An old story from the past
Eye of the hurricane
Alex Higgins, snooker’s most outrageously talented player, now lives in a twilight zone of tantrums, paranoia, late-night showdowns in bars and endless demands for money. Bill Borrows was sucked into his world and survived to tell this tale. Higgins just survives…
Sunday 6 October 2002
Observer Sport Monthly
‘What about that Alex Higgins? … He’s off his ■■■■. All that money and fame and ■■■■ and he’s blown the lot. What a ■■■■■■■ way to go. I hope that happens to me. One big ■■■■■■■ blowout. Top.’
Liam Gallagher, Oasis (1997)
‘I don’t ■■■■■■■ care what you think,’ railed Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins.
‘Really? That’s good because I don’t care that you don’t care what I think.’
‘Oh really? Why is that then you ■■■■■■■ prick?’
‘Because I don’t have to.’
‘■■■■ off.’
‘You ■■■■ off.’
‘I’m off.’
‘Good.’
As first dates go, I’ve had better. I’m not sure we both have, but I definitely have. Ostensibly, this was a meeting between a two-time world champion and sporting legend and his potential biographer, set up after weeks of negotiations between mutual friends twice removed and the lure of cold hard cash. The above was how it ended, eight hours later.
There had been a phone call the day before at 10 pm. I was in London. When I answered it there was no voice, only the kind of background noise you get when someone has accidentally pressed the call button. This, I soon came to appreciate, is the trademark Higgins pause. The only time you don’t get it is when you are about to be threatened. And so, a pause and then, ‘Hello, is that Bill Borrows?’ The voice sounded distant, tremulous and hinted at an urgency behind the slurred words but, for all that, was instantly recognisable.
‘It’s Alex Higgins here.’
These are four words guaranteed to generate a mild bowel movement in anybody who has mistakenly given the former world snooker champion their telephone number. Higgins keeps a battered handwritten notebook with the names and numbers of such people: ex-managers; ex-friends; people soon to become ex-friends; people who will lend him money; family and emergency contacts. Nobody gives him their number twice but they don’t have to because, if they can help Alex Higgins, he will have made a note of it. The book is his lifeline.
‘Listen Bill, I’m in a bit of a predicament.’
This is a favourite phrase, covering everything from athlete’s foot to imminent arrest.
‘I’ve left all my stuff in a little pub… golf clubs, a shoulder bag, a carrier bag and another ■■■■■■■ carrier bag. There’s a lot of valuable stuff in there you know… I’ve got to find a quieter pub. Call me back in four.’
He also has a cue with him in a dirty brown, soft leather cue case but neglects to mention it. Four minutes later.
‘Hi Bill, thanks for calling me back. I’m in the best Chinese in Britain,’ he shouts, for the benefit of the proprietor of the Pearl City restaurant in Manchester’s Chinatown. ‘The prices are very reasonable and it’s where all the ■■■■■■■ Chinese come, anyway, I’m not going to take the ■■■■ you know, I’m sincere, I want you to know I’m sincere, the food will cost between 10 and 20 quid, you know, and I’m going to take it away. Can you pay for it for me?’
His tone of voice contained just the right amount of pathos to preclude inaction but was essentially a mechanism by which Higgins could instantly establish the ground rules of any subsequent relationship. If I refused to pay, he would not meet me. I would be guilty of neglecting him. If I gushed, he would meet me but probably underline my name in his little book as someone he could call and berate at 3am for some perceived slight. It would also fast-track me onto the short list for the position of his next general factotum - his preferred option.
If I agreed to pay with conditions attached, his feral cunning would gauge instantly what he could expect to extract from the relationship in the same way that Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s official hangman until 1956, was supposed to be able to calculate the weight of a condemned man just by shaking his hand. But Higgins does not need physical contact to weigh up what he can get out of any given situation. He can detect the relative worth of any nuance in the same time it used to take him to work out which ball he was going to play three shots hence. Which is to say, with preternatural speed.
Of the payment options on offer I went for the third and decided to pay for the Chinese meal (and a hotel for the night) if he would meet me the following day. Higgins’s mobile phone was passed over to a waiter at the restaurant but negotiations with three members of staff at the Pearl City revealed that none of them could help Mr Higgins or take credit card bookings over the phone. The mobile, one of eight he would be in temporary possession of throughout the next nine months, was then returned to Higgins, who, possessed by the sudden rage of phosphorous pentoxide coming into contact with water, was incandescent at the injustice of it all.
Seconds later he was being wrestled from the premises shouting, ‘But I like Chinese’ and, oddly, ‘What is your VAT number? Tell me your ■■■■■■■ VAT number.’ Ten minutes later.
