Alex Higgins: The People's Champion (2010 TV Movie) User Reviews

Always a maverick

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 15 February 2016]

This show was a tribute to the wayward Alex Higgins the self styled 'People's Champion.'

Higgins died relatively young with his final years being ill ridden with cancer which made him gaunt. His star had ascended fast as he became the youngest snooker world champion in 1972 when snooker was still a sport associated with smoked filled rooms. He won his second championship at the Crucible when snooker was hitting the heights of its popularity with regular television coverage.

Higgins certainly did his bit to popularize the sport in between those years. He was brash, quick and controversial. This attributes would also finally let him down and ultimately destroy him.

Yet there are so many players who came up through the ranks of professional snooker inspired by Higgins. Jimmy White, Stephen Hendry, Ronnie O'Sullivan. Even Steve Davis was a fan although Higgins never had much time for the Romford Robot.

However Higgins decline was swift, he felt out the top rankings which meant no automatic invites to the top tournaments, he lost sponsors, gained more controversy, lost friends and he was always in financial trouble. Higgins lived it up with fellow hell raisers such as Oliver Reed. You always felt if he was more disciplined he would had lasted loner but Higgins lived for today.

Of course nowadays no one under the 40 years of age would even have heard of Higgins. This was one last celebration of a maverick.

Familiar Tale of the Decline and Fall of a Major Sporting Star

[l_rawjalaurence · 5/10 · 18 December 2014]

Alex ('Hurricane') Higgins was one of the major stars of the televised snooker age. Although he only won the World Championship twice, in 1972 and 1982, his colorful style of play and extravagant behavior inside and outside various arenas ensured that he remained in the forefront of spectators' minds.

Brought up in a tough area of Belfast, Higgins was a self-made player who spent most of his younger days in snooker halls. Possessed of immense natural talent, he shot to fame in the early Seventies when he beat his one-time mentor John Spencer to win the world crown. When television started to become interested in the sport, initially through the series POT BLACK, Higgins was catapulted to stardom; his 1982 victory over Ray Reardon at the World Championships had a memorable denouement, when his wife and young daughter came out of the audience to embrace him; Higgins himself broke down in tears.

Sadly this success was not to last. Jason Bernard's documentary suggests that Higgins spent too much time carousing and not enough on practice; to snooker barons such as Barry Hearn - who founded the all-conquering Matchroom team - Higgins was a liability, someone who could prove unmanageable. Despite occasional flashes of his one- time brilliance, Higgins gradually slid down the rankings ladder, and was eventually reduced to the qualifying rounds of the World Championships.

Above all he was a stubborn man - even when he contracted throat cancer he refused to change his lifestyle. He continued to play, even though he was little more than a physical wreck, his once- attractive countenance ravaged by illness and alcohol. He died young; and although the stars turned out in force for his funeral, there was a lingering sense that the player himself was solely responsible for his demise.

While the documentary recognized the fact that he might have been 'The People's Champion' in his prime, by the end of his career he was a sad person.