A warning call as Hurricane goes gently into that good night
Even his nickname, Hurricane, evokes a different era – one in which the likes of Kirk Stevens and Bill Werbeniuk bestrode the world like... well, in Werbeniuk’s case, colossus would be apposite.
The golden era of snooker is one of those proverbial times now in the general consciousness, like the Jurassic Era, or the period when Ricky Gervais was funny.
The high point usually cited by historians of the Great Snooker Era is 1985, when a number of TV viewers slightly larger than the population of Germany is reputed to have tuned in to watch Dennis Taylor edge out Steve Davis in the world championship final. Great days, and nights – Taylor v Davis went into the wee small hours before the man from Northern Ireland won, and celebrated with an odd squat and thrust of the cue.
Youthful and dark-haired as we were at the time, we can recall schoolyard debates as to whether snooker was a sport at all.
The arguments in favour of the thesis took cognisance of the physical demands of staying on your feet for hours at a time, maintaining a mental focus for that same period, and the challenge of holding your nerve at the decisive moment.
In a rehearsal of his future diatribes against the game of golf, your correspondent usually maintained the opposing viewpoint and asked what sport you could possibly play in Farah slacks and tasselled slip-ons, but invariably I was shouted down.
You could say this present posting comes under the heading, ‘vingince, be jasus’ on the loudmouths of class 2AG all those years ago, but those decades have mellowed our outlook even as they’ve softened our midsection.
No problem nowadays confessing to a fondness for Higgins. His personality burned through the era like phosphorous; you couldn’t help but respond to it.
By the time Davis and Taylor clashed in 1985 – severely hampering your columnist’s preparation for the Leaving Cert, by the way – Alex Higgins was already in decline, despite winning the world championship himself only three years earlier. His downward spiral was accelerated when, in 1986, he head butted a match referee and was suspended for five matches and fined £12,000, a considerable sum at the time and not to be sneezed at nowadays either, let’s be honest.
Four years later he threatened to have his fellow Northerner Taylor shot after a disagreement, and he’d punched another referee in the stomach. (Before you ask, we understand he didn’t have any Louth ancestry).
That kind of bald summary doesn’t do justice to the kind of electricity Higgins generated, though. He galvanised snooker in the early 70s, turning it from a backroom activity yearning for respectability into the hottest ticket on Broadway – his hurried scuttling around the table, rushing from shot to shot, allied to the colourful personality life alluded to above, made the game must-see television.
Snooker might have needed colour screens to sell it to the public, but the Hurricane was needed to give it life. His end, alone in a Belfast flat, seems sadly apt, particularly in the present age of day-glow celebrity and instantaneous fame, of legendary garden designers and renowned hair colourists, with a heavily ironic use of those adjectives.
The solitary death of a sportsman who soared to a stratosphere of ubiquity where he was known universally by his nickname should be a warning call to the boyband wannabes and potential TV presenters. The lights fade eventually for everyone.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie; Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
