Alex Higgins: Legend

Just. Awesome.

If you’re around my age (*cough* – 35 – *cough*) then you can’t have grown up not knowing about Alex Higgins. When snooker was at its most popular in the 80s and its stars were household names, his was the name that dominated the headlines. Some say that the rise and fall of snooker is more or less tied in with the arc of Higgins’ career. Certainly since the heyday of snooker’s bad boys like Higgins, Tony Knowles, Jimmy White and Kirk Stephens it’s been hard to care about the succession of half-chinned, dead-eyed, dishwater-coloured ‘stars’ that have played the sport since (honourable exception being O’Sullivan).

Variously he was stabbed by his girlfriend, fell out of a first floor window, pissed in a plant pot during a tournament, was chinned by Cliff Thorburn and was generally followed by a maelstrom of drink, violence and excess. Very, very rarely is someone’s personal life lived as fully and unapologetically in the public eye. Think Amy Winehouse with better hair.

I can’t recommend the unofficial biography by Bill Borrows enough (commercial disclaimer: I will get about 8p if you buy the book from that link! Woohoo!)

Higgins was – and is – cut from a different cloth. He lives his life without apology however he sees fit. He won vast sums of money in his pomp as a player and blew the fucking lot on women, booze and gambling. After surviving severe throat cancer, he shrugged and went back to the fags. He never stopped hustling for tenners here and there in sleazy pool halls even when he was one of the most famous men in the country. As his lifestyle finally overran the greatest stores of his talents he faded away from the front pages and became a legend. A flickering reminder of a less apologetic era who still occasionally haunts the inside pages of the press whenever he resurfaces.

Today, it would be easy to paint Higgins as a tragic, lost figure. I doubt he’d see like that himself. In very fundamental ways, his life now is no different to what it was 40 years ago – just less scrutinised and possibly better balanced as a result. Here he is being interviewed by The Telegraph recently and he’s still amusingly full of piss and vinegar, albeit alarmingly frail.

A reminder of why he was so fucking magnetic on the green baize. If these few minutes of snooker don’t send a shiver up your spine then you’ll probably never understand the game or the man.

(I mention this partly because of the fallout from the John Terry affair. It’s brought forth a predictable torrent of moralising hogwash from the media because Terry is a “role model” and an “example” and because the England captaincy is “special.” You know what? Fuck dat right there. It wasn’t Terry who made his position into what it is. He’s just a man who happens to be good at what he does. The rest is just froth whipped up by hacks who’d prefer to put a snapshotof a mystery blonde on the front page than, say, a explanation of why the country is more or less bankrupt.

The truth is that journalists are the people with real influence. They are the ones who choose to highlight individuals and their foibles. It is them who enjoy a readership of millions. Dressing it up in moral fancy dress and pretending to wring their hands doesn’t hide the fact that they are only writing about this because it sells papers. Having a morally compromised man as England captain only matters if people know about it. And why do people know about it? Because the press told them.)