Alex Higgins, Snooker's King Of Tik Tok Who Came Too Soon.
Back in the day, like most snooker kids of my generation, I was helplessly hooked on Alex Higgins. The grip wasn’t just about the shots. It was never just about the snooker. It was the show—the drama, the tension, the trembling beauty of a man who could detonate a room with a twitch of his brow. The Hurricane didn’t play frames. He staged epics.
Contrary to popular belief, the Higgins fix didn’t come from watching him pot balls. Potting balls was—at best—a technicality. We didn’t come for the breaks. We came for the breakdowns. We watched because we believed, or hoped, or feared, that Higgins might explode. And when he did, it wasn’t failure—it was the point.
He was the first snooker player who understood his own mythology. The first to act like this was a theatre—not a sport. When he walked into a venue, it wasn’t like a player taking his seat. It was like a Marvel character stepping into frame, ready to rip the script apart.
Had he arrived in the age of TikTok and Insta reels, Higgins would have eaten the algorithm alive. He wouldn’t be in a dusty green room with Barry Hearn whispering, “He’s unmanageable.” He’d be in a Soho house studio, pumping out storytime rants, training montages, table-smashing POVs, and merch drops with his own face stencilled on them.
He would’ve invented a new genre: chaotic cue sports influencer. The viral clip of him headbutting the ref? That’d be on Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram before he even sat down. Think Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift’s VMA. Think Will Smith’s open-hand philosophy at the Oscars. Now picture Higgins backstage at the Masters, drunk and wild-eyed, swinging for teenage Hendry, and still—somehow—the WhatsApp groups backing him, the Telegram channels theorising that his cue taps were coded signals to betting syndicates, the Facebook livestreams dissecting the cue-ball placement frame-by-frame like it was the Zapruder film.
He would have been the ultimate unreconstructed TikTok antihero. The clips of his cross-legged chicken-run around the table would loop endlessly. The stare-downs. The cue tapping. The after-frame rants. The puff of smoke mid-break like he was cleansing the table of evil spirits. He wouldn’t have needed PR. He was PR. He was viral before viral was a thing.
Now picture a different ending. Picture Higgins in his prime right now.
No tabloid exile. No fading into bad lighting on BBC2. No slow drift into Sunday-supplement retrospectives. In 2024, Higgins wouldn’t be marginalised by suits and schedules. He’d be un-cancellable. No Barry Hearn could shut the gates on him. He wouldn’t need them. He’d own the platform. He’d be the platform.
The Hurricane wouldn’t just move through culture. He’d be the culture. The snooker table would be a content studio. The cue a lightning rod. Every outburst, every grimace, every collapse mid-frame—it would all be clipped, soundtracked, viral. A dopamine storm in three acts. The rawness, the rage, the romance—packaged and posted by lunchtime.
Only he isn’t here with us now.
The footage that remains is VHS-warped, thick with the colour tones of the 80s and 90s—dull maroons, golden greens, slow static crackling across the screen. Those who knew him are older now. Those who talk about him do so with a strange mix of awe and exhaustion, like war reporters remembering something too large, too fast, too close to name.
He’s gone—but not forgotten.
Not because of his titles or breaks or medals. But because he moved through the game like a weather system—hot, unstable, sublime. An elemental force of destruction, less a man than a living phenomenon. If the ancient Greeks had invented snooker, they’d have carved Higgins into marble, crowned him with laurel, and whispered warnings to their sons.
Like a rogue wave crashing through the Texaco-drenched neon of 80s Britain, he flipped cars, wrecked buildings, detonated careers, shredded reputations. He twisted the laws of the baize until they bent to his will—or broke trying. A supernatural reckoning cast in human flesh. They called him the Hurricane. The name was never a metaphor. It was a warning.
He has moved on now, but the ruins remain.
And in those ruins, we still gather—wide-eyed, a little singed, still shaken. We speak of what we saw. We replay the tapes. We try to explain it to those who weren’t there, who didn’t feel the air change when he entered a room. We fail, mostly. But we try.
Because every age needs its gods. And Higgins—mad, magnificent, self-destroying Higgins—earned his. Not through sainthood, but through sheer, unrelenting myth.
Gone.
But not gone.
Because immortality, in the end, isn’t clean. It’s messy, cracked, full of stormlight.
And it beckons.
samjhere@gmail.com