I was very sad to hear this news this evening.
My former partner, who I sincerely loved dearly, was a bit like Alex Higgins. He liked his drink more than his smoke but a hard living man he was and no-one could tell him how to live.
He was so scared, however, of the doctors that when he got throat cancer, he ran out of the back door as the ambulance arrived at the front to take him away. He was 54 when he died.
He believed that fate would have it that way and that was nature's way. All sorts of things were done to make him try and stop drinking and live more healhily, but he lived his life as he loved it and was quite prepared to accept the consequences.
"Life is about quality, not quantity, my angel," he would say. Yes, he was a man with the same kind of violent outbursts as Alex as well, which I couldn't live with. But I would never try to make him into a person he was not. I had a choice. My choice was to leave.
I suspect that like Alex Higgins, he was happy with his lot, and like Alex, he will never be forgotten.
RIP Alex Higgins -