A tender sporting moment with Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins

Paul Mitchell recalls snooker champion Alex Higgins tearfully celebrating his win with his young daughter

While I enjoyed your photo feature with its “groundbreaking images [that] have upended assumptions about how men behave, dress and project power” (Muscles, metrosexuals and male tears: the 39 pictures that changed the way we see men (for good and for bad), 17 October), I felt that a more fitting sporting example than Gazza’s tears would have been Alex “Hurricane” Higgins at the 1982 World Snooker Championship.

On winning the title, Higgins, a notoriously erratic and divisive figure, broke down in tears and pleaded for his wife and infant daughter to join him. It was not an act of image management, popularity-seeking or virtue- signalling. Rather, it was the spontaneous reaction of a man who simply wanted to share the greatest moment of his career with his young daughter.

The scene was made all the more poignant by what followed. With the benefit of hindsight, and in light of Higgins’s subsequent decline into sporting wilderness and personal hardship, that moment stands as a fleeting glimpse of unguarded joy and human vulnerability. In that respect, it remains one of sport’s most moving displays of emotion.

And if Alex Higgins, a man renowned for his toughness, volatility and refusal to conform, could openly weep in public and clutch his baby daughter at the pinnacle of his career, perhaps it serves as a reminder that showing emotion diminishes neither the man nor the achievement. Paul Mitchell Belfast