‘Hello Bill, it’s Alex again and I’m still in a bit of a predicament.’
A general inquiry regarding his precise whereabouts was treated with commendable efficiency (the soon-to-become-familiar ‘Shut up you idiot, will you just ■■■■■■■ listen and stop interrupting?’). He continued.
‘I’ve just got to put my feet up. I know it sounds like I’ve had a few but I haven’t really lubricated my throat yet and I need a hotel between £45 and £60… I’m not going there, it’s a khazi. When can you get here?’
I explained that I was 180 miles away, had no car and no means of getting up to him until the morning. Higgins cannot drive.
‘What am I going to do?’ he asked.
Inexplicably, he had managed to get under my guard. I felt guilty and so reassured him that I would try to book him a hotel on the phone and let him know where it was.
Alex Higgins is unwell. He has been unwell for as long as most people can remember. His diet is not something recommended on the pages of Men’s Health magazine, while his infamous consumption of stimulants (legal and illegal) has probably not helped. ‘If he carries on at that rate,’ a snooker official remarked of the 23-year-old Irishman at a post-tournament party in 1973, ‘He won’t even make 30.’
Of course, he did not carry on at that rate - he was just warming up and has since passed 30, 40 and 50. The BBC has had his obituary taped and recorded for months but, as one of his many former managers once remarked, ‘He’ll live to be 70 that ■■■■■■■■ They’ve been writing him off since he started playing. On and off the table, he is a total survivor and he knows it.’
In 1998, however, he had genuine cause for concern. Diagnosed with throat cancer, Higgins became seriously ill and when the paparazzi caught up with him at the funeral of his close friend Oliver Reed a year later, the picture was picked up by everybody. It showed an emaciated Higgins looking down through a pair of half-moon glasses perched imperiously on the end of his nose, his face contorted in a combination of terror and explosive rage. Rage at the indignity and injustice of being photographed at a friend’s funeral, and terror at encountering the media while looking so visibly unwell. Alex Higgins takes a great pride in his appearance and the cravat he has adopted is to hide the scars of his throat operation.
It is remarkable then, and also admirable, that he chose to appear on the BBC1 documentary Tobacco Wars in July 1999. Described by the Corporation as ‘a hard-hitting history of the cigarette’, it provided the opportunity for those people who had missed the snapshot of a gaunt and distressed Higgins caught in monochrome to see him in colour and hear him attempt to speak in a halting whisper after 40 treatments of radiotherapy and an operation to remove a cancerous lymph node in his neck. Wearing a beige waistcoat over something resembling a dress shirt and then a cravat (tied David Essex style) and weighing less than seven stone, he resembled a grotesque caricature of himself.
Looking into the camera he claimed, with utter conviction, that he felt ‘nothing but disgust’ for the industry that still sponsors all the major snooker tournaments. ‘The tobacco companies and snooker were as thick as thieves,’ he continued, warming to his theme. ‘Obviously I think that they have got their advertising for a song for 25 years. Cigarettes are everywhere in snooker. Freebies everywhere. Most snooker players were given free cigarettes.’
It is important to acknowledge that at the time he appeared on the programme he had a court case outstanding against snooker’s governing body, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), and would instigate proceedings against the tobacco industry within a fortnight.
But, regardless of his motivation for appearing on the programme, he stole the show. The public was shocked. It was impossible to argue with the man, rasping defiantly, ‘I intend to fight this case to the end. It’s easy to stop smoking. I have a strong will-power. What chance has cancer against me?’
Given that it is in remission at the time of writing, apparently none.
‘I thought you had throat cancer?’ asked a perturbed Arthur Magee as he sold him a pouch of Golden Virginia from his Belfast cabin several months after the documentary had been screened.
‘I’ve beaten it,’ replied Higgins without a flicker of a smile. He was back in the public eye. The reasons were not of his choosing but at least people were talking about the ‘Hurricane’ once more. To a man who, except on rare occasions, has lived his life according to the motto, ‘there is no such thing as good publicity’, that was something to be cherished.
Unlike the next splash. The piece started: ‘In the semi darkness of an all-night snooker hall, a sad and shabby figure shuffles between the green baize tables. Once he held the world in his palm, a two-time world champion, the best, they said, his sport had ever produced…But that was then. Time hasn’t been kind to Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins and today the man who elevated snooker to an art form is reduced to playing all-comers for £10 a time in a back-street hall.’
