When Alexander Gordon Higgins first won the World Snooker Championship in 1972, the bow-tie and Brylcreem brigade who ran the game despaired.

They said that the young firebrand from Belfast would not make 30. He drank too much and partied too hard. He was not “respectable”. Excess all areas.

He lived life like he played snooker. A rebel without a pause, as someone once remarked.

But he was only warming up. And though it was then said he’d never make 40 or 50, he outlasted the critics for more than another decade – sneering when diagnosed with throat cancer: “What chance has it against me?”

He was, famously, the People’s Champion – to be remembered always for his second World title in 1982, crying and holding his arms out wide and asking for his baby to be brought to him.

His threat to have Dennis Taylor shot notwithstanding, he made the sport what it was during its heyday. With no Alex Higgins, there would be no televised snooker today.

He was a renegade who dragged the game into the front rooms of an entire nation as he sped round the table, twitched, smoked and drank, and played the game at least two shots ahead of his opponent. You couldn’t keep your eyes off him.

And while others practised, he pushed life to the limit to the full while engaged in a battle with alcohol his whole adulthood.

His friends and associates included Keith Moon, Marianne Faithfull and Oliver Reed.

In one bizarre bet, Reed drank a glass of washing-up liquid while Higgins downed a bottle of aftershave – and reportedly said afterwards: “I bent over the table the next day, broke wind and they thought I was Jesus.”

Our paths crossed as kids living in South Manchester and later drinking in the same pubs and seeing him bet in and be barred from my father’s bookies.

Now he is for ever The Hurricane, the man who dragged an Edwardian parlour game into the TV age. Higgins did that. Not by design, perhaps. But he did it.

- Bill is the author of The Hurricane: The Turbulent Life & Times of Alex Higgins