"I didn’t know I was this geeky until I discovered the online world through my office’s 2400 baud modem back in ’93." Alex Higgins, RIP
In another time and another place we were students with lots of time on our hands. We spend all week on the couch, reading the papers, drinking cinnamon tea and spice biscuits and taking the mickey out of each other. And then we got BBC 1 and 2 on our cable. Overnight we turned into fans, gobbling up the brilliant comedy (Spitting Image, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Fry and Laurie) and wasting many, many hours watching sports coverage as the Brits introduced us to their exotic games of darts, golf and snooker. Under the influence of the Beeb, darts and snooker took off in our country. We got a darts board and even tried our hand at snooker, in some of the new snooker halls opening up around the city. It was the era of Steve Davis famously ‘earning the right to be boring’, Dennis Taylor with his specs and Jimmy White. We liked White, but my favourite was Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, because he played faster than anyone else, because he was a real character, because he wasn’t Steve Davis. Because he headbutted that referee.
Funny, unpredictable, volatile, Irish. Alex Higgins, legend, died of throat cancer on Saturday.