The piece was by Patrick Mulchrone and published in the Mirror in June 2000. What Mulchrone probably didn’t know is that Higgins had started out playing all-comers for money in the Jampot on the Donegal Road in the late Fifties and early Sixties and, despite becoming world champion twice, had never stopped hustling. Even in 1982, after his second world title and while less successful players like Dennis Taylor and John Virgo were fulfilling relatively well-paid exhibition engagements, Higgins, in between even more lucrative exhibition matches at £1,000 to £2,000 a time, was still hustling for £10 here and £20 there in snooker clubs all over Britain.
However, the story surrounding the Mirror piece is worth exploring in detail because it demonstrates not only Higgins’s relationship with the tabloids but also why he has become so circumspect about every person he meets. The day began with someone tipping off the papers for a nominal amount of money when all he wanted to do was play a bit of snooker and hustle and two days later millions of people had arrived at the conclusion that he deserved pity, something that distresses him greatly. This kind of casual betrayal, repeated countless times over the years, has convinced him that only the paranoid survive but his blithe refusal to accept that he can be outsmarted by ‘■■■■■■■ pressmen’ and the money he believes his story is worth keep drawing him back towards the flame where he almost always gets burnt.
Acting on a tip-off, Mulchrone made his way down to a snooker club in the back streets around Strangeways Prison in Manchester. ‘We watched him playing and drinking some extraordinary concoction at the bar,’ he explains. ‘My first impression was one of extreme shock because he was so gaunt. He had pallid skin, his cheeks were drawn in, he had thinning hair and his throat was covered by a cravat. He was also wearing what might have once been a garish waistcoat. That said, he was still whizzing around the table as best he could. The frame we saw him play he lost. And so, we were working out what to do, whether we should ■■■■■■ a picture or try to gain his confidence or whatever.’
The press are understandably wary of Higgins and his predilection for sudden and violent outbursts but, eventually deciding upon the latter approach, the journalist and his photographer asked Higgins if he wanted to talk to the paper. For money, obviously.
‘He said “Yeah” and then tried as best he could to take command of the situation,’ Mulchrone recalls. ‘He asked me to pick up his bag and carry it to my car and then told me to take him to a hotel in town.’
The old Albert Pierrepoint treatment. Once ensconced Higgins, assuming that his luck was in, gambled and asked for an ‘extraordinary figure’. The paper refused and negotiations commenced. Part of this process involved the newspaper taking Higgins in search of a former friend in a pub in one of the less salubrious parts of the city and then to the home of a female friend. He went in, left the journalist outside for 20 minutes and then reappeared.
Financial negotiations, at this point, were still ongoing as were the precise topics for discussion.
‘He put a piece of feint-lined notepaper into my hand,’ remembers Mulchrone. ‘And at the top he had written down my name and telephone numbers and then what he considered to be the terms of our discussion. In capital letters he wrote, “WHO ARE YOU? HOW’S YOUR HEALTH? NORTHERN IRELAND”.’
Back at the hotel Higgins ordered champagne and Guinness as the Mirror attempted to find a figure he would accept. It proved impossible but, sensing that he had a fantastic exclusive, Mulchrone asked him to sleep on it. The next morning, unsurprisingly, he had not changed his mind. Even at this stage, and with ‘a substantial amount’ of money on the table, he could not override his natural instinct for screwing them for some more. The impulse was not greed. Rather, it was driven by his belief that he was ‘owed’ for all the papers he had sold for them in the past. Higgins has a keen, although considerably inflated, sense of his own market worth.
Consequently, the Mirror snatched a picture of him outside the hotel and the piece went ahead without his cooperation.
As Mulchrone now admits, ‘[The picture] spoke a thousand words for me. I didn’t really need to do very much once that picture of him appeared. That told the story… it was just an observational piece and I didn’t use half the stuff he told me because we agreed we weren’t going to talk about that. He was upset when it came out but the man ■■■■■■ on his own strawberries in an extraordinary way.’ In the history of Alex Higgins and interpersonal or professional relationships, this is not a new development.
Back in London, I was still frantically trying to find a hotel in Manchester that would take him for the night. Alex Higgins seems to have systematically targeted every major hotel in the city centre over a sustained period of time and managed to get banned from the lot. That takes real dedication. The process was further complicated by Higgins’s demands for a hotel with a golf course, his food order (‘I’ve not eaten for three ■■■■■■■ days’) and then the need to book somewhere before anyone checked with the duty manager.
Using a false name would be futile because when he eventually turned up he would be barred and the whole process would have to start again. I had already received a polite refusal from the last city centre hotel and was actively searching for somewhere in the suburbs, preferably South Manchester where he used to live and might feel at home.
By this stage Stephen O’Malley, a friend of mine whom I had pressed into a reluctant babysitting role, and a work colleague he had brought along as back-up had made their way to the Circus Tavern.
