Snooker legend Alex Higgins has been found dead in his Belfast flat. He was 61.
Higgins, a two-time World Champion, had fought a long battle with throat cancer. The cancer treatment had left him weak and emaciated and had cause him to lose all of his teeth. This in turn had made it increasingly hard for him to eat, with his weight reportedly plummeting in recent times to just seven stone.
Around €24,000 had been raised by fellow snooker stars for him to have surgery that would have given him new teeth, but hopes of seeing him return to health were dashed when he was deemed too weak to withstand the necessary procedures.
Higgins had been World Champion in 1972 and 1982. He had continued to play snooker until very recently despite his deteriorating health. He was in the news as recently as May when he claimed to have knowledge of at least four top players taking bribes to lose matches.
He claimed that he had been offered £18,000 sterling by Greek gamblers to lose his Benson & Hedges Masters quarter-final in 1979 and had again been approached in 1989 with an offer of £20,000 if he threw a match at the Irish Masters, but had declined on both occasions.
He was twice married and had two children with his second wife Lynn. He earned the nickname ‘Hurricane’ because of the short amount of time he took to take a shot.
Passion
Fellow World Champion Steve Davis has spoken of Higgins’ passion for the game that made the Belfast-born player a household name: “He was a very competitive animal, and you knew how he was feeling at the table. That wasn’t common in a reserved game.
“He got a lot of people who wouldn’t have watched snooker interested, and dragged the game forward kicking and screaming. He didn’t wear a tie, he caused problems, but he was loved all the more for it and he was a snooker genius.
“Alex, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Jimmy White are the three who shocked people with the shots they have come out with. He had bottle and heart.
“He perhaps didn’t win as much as possibly he could have with his talent, but when he did win the crowd absolutely loved it because it was one against the head. It was against authority, he was the true rebel.
“He was a player who fascinated the crowd and everyone who watched him play. I think the one main reason for that was that he was a competitive animal, and he wore his heart on his sleeve. He put the sport in the limelight.”
