Former world snooker champion Alex Higgins has died aged 61 after a long battle against throat cancer. The two-time world champion, a heavy smoker, was reportedly found dead in his flat in Belfast on Saturday. Recent newspaper pictures showed a painfully thin Higgins in Spain after his hopes of having surgery to get new teeth had been dashed. Higgins lost all his teeth during his cancer treatment but was not deemed fit enough to have the surgery. His weight had reportedly plummeted to only seven stone as he had to have all his food pureed because eating in a normal fashion had become excruciating. Friends of the controversial snooker legend had raised around £20,000 to enable Higgins to have the surgery in Spain. However, he was deemed too frail to undergo the operation by the Spanish medics. 606: YOUR TRIBUTES He may at times have been totally out of order, but on the snooker table he would produce shots that no player before or since could even imagine
douglasmcdouglas Higgins was in the news in May after claiming that he had knowledge of at least four top players taking bribes to lose tournament matches. The Northern Ireland legend also revealed that he turned down several big-money offers to throw games in his career. Higgins, the world champion in 1972 and 1982, claimed Greek gamblers offered him £18,000 in 1979 to lose his Benson & Hedges Masters quarter-final against Perrie Mans and £20,000 to cheat at the Irish Masters in 1989 but rejected both. Higgins was scheduled to appear in the new World Seniors Championship in November. The Belfast man clinched his first World title in 1972 as he defeated John Spencer in the final and memorably repeated that triumph 10 years later at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield by beating Ray Reardon. Higgins was also beaten in the 1976 and 1980 world finals while other triumphs included two Masters titles at Wembley. He had frequent brushes with snooker's governing body - he once head-butted a tournament director - and his career suffered a downward spiral after being banned for an entire season following a threat to have his compatriot Dennis Taylor shot in 1990. Higgins was married twice and had two children with his second wife Lynn, whom he later divorced. More to follow.
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in 2008. 
Snooker player , nicknamed "Hurricane", was found dead in his apartment in Donegall Road, , Northern Ireland on Saturday. He was aged 61 and had been suffering from  since 1997.

Born in Belfast on March 18, 1949, Higgins became the champion of the  at the age of 23 in 1972. He reached the same achievement again in 1982. Higgins' final title victory was in the  in 1989.

During 1986, he received a fine and was banned from five tournaments after headbutting a director of a tournament. He was also banned from playing for one year in 1990 after threatening to have , another snooker player, shot.

Recently, Higgins lost all his teeth as the result of having treatment for his cancer. In May 2010, a charity dinner took place in ,  that raised approximately 20,000 (30,997, 23,859, 34,363, 31,961) so as to allow surgery for new teeth for him to occur. However, Higgins was considered to be too unhealthy to have the surgery in , .

Dennis Taylor, now a snooker commentator at the , stated that "there was just something about the way he played the game — there was a little bit of  in there. I don't think you'll ever see a player in the game of snooker like the great Alex Higgins."

Philip Studd, another commentator of snooker for the BBC, has described the late snooker player as being "snooker's original troubled genius" and that Higgins was "charismatic, flash, fast, unpredictable, combustible — you just couldn't take your eyes off the 'Hurricane'." Studd continued to explain that "while he could never match the consistency of  or , Higgins on his day was the greatest of them all. He touched the heights in 1982 when he won his second world title. He pipped  to the final thanks to a break still widely regarded as the finest ever made. His tears of triumph after beating  — wife and baby in arms — remains one of snooker's most iconic moments. Without Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins snooker would never have become one of the most popular television sports in the 1980s and beyond."