Snooker legend Alex Higgins stabbed after a domestic incident in Swinton Salford
Snooker legend Alex Higgins stabbed after a domestic incident in Swinton, Salford, Greater Manchester.
Camera Nikon F4, Lens Nikkor 80-200 f2.8 on kodak 400 film
Pictured above in 1997 his then girlfriend Holly Haise stabbed him three times during a domestic argument.
Alexander Gordon "Alex" Higgins (18 March 1949 – 24 July 2010), also known by his nickname of Hurricane Higgins, was a Northern Irish professional snooker player who was twice World Champion and twice runner-up. Higgins earned the nickname The Hurricane because of his speed of play. Higgins was also a former World Doubles champion with Jimmy White and won the World Cup three times with the All Ireland team. He also came to be known as the People's Champion because of his popularity.
Higgins is often credited to have brought the game of snooker to a wider audience and contributing to its peak in popularity in the eighties.
Higgins had a reputation as an unpredictable and difficult character] He was a heavy smoker, struggled with drinking and gamblin.] and admitted to using cocaine and marijuana. Diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, Higgins was found dead in his Belfast home on 24 July 2010.
Alex Higgins was born in Belfast and had three sisters. He started playing snooker at the age of 11, often in the Jampot club in his native Sandy Row area of south Belfast and later in the YMCA in the nearby city centre. At age 14 and weighing seven and a half stones (47.6 kg), he left for England and a career as a jockey. However, he never made the title because, in his youth days, he drank a lot of Guinness and ate a lot of chocolate which made him too heavy to ride competitively. He returned to Belfast and by 1965, aged 16, he had compiled his first maximum break. In 1968 he won the All-Ireland and Northern Ireland Amateur Snooker Championships.
For most of his adult life Higgins often smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day. He had cancerous growths removed from his mouth in 1994 and 1996. In June 1998, he was found to have throat cancer; on 13 October of that year, he had throat surgery.
In 2009, Higgins lived in a caravan. In spring 2010, he had pneumonia. In April 2010 Higgins's friends announced that they had set up a campaign to help raise the £20,000 he needed for teeth implants, to enable him to eat properly again and put on weight. Higgins lost his teeth after intensive radiotherapy used to treat his throat cancer. It was reported that since losing them he had been living on liquid food, and had become increasingly depressed, even contemplating suicide. He was too ill to have the implants fitted. Despite his illness he continued to smoke cigarettes and drink heavily until the end of his life.
At the end of his life, Higgins' weight fell to 6 stone (38 kilograms). He lived in sheltered housing on the Donegall Road, Belfast. He was found dead in bed in his flat on 24 July 2010. The cause of death was a combination of malnutrition, pneumonia, a bronchial condition and throat cancer. His children survive him.
At the time of his 1972 triumph at the World Championship, Higgins had no permanent home and by his own account had recently lived in a row of abandoned houses in Blackburn which were awaiting demolition. In one week he had moved into five different houses on the same street, moving down one every time his current dwelling was demolished.
In 1975, Higgins' son Chris Delahunty was born. Higgins's first marriage was to Australian[16] Cara Hasler in April 1975 in Sydney. They had a daughter Christel, and divorced. His second marriage was to Lynn Avison in 1980 at a United Reformed Church. They had a daughter Lauren (born late 1980) and son Jordan (born March 1983). They split in 198 and divorced. In the same year, Higgins began a relationship with Siobhan Kidd, which ended in 1989 after he allegedly hit her with a hairdryer.
He had a long and enduring friendship with Oliver Reed and was a good friend of Jimmy White, with whom he often played exhibition matches.
While not normally noted for his philanthropy, in 1983 Higgins helped a young boy from the Manchester area, a fan of his who had been in a coma for two months. His parents were growing desperate and wrote to Higgins. He recorded his voice on a tape and sent it to the boy with his best wishes. He later visited the boy in hospital, unannounced, and promised that if the boy recovered they would play snooker together. True to his word, once the boy was out, the match was held.
Press Photographer in Salford Greater Manchester