Snooker Champ Dies

“The name ‘Hurricane’ had originally been given to him on account of the impatient anticipation with which he approached the next shot. As he declined from his peak of the 1970s and early 1980s, and swapped the title of world champion for the more dubious sobriquet of ‘People’s Champion’, ‘Hurricane’ increasingly appeared as a reference to his destructive streak. Though he exhibited no prejudice against drugs, Higgins’s principal hobby was alcohol. When Oliver Reed offered him some Georgio Armani scent, he drank half a pint of it off pat. As for women, his habit of alternating violent rows with lachrymose apology afforded unending fodder for the tabloids.”
-Snooker champion Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins died this weekend at the age of 61. Higgins, says a colleague, “rewrote the book on misspent adulthood. He was a dreadful gambler and I cannot remember him winning one bet — he would go through his pockets and bet every single penny, and the evening would always finish with him asking ‘you could not lend me £50 for my train fare home?’ and you would obviously never see that again.”