Young wizard: But John Higgins has never been comfortable dealing with the media. Pic: © SNS Group
The brief was fairly straightforward: my mission was to find three or four young sporting stars at the beginning of 1990 and analyse their prospects of reaching the summit of their pursuits. There was a meeting with a fresh-faced Dario Franchitti, who, at 17, was already displaying signs of the mix of glitz and grit which would lead him to a Hollywood lifestyle and a brace of Indy 500 triumphs in the next two decades.
There was also an interview with teenage cricket prodigy, Gavin Hamilton, who went on to play for Scotland and England, before announcing his retirement last month. But there was also a chat was a youngster from Wishaw, who was showing signs of fearsome break-building abilities within the confines of the Masters club in Dennistoun.
That was my initial encounter with John Higgins and although he was affable enough, there were already signs that he would struggle to deal with the incessant media and PR scrutiny which is the lot of any modern sports star. The task of trying to persuade him to pose for photographs provoked ribald comments from his mates, even as the then 15 year-old from Wishaw ran through the lexicon of sporting cliches, so beloved of Private Eye.
It was his dream to appear at the Crucible in Sheffield, he would be "over the moon" if he could gain admission to the World Championships in the future, but, for now, he was "taking one game at a time," eschewing predictions and "aiming to give 100 per cent", As somebody who had regularly talked to Stephen Hendry on a regular basis, the best that could be said of Higgins was that he made his compatriot seem like Billy Connolly by comparison.
Yet, whatever his problems with a microphone close to hand, he was a wonderfully compelling figure whenever he picked up a cue and embarked on the job of leaving opponents stuck in their seats, while he potted balls with the relentless precision of a great player in the making.
In the interim period, Higgins has achieved his potential - nobody wins two, let alone three, world titles without being a maestro in their field - but the ambivalence about him has never entirely vanished. At the outset, when he fell out with the snooker impresario, Ian Doyle, the man who had been the Svengali-like figure behind Hendry's transformation into probably the best player who has ever graced the green baize, it was possible to explain away his occasionally surly behaviour as the typical actions of a grumpy teenager, who was still growing into his role as a sporting superstar.
Later, though, such as when he arranged to speak to me during a tournament in Aberdeen, only to drive home to the west of Scotland upon being knocked out of the event, without bothering to let me and a photographer know of his change of plans, it became obvious that Higgins, akin to some of the soccer brethren in the Glasgow area, desired fame, fans and filthy lucre without bothering to observe some of the basic courtesies.
That didn't make him a bad person. But, whether behind the scenes or in the public spotlight, Higgins has rarely been at ease dealing with the media.
Some players, Ken Doherty, for instance, or Steve Davis, can flit effortlessly in and out of this exposure, while others in the mould of Ronnie O'Sullivan are capable of leading their interrogators into a frenetic roller-coaster ride of towering highs and Stygian depths. Higgins, in contrast, tends to be a monotone master of the mundane, whose genius disappears whenever he has departed the table.
A colleagues once remarked to me, following a characteristic display of attritional warfare from the so-called "Wishaw Wizard" - never was a sobriquet more out of kilter with the reality - that he could understand why snooker's popularity had declined in the 1990s. "We had Alex Higgins in the 70s and now we have John Higgins - the first was electric, the second had a power cut".
It was a cruel dismissal of Higgins' many admirable qualities, such as his tenacity when under the cosh, his ability to seize matches by the scruff of the neck and reduce rivals to spluttering impotence, and his modesty in the aftermath of victory, but it touched on one important truth about the Scot. He was prosaic, pragmatic, preoccupied with safety and untainted by danger.
All that changed, of course, at the start of May this year, following the revelations in the News of the World that Higgins and his business partner, Pat Mooney, stood accused of agreeing to fix frames of snooker, in conversation with a shady cabal of conspirators in Kiev, who turned out to be undercover reporters. In as much as many of the details of the story remained vague.
Why was Higgins even involved in these discussions at all? And why Kiev, of all places - the lurid front-page headlines provoked shock, precisely because Higgins had always appeared one of the game's solid citizens, but here we were, being asked to believe that he had risked his reputation, exalted status in the sport, and future livelihood on the potter's wheel, for the sake of around £250,000.
Yet the paper ran transcripts of taped conversations, which were impossible to ignore, even for those of us who detest the methods of entrapment which surround many of these lurid exposes. In anybody's terms, this was sensational stuff and it erupted at the worst possible time for the game, just as the English entrepreneur, Barry Hearn, was in the process of shaking up and waking up the sport, by creating a new, worldwide tour and bringing some of the same dynamism and vision which he had previously used to revitalise darts.
Since the news emerged, both Hearn and Higgins have adopted a hard-line stance. When I spoke to the former in July, he was insistent that the allegations would be thoroughly investigated by an independent body, and if they proved to be true, he was determined to take punitive action against anybody involved in match-fixing incidents. The fact that Hearn both knew and respected the Scot was irrelevant in the circumstances.
For his part, Higgins declared that he was "100 per cent innocent" and maintained that he had only gone along with the people he had met in Kiev because he was concerned for his and Mooney's safety. As the weeks passed, there were suggestions that he might escape punishment on the grounds that he hadn't actually committed any wrong-doing, and had only agreed to "throw" frames to get out of the meeting unscathed. But this never adequately explained one point: namely, if he had nothing to hide, why didn't Higgins make contact with Hearn and blow the whistle immediately on his return to Britain?
In the end, it boils down to trust, to preserving the game's good name, and ensuring that potential cheats are warned off. Higgins, from the very early days, has been in love with snooker, and has encouraged youngsters following in his wake. He has been an ambassador for his pastime, but any goodwill he had generated was resoundingly swept away when the News of the World hit the news-stands four months ago.
And the sorry reality is that mud sticks, even if it is flung in an ill-directed fashion. Athletics, cycling, cricket, horse racing and American Football have already suffered from the blight of cheats, the curse of innuendo, and the desperately unfair practice of tarring everybody with the same brush. The questions now are: Where does Higgins go from here? And why did he get roped into the Kiev business by Mooney in the first place?
