Alex Higgins' slow, painful decline over the past decade has had all the ghoulish appeal of a motorway pile-up. As much as you want to turn your eyes away, something still keeps pulling you back to have one last prurient look. And now comes the news that the two-times world snooker champion has throat cancer.
Reports of Higgins' illness first surfaced in an English tabloid newspaper last week when the Belfast man said he'd already had a cancerous growth removed from his mouth and that the disease had now spread to his throat. There were also suggestions - since denied by Higgins in a weekend telephone call to a Belfast newsroom - that he'd been paid for the interview. Add to that an unseemly Sunday tabloid hunt for the apparently AWOL snooker player and you have a scenario that casts a distasteful stench over the world of sports journalism.
Higgins' antics have long been grist to the tabloid mill and his public life hasn't always been, how can we put it, exemplary. But this public exposition of his serious illness, allegedly for payment, has an air of terrible sadness about it.
In many ways Alex has become the forgotten fallen Belfast hero. Lazy comparisons of their respective careers have always been made between Higgins and George Best based on little more than geographical coincidence - "East Belfast genius gone bad" has that easy, lowest common denominator ring to it. But for once the contrast is apposite.
Best has defied all the prophets of doom to carve out a lucrative life for himself on the after-dinner punditry circuit and misty, nostalgic eyes add to his legend with every passing year. But for Higgins it's been very different.
Like Best, he was a mercurial presence in a sporting world peopled largely by mediocrities. His mere presence was a powerful antidote to the snooker legions of the bland, led by players like Steve Davis, that eventually wrested the game from Higgins and the rest of the mavericks during the 1980s.
But in recent years he's been reduced to a slightly macabre side-show, reportedly penniless and homeless. First there was the much-publicised spat with Denis Taylor during which Higgins allegedly threatened the life of his Northern Ireland team-mate. Unsurprisingly, Higgins emerged from the whole sorry incident with his reputation almost irredeemably ruined.
Every few months news reached us of embarrassing stories of Higgins turning up in some bar or other playing frames of pool for a fiver. And then there were the very public fights and break-ups. To an extent we're all complicit in this, the voyeurs standing at the side with our arms folded looking in on a continuing tragedy.
His misfortune was that his snooker ability has never been matched by anything approaching the same level of self-preservation and he has lurched from one personal crisis to another. The sheer extent of his celebrity meant it was inevitable that his private and professional lives would blur into a shadowy, media-driven self. A true product of the times.
But the seam of good will towards Higgins runs deep, despite everything that has happened and everything that he has done. At Belfast's Waterfront Hall last year an exhibition event was organised between Higgins and the then world champion, Ken Doherty. There were occasional flickers of the old Higgins genius but this was less a sporting occasion and more a charitable act of homage. The money was duly banked and Higgins had some short-term security. Until the next time.
Now, more than ever, Alex Higgins stands as a figure desperately out of step with the sporting zeitgeist. The fundamental conflict in his life is that while he has lived in the glare of the tabloids, his is not the world of cosy endorsements and soft-soap chat show appearances. And in that existence the hand that feeds has an alarming tendency to bite back. Paul Gascoigne is living testimony of how one kebab too far can push you over the celebrity cliff-top and now the latest Higgins twist has been eagerly seized upon.
Interestingly, his story was fighting for front page space here on Sunday with reports that a consortium is at an "advanced stage" in its bid to bring English Premiership football to Belfast. Sound familiar? This whole sorry saga has already been played out ad nauseam down South and up here a combination of opposition from vested interests and logistics mean it's likely to be just another piece of football pie in the sky.
But it does say much about how Northern business is waking up to what are euphemistically referred to as the "development opportunities" that modern sport now offers. You don't just build a stadium any more - in this new sport speak they're called "leisure complexes". And the outmoded concept of a team has been replaced by a "franchise" with all the attendant money-making opportunities.
It's a world where a figure like Alex Higgins has never seemed so out of time and so redolent of a different, more forgiving era. To survive and prosper in modern corporate land you have to play the game and play the game by carefully preordained rules. George Best came to a late realisation of this after his period in the wilderness and he has fostered a symbiotic relationship with the powerful media forces that allows both to co-exist reasonably easily.
It doesn't take a sporting psychologist to see that Alex Higgins might have more fundamental problems with a Best-style reinvention. After all this time it's probably hoping too much that he would be able to cast all, or any, of the monkeys from his back. Redemption through the sport he once dominated now looks a folorn hope. Higgins has long since tumbled out of the world's top 100 snooker players and now has to suffer the indignity of lengthy pre-qualifying for even the most mundane tournaments.
Now more than ever Alex Higgins is prey to the tabloid feeding frenzy. It may well be payback time for the Faustian pact he has made with that same tabloid world, but is it too much to hope that he can now be afforded some dignity?
