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.…