From time to time, sport throws up personalities who demand our attention. Riddled with inner demons and an other worldly talent, blessed with good looks and a twinkle in their eye and able to fluctuate between moments of sheer brilliance and moments of utter stupidity in the blink of an eye. While they are with us, we are painfully aware of their fragility and take every day of their lives as a gift from the Gods. They have all the gifts which we all wish were ours and use them with casual indifference. We would give blood for such gifts but such gifts are not meant for the likes of us.
How amazing then that between May 1946 and March 1949, the city of Belfast spawned not one but two such talents. To be blessed with one is the stuff of dreams but to blessed with two is riches beyond compare. On Bloody Friday in 1972 the provisional IRA detonated 22 bombs to mark one of the low points in the recent history of Belfast. 1972. George Best's star was beginning to lose its glow in a mire of alcohol, tabloids and celebrity. The 23 year old Alex Higgins was winning his first World Snooker championship and the future augured well for the future of snooker. The celebrity culture is not a new thing and George and Alex were two of its earliest darlings. In the news today, football clubs are reputedly lining up bids in excess of 50 million pounds to secure the services of 26 year old Spanish striker Fernando Torres. At 26, in 1972, George Best had been there, done that and got the t shirt. Heaven knows what Goerge might have been worth in today's hyper inflated, globalised market. But it is easy to forget that football in 1972 was only ten years into the era of negotiable wages. A decade earlier, Jimmy Hill, then the chairman of Fulham, had fought and won the battle to abolish the maximum wage for professional footballers. From that moment on, the writing was on the wall for football. The balance between playing the game for the sheer love and playing for the money had been irreversibly tipped. It is thus that George Best was one of the last true professionals. Just seven years later in 1979, Trevor Francis was sold for 1 million pounds and the final nail had been hammered into the coffin of the beautiful game. Likewise when Alex Higgins won the world snooker championship in 1972, while he may have only won buttons for his efforts, his explosion onto the scene of a sport hitherto confined to smoky back rooms assured its financial future but paradoxically ushered in the modern professional era which has spawned players of the ilk of Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry.
George Best and Alex Higgins were both from humble working class origins from a city drowning in social problems. It is little wonder then that two lads from such a background as this should be tempted by life's vices as soon as their talent brought in the money. It would have taken enormous strength of character to resist temptation given the experiences of their formative years. It is not coincidental that the most comparable modern snooker player to Higgins is Ronnie O'Sullivan. Ronnie has come from a rough background and his father is serving a lengthy prison sentence. But there the comparisons end. Ronnie earns more now for winning a tournament than Alex won in his career. Enough said. Alex and George were both blessed with genius and knew it was their only passport to escape their native Belfast. Thank God they both escaped and we were privileged to witness their God given talents. An era has passed and more is the pity.
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