SPECTATOR SPORT
A black-edged list
Frank Keating
AS EVER, a bumper year for obituarists.
The merciful release from Alzheimer's for poor Danny Blanchflower — in his prime the brightest, most articulate and rel- ishably disputatious of footballers — put the grieving tin lid on 1993 with a sonorous clang. Earlier in the year, Bobby Moore's death from cancer also cued in a wail of collective mea culpas round the land for the loss of another totem and chevalier of a golden, honeyed age not so long ago, in contrast to the grubby greyness of the dis- honourable present.
Likewise, Arthur Ashe, great and good, who was also mourned. So was, in my neck of the woods, Charlie Barnett, bellicose bat and the first famous scrawl in my autograph book. That must have been the same year I was allowed to set the alarm and listen to a prize-fight on the wireless — Joe Louis duffing up Billy Conn in eight in 1946. Five years earlier, Conn had been a street ahead when the Brown Bomber finally nailed him in the 13th, and many aeons later I lunched near Grand Central Station with the enchantingly garrulous Irishman they called the 'Pittsburg Pixie'.
I was heavyweight champ for twelve rounds — feint, whack, move, bing, bang, move, hit him like a machine-gun, then get out fast. Joe never touched me. In the thirteenth I thought I hurt him bad. So I say, 'Joe, you gotta go,' and I aim to knock him out. At which Joe hits
me fifteen times, every goddam one flush on the jaw. I'm in the next precinct. Serve me right. What a time to play the wise guy.
Billy, wise to the end, died in May, aged 76. Another sage Billy — Griffith — secre- tary and president of MCC, pulled up stumps the month before. In 1948, he made his maiden first-class 100 in his maiden Test as makeshift opener against the West Indies at Trinidad, and when he came in after six heroic hours he was handed a wire from an astonished friend in England. It said simply: 'Really!'
Lindsay Hassett died in the week of the Ashes Test at Lord's. Cardus said that if the tiny Hassett had batted on a snow-cov- ered pitch 'his footprints would probably resemble those of a bird'. Another Corinthian captain, Reggie Ingle of Somer- set, doffed his panama at 89. He once hooked Larwood for six into the main road. In the winters he was a Bath solicitor, whence he travelled the country specialising in defending put-upon gypsies for no fees.
The black-edged list goes on . . once hale footballers, Jack Froggat, Roy Vernon, Archie Macauley . . . wastefully young ones too, like Tommy Caton, Mell Rees and, horrendously, 18 of the Zambian soccer squad which glistened with promise. The cricketer Ian Folley was just 30. Grands Prix will be less grand for the going of Denny Hulme and James Hunt. Pioneer 'FT motor-biker Stanley Woods dismounted at 88 — four years younger than Danie Craven, Springbok inventor of the scrum- half's diving pass and staunch, hypocritical administrator who helped get me thrown off the Lions tour of 1980 to the Republic for 'not concentrating solely on the rrug-bee, mun'. A far more honest broker, the FA's Ted Croker, was also mourned in 1993.
Myrtle Maclagan, scorer of the first women's Test century, in 1935, died at 81, alas just before her 'bonny gels' of 1993 did their stuff at Lord's. Myrtle, herself a bonny gardener to the last, went in the same week as beloved Cec Pepper, Oz demon and umpire. One lunchtime at Bristol I asked Cec if the pitch was docile. 'As much move- ment as a midnight graveyard,' he said. After an Essex match in the 1970s, the cap- tain, 'Tonkel' Taylor, filled-in Cec's umpire's report-sheet for Lord's. Under `Any Complaints?' Taylor noted: 'Excessive farting'.
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