Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, the former double world snooker champion, died on Saturday at the age of 61 after a long battle with throat cancer. The flamboyant Belfast-born snooker legend, who won the world title in 1972 and 1982, was first diagnosed with cancer more than 10 years ago.
Despite being warned many times to cut his drinking and smoking to save his health, Higgins couldn’t quit.
He had cancerous growths removed from his mouth in 1994 and 1996 and was told in 1998 that he had throat cancer.
Snooker promoter Barry Hearn said Higgins would be remembered as the “original people’s champion” and the man who transformed the popularity of the sport.
Hearn said: “I have known him for nearly 40 years. He was the major reason for snooker’s popularity in the early days.”
“He was controversial at times, but he always played the game in the right spirit. We will miss him — he was the original people’s champion,” he said.
Steve Davis was one of Higgins’ greatest rivals in the 1980s and he said: “Alex was quite a fierce competitor, he lived and breathed the game, very much a fighter on the table.”
“It was a love-hate relationship with Alex Higgins. The thrill of playing him was fantastic, but the crowd that came along were not your usual crowd. They were much more noisy and you had to play the crowd as well. To many people in the 1980s he was the only player they came to watch,” Davis said.
“I used to be quite frightened of him as an individual. But on the snooker table, my admiration was immense,” he said.
Davis admitted Higgins was a controversial figure due to his erratic behavior, but insisted he will always be best remembered as a snooker genius.
“To people in the game he was a constant source of argument, he was a rebel. But to the wider public he was a breath of fresh air that drew them in to the game,” Davis said.
“He was an inspiration to my generation to take the game up. I do not think his contribution to snooker can be underestimated,” he said. “No one player has ever been bigger than the game. But he brought a genius quality that possibly hadn’t been seen before.”
“He was one of two or three people I would put the word ‘genius’ to when it came to the table,” Davis said.
Higgins was one of the sport’s greatest entertainers, but away from the table his private life was a chaotic whirlwind of drink, womanizing, fights, illness and debt.
He earned millions in the years when snooker was a British national obsession, but blew it all in a long and turbulent descent into homelessness and drink.
Higgins’ life continued to unravel in sheltered housing on the Donegall Road in Belfast, but he kept playing the sport he loved until his final days.
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