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.
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