Alex Higgins: Fond tributes recall magic of the Hurricane

His body was discovered yesterday when his flat was broken into in Belfast after he failed to answer his mobile phone.

The 61-year-old was considered one of the finest players of all time and the sport's most flamboyant character. Tributes poured in last night to the two-times world champion, who had long-term problems with alcohol and smoking.

Former champion Dennis Taylor said he played thousands of frames against him and that they eventually made peace with each other after Higgins threatened to have him killed.

Taylor said: "I don't think you'll ever, ever see another player in the game of snooker like the great Alex Higgins. He was a very, very exciting player to watch."

Snooker promoter Barry Hearn said Higgins would be remembered as the "original people's champion" and the man who transformed the popularity of the sport.

"I have known him for nearly 40 years. He was the major reason for snooker's popularity in the early days," he said.

"The Hurricane" lived up to his stormy nickname. Stalking round the green baize, the people's champion blew opponents away with his fast and furious style. He won the world championship in 1972 and 1982.

Away from the snooker hall, his private life was a chaotic whirlwind of drink, womanising, fights, illness and debt. He earned millions but squandered it in a long and turbulent descent into homelessness and alcoholism.

His career disintegrated amid fines, bans and court-cases and he lost luxury house in Cheshire to the taxman.

He was divorced by two wives, Cara and Lynn, and was stopped from seeing his children, Lauren and Jordan.

Despite being warned many times to cut his drinking and smoking to save his health, Higgins smoked as many as 80 cigarettes a day until attempting to quit in 1996.

He had cancerous growths removed from his mouth in 1994 and 1996 and was told in 1998 that he had throat cancer.

Born in Belfast, Higgins discovered the game that was to dominate his life when he stumbled across a snooker hall while taking a short-cut home at the age of 11, and became a teenage "pool-shark", hustling money from older and less talented players.

He claimed the world champion's crown at the first attempt, aged 22, and took it back again ten years later from Ray Reardon at the Crucible in Sheffield.

But what many feel was his finest hour came the following year at Preston Guildhall, when he came back from 7-0 down against the seemingly unbeatable Steve Davis to win the 1983 United Kingdom championship final 16-15.

His fall from grace began in the same hall three years later, when he head-butted an official and was fined 12,000 and banned for the next five major tournaments. He won the Irish Benson & Hedges Masters in 1989, against an up-and-coming Stephen Hendry.

The following year he was banned for 12 months after hitting an official and telling Northern Ireland team-mate Dennis Taylor that he would have him shot.

By then, his age and the effects of his drinking were beginning to show, and he slipped out of the top 100 rankings in 1997.

Former champion Steve Davis said: "To people in the game he was a constant source of argument, he was a rebel. But to the wider public he was a breath of fresh air that drew them in to the game."

The man I knew - Jeremy Watson

LATE night at the Crucible Theatre in 1982, and there is a kerfuffle behind the scenes. It's the early stages of the World Snooker Championships and Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins, a living legend for both his style of play and his capacity for drink, is caught short and has just relieved himself in a potted plant holder in the practice room.

Some officials are calling for disciplinary action but most of those present just laugh and shrug their shoulders. Not for the first or last time in his incident-strewn life, such was his charm and his genius, the mercurial Irishman escaped censure for behaviour that would have had lesser mortals clapped in irons.

The Belfast boy first won the world championship in 1972 at the age of 22. Young and brash, he captivated fans the world over with his lightning cue action and big-potting bravura while alienating older professionals and the game's then staid officialdom. Over the next decade, while never repeating his earlier success, the whippet-thin, chain-smoking professional earned millions of pounds that he largely drank and gambled away.

But the snooker public continued to adore the flamboyance delivered with a cheeky Irish grin. Many tears were shed in 1982 when Higgins again defied the odds to win the World Championship for a second time in an era when more robotic professionals such as Steve Davies were taking over the game. Above all, he represented an earlier, edgier era of a working man's game played in smoke-filled, booze fuelled halls before the sport invaded the nation's living rooms during the 1980s boom. For those who love the green baize, he will be sorely missed.

• Jeremy Watson was snooker correspondent for the Sheffield Star