Saddened to read in today's paper of the death of Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, a finely unpredictable snooker player of some years back. I won quite a bit of money on him in the World Championship of 1982, having placed a wager at excellent odds when he reached the last sixteen (if memory serves me correctly.) The odds were excellent because, despite his undoubted ability, he had shown little sign of the discipline needed to turn that to real account since winning the title ten years earlier. In that ten years a lot had changed. The game had moved from seedy, dingy backstreet dives to becoming quite a television spectacle with the championship played at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre. (Not the most obvious venue - but somehow it worked.)
So snooker had become respectable, whilst Alex hadn't - which, I suppose, is why I backed him. And somehow he held it together for a change and surprised everyone. Then he reverted to being the archetypal Irish bad boy and it duly fell apart.
But it was nice whilst it lasted. And he's name-checked in Van Morrison's So Long In Exile, which is in itself a kind of (dubious) immortality.
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