SPECTATOR SPORT
The grim umpire
Frank Keating
JOHN Currie died in a train as it ploughed through Saturday's blizzards in the Mid- lands. He was half of English rugby union's most enduring and unlikely partnership. Marques & Currie tripped off the tongue in the 1950s as readily as Hutton & Wash- brook, Matthews & Mortensen. Marques was a gangling patrician of oft 5ins; Currie, the Westcountryman, a couple of inches shorter and the duo's bouncer-bodyguard. They were second-row partners for Eng- land a record 22 successive occasions. Early on against Wales in 1957, Marques was set upon by a coalface tough and a steel-mittened foundry worker. They had to peel him off the Cardiff mud. 'Who was it?' said John, fumingly intent on vengeance. Marques waved his friend aside and groggily approached his two sheepish assailants in red — and warmly shook their hands. 'What the hell are you doing?' said John, 'They tried to kill you.' I just want them', said Marques, `to feel utter cads.' It has, alas, been another scything good year for the reaper. He is slashing with particular abandon at all the backpage gods of boyhood, now immortal only on cigarette-cards, with their sleek, flattened hair and languid, half smiling stare. At cricket this year, the dreaded umpire's index-finger — 'on y'way, son' — for a whole top-order, from Ames to Yardley; with a full hand of Hs for heaven — Hutton, of course, and Hardstaff, and
Hazel', and Malcolm Hilton, who was 19 in 1948 when he got Bradman twice in two days at Old Trafford, for 11 and 43, and he and his fiancée were pictured on the front page of the News Chronicle: 'The Werneth painter and decorator had been ordered by his bride-to-be, "I don't care if you only get one wicket, as long as it is The Don's" '.
Soccer: sad too, Peter Doherty died at 77. My Irish uncle wrote me a letter to school saying Doherty could 'glide through a brick wall'. He was Danny Blanchflow- er's tutor — 'my great North Star that twinkled in the heavens, promising untold glory, beckoning me to follow and always showing me the way'. Bonny, bow-legged Joe Mercer would have marked Doherty more than a few times: Joe was also called off 'by the bench' in 1990; Jackie Milburn as well, he of the dragonfly darts and dashes in the magpie's strip. And Lev Yashin, Russia's goalkeeper, who dressed all in black. I played him at chess once during the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. He needed only about four moves and smiled and said 'Derek Kevan, England, very fine player'. He meant at soccer, not chess, I presumed.
Geoffrey Green called Yashin 'the Black Octopus' in the Times. Dear Geoffrey, too, handed in his last piece just a few weeks after Yashin in the spring. Larry Adler played the haunting 'Moon River' at Geoffrey's funeral. His friend, Teddy Tinl- ing, the great beaming, bald, lighthouse and totem for the remaining goodness in tiresome tennis, outlived GG by just a fortnight. Ted requested the Neighbours theme tune to end his memorial service, so everyone came out giggling. Typical Ted.
Joe Erskine, Britain's best heavyweight boxer of all time, died in 1990; so did Jack Petersen, also Welsh, who was probably the second best. Also Dick Turpin (Ran- dolph's brother), who in 1948 was the first coloured man they ever allowed to win a British title: we weren't all that far behind South Africa in sport when you come to think of it. The bell clanged too for an all-time hall-of-famer, Rocky Graziano, the Lower East Side buzz-saw. He kept his money and his marbles. They filmed his ' autobiography Somebody Up There Loves Me. Now he knows. 'What the hell', he once said, 'Life's like Showbusiness: the singin's easy: memorising the words is the hardest part.'
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