This was the ‘little pub’ in which Higgins had left most of his worldly possessions. The Circus Tavern is a two-room establishment with a bar the size of a butcher’s chopping block. With real fires and an absence of pretension, it has the feel of an Irish country pub despite its location in the centre of Manchester. Consequently, it has a large number of expatriate Irishmen among its clientele but not, it would appear, Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins who was in a ‘bit of a predicament’ somewhere else. Ten minutes later, however, he arrived wearing a fedora (which he took off only once), smoking and demanding both a drink and a place to sit down. He likes to make an entrance.
‘I’m looking for O’Malley,’ he announced and, satisfied that he had found him and that he would now have somewhere to stay for the night, he began to relax. Fortunately, he approved of my friend’s surname (‘A good Irish name, I am saved… the Hurricane is saved’) and knew his mother, which was hardly surprising as she is an Irish publican.
He ordered himself a drink that he could not pay for and then settled down in the back room. Depending upon the subject matter he was, by turns, a charming companion, a snarling bar-room bore or a vulnerable child, sobbing as he talked about his love for his dead mother. You do not have a conversation with Alex Higgins. You listen and do not interrupt. These were ground rules that a drunken middle-aged interloper who invited himself to sit down at the same table had not taken the opportunity to learn. After a warning for adopting a tone that Higgins considered to be too familiar he subsequently made the fundamental error of interjecting mid-anecdote. There was an uncontrolled explosion.
‘Get the ■■■■ out of here,’ screamed Higgins as he stood up at the table. The focus of his anger complied almost immediately but the incident had served to disturb whatever temporary truce Higgins had negotiated with the voices inside his head.
‘It unsettled Alex, you could tell,’ explained O’Malley. Five minutes later he took off his hat, pulled a comb out of his pocket, dipped it in a glass of vodka and orange on the table, stood up and then combed his hair in the mirror over the fireplace. It is always the little things that give it away.
Suddenly there was no light to alleviate the darkness and the subsequent hour they spent driving around in a minicab while I attempted to locate a sanctuary cannot have helped. Higgins was becoming paranoid and demanding to know where he was being taken. The taxi driver, who had not recognised Higgins, thought he was party to a kidnap. The man who had just berated the driver for having a spare tyre in the boot of his car was now cursing and threatening one of the other passengers, telling him that if he said another word he would ‘put his snooker cue in his ear and rip his ■■■■■■■ brains out’.
Regardless, O’Malley risked Higgins’s wrath by delivering reassuring stage whispers to the driver until I had located a hotel in a nondescript suburb of south Manchester where Higgins was not persona non grata. The duty manager of the Forte Post House, despite the fact that the man about to check in had just pushed the doorman out of the way, welcomed him. The new guest demanded an empty pint glass and a pot of tea and, after sending the white ball around four cushions of the pool table in the bar and just missing the pocket, went to bed in room 271.
All that remained now was for me to meet and strike a deal to write the authorised biography of a man who claimed he had lots to tell, a damaged person frequently as sinned against as sinning, a man who should have had it all but failed to press home the advantage when he had the chance, a man who was denied his career and the money he earned by people he trusted and those he despised, the most exciting player in the world, a self-destructive character but also an inspiring one.
When I called him at the hotel from Manchester Airport at 9am the next day, he explained he was tired and asked me to come and see him four hours later with a copy of the Racing Post and a pint of ‘black and tan’ (half-Guinness, half-lager).
I asked at the desk for his room number. The girl behind the desk shot me a look and then told me. I bought him a drink and two for myself and went up to his room.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he called out before I even knocked on his door. Newspaper under my arm and a tray of drinks in my hand, I already felt like room service. ‘You can put them over there,’ he said when he finally opened the door. ‘Have you got my paper?’ All the lights and the television were on.
He was wearing a red cravat but nothing on the upper half of his body, a pair of beige slacks held up by a makeshift belt and, of course, a pair of half-moon glasses halfway down the bridge of his nose. He looked like Max, the English prisoner played by John Hurt in Midnight Express. Emaciated, weighing less than seven stone, thinning hair combed back over his head, teeth in a state of disrepair and sores on his upper body, the whole ensemble was nonetheless held together with a vestige of dignity. Although he looked terrible, he was still in better shape than I had been led to believe by his recent media appearances. The room was beyond warm, it was airless and cloying. The smell was of stale tobacco and unwashed clothes.
‘Can you ask them to turn the heating down?’ he asked.
I did but to little effect. The place was a mess, with his belongings (three supermarket carrier bags stuffed with old newspapers, a snooker cue in a leather case, one set of golf clubs - his ‘woods’ - and two small travel bags) scattered everywhere.
