Shame on those who left Higgins to die alone

0 Comments | Herald, The; Glasgow (UK), Jul 27, 2010 | by harry reid

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins was hardly a role model, but he did not deserve to die alone and bereft. Over the last 48 hours the consensus has been that he more than anyone else propelled snooker from a stagnating, obscure backroom game to a highly popular sport that television adored (no doubt helped by the fact that no expensive outside broadcast equipment was required).

High-placed people in snooker should be asking themselves this week: If Higgins almost single-handedly made snooker the hugely successful phenomenon it was in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, then surely snooker owed him something in return? Latterly his life had become so wretched that he contemplated suicide but could not summon the will to kill himself.

Of course Higgins could be thuggish. He butted a tournament director and he had various violent altercations with tournament referees. Indeed he seemed to be permanently at war with the snooker authorities. But these authorities should have been big enough to try to sustain him when he was in his final, prolonged crisis.

Higgins made a lot of money from the game – estimates put the fortune he acquired at around pound(s)5 million, modest in the context of some professional sports but still a serious sum. Perhaps, towards the end, this wayward and wasted man had his own version of pride; he was not likely to accept charity from people he despised. He did more for snooker than snooker ever did for him.

Plenty of influential and powerful people in the snooker industry – and all contemporary high-profile sports are industries, of a kind – must have been well aware of the ruinous decline of their leading figurehead, marked most spectacularly by the 30ft fall from his one- time flat in Lancashire. There were persistent signs that he had lost control and all purpose: the wrecking of hotel rooms, the constant drinking sessions, then the pitiful life picked out in a caravan where he was sustained by a diet of pills, pilchards – and lager. And then the final, lonely return to Belfast.

He apparently did receive the odd hand-out from the sport’s governing body but there was clearly no sustained and compassionate effort to save this tormented man from himself. He was in effect cast aside, and allowed to die, starving and disowned.

There are parallels with the slightly older George Best, who, like Higgins, was Belfast born and bred. But on the football field, as well as sublime skill, Best showed physical bravery and resilience of a kind that Higgins was never asked to evince. And Best had fewer demons; his problem was quite simply alcohol.

When he enjoyed his brief and unlikely renaissance with Hibs in the 1980-81 season Best used to drink in a pub situated behind the newspaper office where I then worked. People queued up to buy him a drink, and I believe that it was as much his essential kindness and sociability as his craving for alcohol that made it so desperately difficult for him to refuse.

It is easier to write about Best in terms of redemption because he was, I suspect, a nicer man than Higgins. To put it crudely, Best was a playboy, Higgins was a prat. But the snooker player’s serial, abusive foolishness, his reckless disdain for everything he should have cherished in his life, clearly signalled over a very long period that he needed determined, organised help.

The dark, wild side to Higgins, combined with his tremendous natural talent, created the tumultuous personality who gave snooker the momentum needed to sweep it from obscurity to being a staple of the nation’s televised life
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