Modest sites of birth and death were visited by the funeral cortege as Belfast buried its sporting hero and star
SPORTS STARS, public representatives and other dignitaries joined the people of Belfast yesterday in mourning the death of Alex “Hurricane” Higgins.
Among those paying tribute to the “people’s champion” at his funeral was his life-long friend in snooker Jimmy White who remembered him as an honest individual who infuriatingly “never listened to anyone”.
The mourners were led by the former world champion’s second wife, sisters, son and daughter at the service of commemoration in Belfast’s St Anne’s Cathedral.
The cortege earlier left the home of the snooker star’s sister in the Roden Street for a horse-drawn procession to the cathedral. The coffin, with a single bouquet, was taken through the Donegall Road area where he grew up and past Sandy Row.
Hundreds of mourners from the strongly loyalist area lined the street, applauding as the carriage passed. It paused near his birthplace in Abbingdon Street before continuing towards City Hall and the cathedral where his parents married nearly 70 years ago. Local residents were joined at the service by White, whom Higgins defeated in the 1982 world championship semi-final. Also in attendance were six-times world champion Stephen Hendry; former world champion Ken Doherty; local snooker stars Joe Swail and Mark Allen, and Willie Thorne, John Virgo, Mark Selby and Shaun Murphy.
Former boxing world champion Barry McGuigan paid his respects.
Queen Elizabeth was represented by Dame Mary Peters, who is the lord lieutenant for Belfast. Belfast City Council was represented by the SDLP Lord Mayor Pat Convery. Stormont Minister Alex Attwood, also from the SDLP, and the DUP’s Arlene Foster, joined by Robin Newton, were there. They were among the 120 invited guests joined by a further 700 mourners for the funeral service led by Dr McKelvey, accompanied by the Bishop of Down and Dromore, the Right Rev Harold Miller and the Rev Terence Kerr from Higgins’s Church of Ireland parish in Donegall Pass.
Dr McKelvey read out a tribute to the late snooker champion by Jimmy White, who was said to be too upset to deliver it personally.
He recalled an occasion when he and Higgins had been in a Southampton casino and were chatting in the gents’ when White accidentally damaged a sink. “I told Alex there’s no point telling as we didn’t have much money but Alex being Alex told them. We all done [sic] a runner. We ended up in a shebeen, surfaced at daylight to a police van waiting and spent a day in the cells till the damage was paid – all because Alex was too honest . . . He was an individual, his own man. He was the Hurricane and I will miss him to the end.”
Higgins’s daughter Lauren read a poem she had written about her father: “I will smile whenever I hear your name and be proud you were my dad”.
Dr McKelvey told the congregation the best way to remember their hero was to contribute to the cancer centre at Belfast City Hospital.
The lesson read was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Bishop Harper said he had “dared to hope” reports the snooker star, who died of cancer last month, found solace in the Bible in his last few days were true.
His coffin was taken outside to the waiting hearse. A floral tribute which proclaimed Higgins as “The people’s champion” was placed alongside the coffin. The cortege moved off through the city centre to Roselawn Cemetery where a final burial service was held.
Victim to fame and fortune recalled
ALEX HIGGINS was a “person of prodigious talent at his chosen sport”, who fell victim to the twin perils of money and instant fame, Dr Houston McKelvey told mourners at St Anne’s Cathedral.
However, he said, most of what had been said about the former world champion since his death was not important. Those assembled inside and outside the cathedral were there “to pray for his son and daughter, his family and his true friends, to commend his soul to a merciful God and to thank God for that which was true and noble in Alex’s life”.
The dean of the cathedral commended mourners to support generously the cancer centre at the City Hospital.
“May his sporting record be the basis of research and care well into the future,” he said. “It is a cause which like his playing will unite people to challenge one of the greatest enemies of human life.”
Dr McKelvey said the young Higgins had encountered two of the greatest temptations possible – fame and fortune.
“He was not the first to find this difficult and he certainly will not be the last. Daily we see reminders of this in news about so-called celebrities who, despite the best of provision of personal coaches and gurus, are making a pig’s mess of their lives.”
Warning the congregation of the dangers of “instant wealth and publicity”, Dr McKelvey cited the temptation of Christ in the desert. “The media which makes can also be the media which destroys and so can the public whim.
“Shakespeare always referred to the fickleness of the mob,” he added. “Jesus too was praised on Palm Sunday and five days later, run out of the city and lynched on Good Friday.”
News coverage of Higgins’s life had been a “media-fest”, Dr McKelvey said, “like a shoal of piranha fish”.
“Many have been judgmental despite the fact that there are few Irish families that I know of who don’t have their own ‘character’ to cope with in the family system – the only difference being that their character was not quite to famous.”
He said than when life had turned sour for “Higgy”, he returned to Belfast “to where he didn’t have to say who he was”.
“Each of us needs to make a homecoming when we come to our senses and realise that we have fouled things up – and that homecoming is to a God who runs towards us to meet us.”