How it unfolded
The 22-year-old Belfast player Alex Higgins was almost unknown before this tournament. Required to qualify for his place, he beat veteran after veteran with his fast cue action and aggressive positional play to reach the final. The World Championship had not yet settled at the Crucible at this point and was still staged across multiple cities, with the final requiring far more frames than today's format. Higgins beat defending champion John Spencer 37-32 to become the youngest world champion on record at the time. His win shocked the sport. In an era when careful, restrained play was the standard, he showed a completely different template for what a champion could look like, playing an aggressive, risk-taking style backed by equally uninhibited behaviour away from the table.
Why it still matters
Higgins's win gave snooker its first genuinely charismatic star. A sport that had lived a clubbable, gentlemanly existence suddenly had a young, flamboyant, unpredictable face, a shift that lined up naturally with television's growing interest in the sport. His style became the template for the aggressive lineage that later ran through Jimmy White and Ronnie O'Sullivan.