BLAST FROM THE PAST: Snooker’s golden age was the 1980s with players like Alex Higgins

The waistcoated men of the green baize were genuine superstars during a decade when snooker was elevated from obscure bar-room pastime to national obsession.

Alex Higgins, the flamboyant, belligerent Belfast boy who once threatened to have Dennis Taylor (he of the funny, upside-down glasses) shot, Bill Werbeniuk drinking 16 pints in a day to settle his nerves (he had a doctor’s note), Terry Griffiths singing Welsh lullabies, ‘boring’ Steve Davies, and many more. All these players were able to earn small fortunes while the country went as Snooker Loopy as Chas & Dave in their top-10 hit of 1986.

With football in the doldrums, mostly due to hooliganism and stadium disasters, there was wall-to-wall coverage of snooker. Millions were glued to their TV sets as the mellifluous commentator Jack Karnehm would whisper that the ‘blue had just kissed the pink’...how did we ever endure the drama of it all?

Whether you loved or loathed him, Alex Higgins, was at the helm of the cue-toting stars. One of sport’s great anti-heros, he was innately talented, and very self-aware, proclaiming himself ‘the people’s champion’ before Diana was the ‘people’s princess’.

Whilst other players ruminated like chess champions over their next move, an open-shirted Higgins would dart around the table, delivering machine-gun shots with swagger, a swing of the hips and hurricane speed.

He scored the best remembered victory of his career in 1982, when he beat Ray Reardon; his tears of joy, whilst beckoning his wife Lynn and daughter Lauren onto the floor of the Crucible Theatre, further endearing him to a now snooker-besotted nation. A mercurial showman, Higgins rescued snooker from its torpor. With his rare magnetism, he broke the mould in this most reserved game, paving the way for other stand-out players like The Whirlwind, Jimmy White, and, much later, The Rocket, Ronnie O’Sullivan.

But Higgins’ talent was matched by an equally self-destructive streak. He drank. He smoked. He womanised. He was volatile, often getting in trouble with the law. Then throat cancer. He died in 2010 aged 61. The Hurricane had finally blown himself out.