck by a lorry as a boy and was unable to read or write, worked as a wheel tapper. His mother brought in extra money from her job as a cleaner. It was a secure and loving background, and Higgins would later look back on his childhood as "the good old days, when there was real camaraderie".

At school Alex fidgeted and could not sit still. The turning point of his life came when, aged 11, he happened to wander into the Jampot Snooker Club in Donegal Road. He would stand there, wondering what on earth was going on with the sticks and coloured balls, until one day, as he remembered, "this extraordinarily tall man, Trevor, let me in".

Thereafter he spent four hours there every day after school, at first subsidised by his generous mother, but soon financing himself from his winnings. He could never function without a cash incentive.

At 15, hoping to become a jockey, Higgins moved to Berkshire to work for the trainer Eddie Reavey. But he soon abandoned this ambition, and drifted around England and Ireland in a number of jobs, playing snooker in his spare time. At Accrington, he challenged the world champion, John Spencer, to play him for £100 and won.

He turned professional, and immediately triumphed in the world championship of 1972, beating Spencer 37-31 in the final, held at the British Legion Club, Selly Park, Birmingham. He celebrated this achievement by travelling to Australia, where he was thrown out of a club for insulting a senior player, and out of a hotel for demolishing his room. On the way back he ran into trouble in India after getting drunk, stripping off and putting his hand up an old man's dhoti.

At the world championship of 1973 Higgins was fined £100 for misconduct; and the next year he was ushered out of the tournament after accusing the referee of robbing him of victory in a match with Fred Davis.

When a system of world rankings was introduced in 1976, Higgins took second place, but even in his palmy years his general tendency was downward, apart from 1982, when he returned to second place after beating Ray Reardon 18-15 in the final with a spectacular last clearance break of 135. This time he won £25,000, though £1,000 was surrendered in fines.

Unfortunately for his finances, he had in 1981 become involved with a businessman called Howard Kruger and his Sportsworld management company; 10 years later it would be wound up with debts of £461,000.

In 1982 Higgins recorded a song, 147, That's My Idea of Heaven, but failed to reach the charts. He was rather more successful with the purchase of two plots of land in the Highlands in 1983, and two years later he bought a house in Cheshire's stockbroker belt.

This period was punctuated by spectacular rows with his second wife, Lynn. There was an almost successful suicide attempt in Spain in 1983, and in 1985 Higgins was handcuffed by police after throwing a television out of the window of the matrimonial home. It was better than hitting his wife, he explained.

Yet he was still playing snooker well enough to score two rare victories over Steve Davis: the stunning comeback at the UK Championship in 1983, and two years later a 5-4 triumph in the first round of the Benson and Hedges Masters at Wembley, after which he was fined £1,500 for swearing.

By 1987 Higgins had acquired a new girlfriend called Siobhan Kidd, an art restorer and psychology graduate, who described him in 1988 as "the gentlest man I have ever met". Two years later she was telling police how he had held her down and broken her cheekbone by striking her with a hairdryer.

The previous year, 1989, he had ejected himself from the first floor window of their flat, gashing his head and breaking his ankle. Yet a month later, still hobbling, he pulled off the last great victory of his career, when he beat Stephen Hendry 9-8 to win the Irish Open at Goffs, Co Kildare.

In 1990, however, Higgins was in worse trouble than ever, after representing Northern Ireland with Dennis Taylor in a match against Canada which they lost. "I come from Shankhill and you come from Coalisland," he told the Catholic Taylor, "and the next time you are in Northern Ireland I will have you shot."

Shortly afterwards he punched another official after losing to Steve James at the world championships, and threatened retirement. Snooker was a horribly corrupt sport, he declared; it should be brought to the attention of the Department of Trade and Industry. Bystanders estimated that he had consumed 27 vodkas.

For these derelictions Higgins was banned from snooker for 10 months and deducted 25 ranking points, which meant that in future he would have to pre-qualify for leading tournaments. After that the way back to the top was too steep for him to climb.

In 1994 Higgins managed to defeat Tony Knowles to qualify for the world championship. But after being beaten by Ken Docherty in the first round at the Crucible, he was fined £5,000 for his comments about the referee, and for smashing a bottle containing a urine sample against the wall.

When he attempted to qualify for the world championship in 1995, Higgins lost to Tai Pichit, a former Buddhist monk. Yet for a moment in the 12th frame he was suddenly brilliant again. Having reached 103 in a break, he asked the referee, John Williams, to move. Williams refused to do so, pointing out that he was not in the line of sight. "You're in my line of thought, though," protested Higgins, who proceeded nevertheless to clear the colours for a break of 137, sobbing loudly as he did so.

In 1996 he was accused of attacking a 14-year-old boy who had interrupted a conversation with his former wife; after admitting the charge, Higgins was conditionally discharged and ordered to pay costs. That year he had a growth removed from his palate.

Matters did not improve in 1997. Higgins attacked a photographer with a luggage trolley, and was stabbed by a former girlfriend. In between he was admitted to a local hospital with a sprained wrist and ankle after losing a qualifying match to a youngster; he claimed he had been attacked by a stranger with an iron bar. He could not stop himself getting into fights, and at 10 stone and five foot nine, he invariably lost them.

In 1998 Higgins attended the 21st anniversary of the Benson and Hedges Masters in Dublin, and celebrated by punching a guest and pouring red wine into the pocket of the tournament director. By the beginning of 1999, with no money, no fixed abode, and nowhere to practise, he was ranked 387 in the world. And by this stage he had been diagnosed with throat cancer.

At the end of his life he was more or less destitute; he had lost his home in Cheshire and was living in sheltered accommodation in Belfast. He continued, however, to play the game he loved, appearing at the Irish Professional Championship in 2005 and 2006. In 2007 he published an autobiography, From the Eye of the Hurricane: My Story.

Alex Higgins was twice married, first to an Australian called Cara. "She was the daughter of a racehorse trainer, so she had lots of money," he explained. "I'm sure she would say our five-year spell together was very pleasant. What Cara actually said was "That lunatic has beaten me up."

He married secondly, in 1980 (dissolved 1988), Lynn Robbins (née Avison); they had son and a daughter.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/sport-obituaries/7908946/Alex-Hurricane-Higgins.html

 

[alasdairm]

really sad news. he was incredible.



alasdair