John Higgins (born 18 May 1975) is a Scottish professional snooker player from Wishaw, North Lanarkshire. He has won 33 ranking titles, placing him third on the all-time list. He has won four World Championships, three UK Championships, and two Masters for a total of nine Triple Crown titles. He has been ranked world number one on four occasions. Higgins turned professional in the 1992–93 season, as did Ronnie O'Sullivan and Mark Williams; the three players are known collectively as the "Class of '92". During the 1994–95 season, he became the first teenager to win three ranking events in one season. He won his first world title in 1998, defeating Ken Doherty in the final, and won further world titles in 2007 and 2009, defeating Mark Selby and Shaun Murphy in the respective finals. In 2010, a tabloid newspaper carried out a sting operation in Ukraine that it claimed showed Higgins and his then-manager arranging to lose frames in future matches for money. An investigation cleared Higgins of match-fixing, but the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association nevertheless found that he had brought the sport into disrepute by failing to disclose an invitation to breach its betting rules. He was banned for six months and fined £75,000. He won his fourth world title in 2011, beating Judd Trump in the final. He later lost three consecutive world finals, to Selby in 2017, Williams in 2018, and Trump in 2019. He lost five professional finals in the 2021–22 season. Higgins made his 1,000th professional century break at the 2024 English Open, becoming the second player after O'Sullivan to reach that milestone. His 13 officially recognised maximum breaks are second only to O'Sullivan's 17. He holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spell in the elite top 16, having entered it in the 1995–96 rankings and stayed for more than 29 years, until September 2024. He also holds the record for the longest span between a player's first and most recent ranking titles, 30 years and 165 days, from the 1994 Grand Prix to the 2025 Tour Championship. He was appointed MBE in the 2008 New Year Honours and was inducted into the World Snooker Tour Hall of Fame in 2012.
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