During last Saturday night's cloying, television love-in with Manchester United, the life of George Best was described by Michael Parkinson as "a mini-series waiting to happen". Twenty four hours earlier on UTV's Kelly show, Alex Higgins's 15-minute appearance proved, once again, that when his story comes to be told it will have to be on a much more epic scale. The pride, the aura of invincibility, the tragic flaw and then finally the fall make "The Life of Alex" the most modern of morality tales.
In his 50 years, Higgins has see-sawed between triumph, despair and farce. In that time, he has also provoked vastly differing emotional reactions, ranging from awe at his inherent genius to unease at the undercurrent of menace just below the surface of his troubled personality. Now it seems that the throat cancer that has ravaged his body for the past year has propelled him into another act of the ongoing drama that has encompassed his sporting and professional life. And that same cancer has dragged us, the gawking, prurient public, centre stage with him.
Many sports writers of a certain age in these islands have trundled down the well-worn Higgins path over the past decade. His last world professional snooker title was 17 years ago but Higgins still continued to rage against the dying of his creative light. Caught in a downward spiral where he needed to keep playing the game to finance his lifestyle at a time when his talent was waning, the most gifted player snooker had ever produced was reduced to slogging his way through qualifying tournaments in dingy halls in Blackpool.
This was grist to the mills of commissioning editors who are suckers for the "fallen idol" hookline and so the young, keen-as-mustard journalistic Turks were packed off to chronicle his demise. With reports of an alcohol problem that had spiralled out of control and only occasional flickers of the creative fire that used to burn, it all made for uncomfortable reading. But we lapped it up. The hero with feet of clay is a story as old as time and sport provides the ideal arena in which it can be played out.
But last Friday night was different. A year ago Higgins had come back to Belfast to have his throat cancer treated at a local hospital. And apart from a charity game to raise money for him last year and a few intrusive tabloid forays by prying hacks, he hasn't been seen in the public domain in all that time. When he was, the impact was startling and shocking. The frail man who walked hesitantly down the few steps towards the sanctuary of the guest's armchair was barely recognisable as the first snooker playboy.
There was applause and there were whistles from the audience in the UTV television studio (negative publicity has always bounced off the Teflon-coated Higgins and he remains incredibly popular here) but there must also have been a few sharp intakes of breath. The ravages of radiotherapy have shrunk his body and by his own admission he is perhaps two stones underweight. Many of the old handsome features have been subsumed into his sunken face. When Higgins spoke, his voice was tinny and at times inaudible. The old mannerisms - the nervous tics and the shrugs - are still there but they too seem exaggerated and out of place. It's as if they are now too much for the reduced body they now inhabit.
But if Higgins's obvious physical decline provoked pity, any patronising notions were quickly dispelled when the interview proper got up and running. Asked whether the cancer and its treatment had made sleeping difficult, he answered with a mischievous half-grin: "Well, I've always been a restless cat." Echoes from a different era dripped from the words he used and the way he delivered them. This was the Hurricane.
Higgins also bears a sense of righteous injustice against the game he once dominated and more particularly against those who control it. At present he has something in the region of 17 cases pending against the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association. While Higgins is reduced to living in a house provided by the local council, fortunes are being made by men only a fraction as talented. "My ears are ringing," he said, "with the general public saying that it wouldn't be anything without you, this game of snooker. There's an awful lot of people who should be thanking me for their wage packets every week."
The whole occasion had a distinctly elegiac air and was very much Alex Higgins's own remembrance of times past. They played a videotape of the final frame of the 1982 world final when he closed out the match against Ray Reardon with a clearance of 135. With his open-necked, luridly coloured two-tone shirt, Higgins was very much the epitome of rebellious sporting cool. The sixth Beatle. The clip ended on the famous embrace with his young daughter but when the cameras returned to the studio Higgins's gaze remained transfixed on the monitor. The stunned look on his face betrayed the pain of memories of what he used to be.
Asked then when he was happiest in his life, Higgins by-passed the world titles and the high-living. Instead, he settled on the first time he won the Northern Ireland championship some 30 years ago. First prize then was a sports voucher for £6.50. He also recounted tales of drunken escapades with the actor Oliver Reed, but even these were like cartoon storylines bereft of any element of edge or danger.
It is a decade or more since Alex Higgins ceased to figure in snooker's big picture. And yet this frail man continues to enthral. Perhaps it is because he stands as a stark reminder of how our sports used to be before media training, before agents, before drugs testing, before satellite television, before tabloid cannibalism and most of all before blandness.
Half an hour after his appearance last Friday, Alex Higgins was replaced in the interviewee's chair by Ulster and Ireland rugby players David Humphreys and Jonathan Bell. Nice guys both, they made all the right noises, laughed in all the correct places and rolled out every answer right on cue. But, like 99 per cent of the interviews sporting personalities deign to give these days, it made deathly boring television. In this company Higgins couldn't fail to shine.
There are many things in his sporting life - the assaults on officials, the threats towards fellow players - which Alex Higgins can only be ashamed of. But when he looks back on it all he can still say with a degree of pride that he always remained true to himself and to what he really was. At times the end result may not have been pretty but as he might say himself: "Hey, that's just the kind of cat I am."