There was a copy of Maxim magazine on the bed. I am the Editor-at-large at Maxim and he had obviously done his homework.
‘Oh, you’ve seen the magazine then,’ I enquired as he expectorated into the bathroom sink.
‘No, I’ve not read it yet,’ he answered.
He was telling the truth. On picking it up and flicking through it there was a two-inch square missing from one corner and saturated crumbs of yellowish powder trapped between the pages in the spine of the magazine. I noticed there was a bottle of Tipp-Ex at the side of the bed.
‘It’s so hot in here,’ he complained, walking back from the toilet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and reaching for a slug of ‘black and tan’. The window refused to open.
And so, irritated that he could not get his own way, he rocked back on his chair, crossed his legs and put them on the desk, lit a roll-up he had prepared earlier, opened the Racing Post and pored over it like an actor looking for a favourable notice in the arts pages while Channel 4 Racing blared in the background. I said nothing. Somehow, he had managed to communicate through an unspoken medium that he was not to be interrupted.
I asked him about when he had tried to become a jockey in the late Sixties at Eddie Reavey’s stable in Berkshire but he just responded with a guttural noise from the back of his throat. I asked him who he fancied in the 2.10 at Salisbury but he ignored me. I reminded him that he had been barred from my father’s betting shop in Cheadle Hulme for stealing the racing papers from the walls. He suddenly took an interest, wanted to know where the shop was and then suggested we go into Didsbury for a drink. Which we did, via a bookies.
‘Can you lend me £50, Bill?’
‘Do you mean give you £50?’
‘No, lend me £50, and if I win I’ll give you the money back.’
A good deal in anybody’s book.
‘I’ll go with you fifty-fifty on the winnings.’
‘OK, deal.’
‘Plus my £50 back.’
‘OK,’ he snarled, thinking that I might be stitching him up but unable to argue because I had the money. As far as I am aware, the horse is still running and I have still not discounted the possibility that he deliberately put it on a no-hoper in a fit of pique.
Four hours later - after revelations about his childhood (a seemingly cathartic exercise) and his problems coping with the death of his mother; his relationship with his father; his scandalous treatment at the hands of the WPBSA yet again; some libellous comments about the leading lights of his profession; a story involving Oliver Reed and his plans for the future - a single mistimed intervention from me provoked the furious outburst that opened this piece. It also meant that the already ludicrous figure he was demanding for his cooperation on an authorised biography was automatically doubled. And he was not to be moved.
I called the Post House the next day to see if he had made it back to the hotel. He had but they could not put me through as he had been asked to leave after insulting a guest, racially abusing a member of staff and ‘going a bit mad in reception’.
A call to his mobile found him in a relatively sunny disposition, as though the argument the day before had never taken place.
‘Listen babes,’ he said, ‘the price stays the same on the book but see what you can do… I’m going to be big news again, I’m picking up my cue and I’m going to come back on the Seniors tour and take on those ■■■■■■■■ like [Steve] Davis and all the rest of them… I’m coming back. And can you do me a favour?’
‘What?’
‘Can you phone Noel?’
‘Noel who?’
‘Noel Gallagher, you ■■■■■■■ prick.’
'[Sigh] OK, and… ’
‘Can you tell him I need to borrow one million pounds and that I want to do a book about music with him? Will you tell him that? Get back to me about the money for the book you want to do with me when you’ve spoken to your publisher.’
Postscript
Bill Borrows did eventually write his book The Hurricane, from which this is an edited extract. But it is not even close to being an authorised biography, Higgins’s insatiable desire for money and complete unreliability ensured that.
This year, having put on some weight and with his cancer still in remission, Higgins returned to Northern Ireland. He was living less than 10 miles from where he was born - in a Simon hostel for the homeless. The way he lived had not changed at all. He still drank, smoked, gambled and played snooker for money. The quality of his life had arguably improved. The pressure of tournaments had disappeared and there was always the chance of another pay day, like the exhibition matches with Jimmy White which took place across Northern Ireland during the summer. Perhaps his sporadic involvement in the book was just as well.
Towards the end of their encounter at the Post House Hotel in August 2001, Borrows asked him, ‘Have you enjoyed your life?’
Higgins looked at Borrows, then adjusted his cravat. ‘I haven’t really had much to do with my life,’ he said. ‘All I’ve done is take part in it.’
Did it his way, no ■■■■■ given. Could be a real obnoxious character by all accounts but boy could he play snooker! Definitely one of the games characters.
)
) Davies got his entourage to bring out all the merch to sell,.all neatly laid out on a mobile trolley table thing.
, but snooker is whole different ball game …literally