All going swimmingly for Jack

"I reckon swimming is all that keeps me out of a wheelchair, " he says. "You can't fall over when you're swimming." Better yet, he has the key to a friend's private pool close to his home at Ingleby Greenhow, near Stokesley, and usually has it to himself.

"It's the best favour anyone could ever have done me, " says Jack, 70. "If you bump into someone in a busy pool it can be really painful when you have such bad arthritis. Now I can do 120 lengths, no problem." Things weren't helped when he suffered a serious shoulder injury after being knocked over by one of his sheep when feeding the hens. "I thought it was sheep which were supposed to tip over on their backs, not their blooming owner, " he reflects.

His grandfather was Middlesbrough's swimming baths superintendent, his father - Jack, also - represented Britain in four successive Olympic games between 1912-28, winning two silvers and a bronze and captained the English team in the 1930 Empire Games.

In 1912, Jack also opened the sports shop in Middlesbrough which still carries his name and where his son worked for 50 years. The company is now owned by former employee Paul Barry.

It was shop talk which started this off, really, the Backtrack story a couple of weeks ago of how Marske Cricket Club had bought back at auction a cricket ball presented to their star bowler in 1908 and made by the Middlesbrough sports outfitter D Bookless.

Jack remembered his father's account of how a Dorman Long chauffeur had been sent round to Bookless's with the company cricket bag for repair and how David Bookless - "played professional cricket, bit of an aristocrat, they reckon" - threw it out into Linthorpe Road with the observation that he didn't want such rubbish in his shop.

Thus driven, the resourceful chauffeur took it instead to Jack Hatfield, who'd been a military saddler during the First World War.

Jack willingly accepted the job and found that Dorman's had long memories.

"From then on we got all their work; even today the shop gets orders from British Steel, " says Jack. "It wasn't a bad bit of PR." Jack junior, as once he was always known, was a multiple Northumberland and Durham swimming champion and record breaker between 195459, followed his father to successes in the Northern Echo sponsored River Tees race between Worsall and Yarm ("things weren't so polluted in those days") and until four years ago was a regular "masters" competitor.

Now he competes only against himself, and against arthritis. "I'll always be grateful that I was a swimmer, " he says. "If I'd been a runner, I'd be at a right old standstill now."

ARTHUR PUCKRIN, another quite extraordinary Boro boy - old age pensioner, to be precise - is back from Virginia after coming fifth at the weekend in the world "triple ironman" championship.

One discipline immediately following the last, the event involves an eight mile swim which he completed in six hours, 336 miles cycling (25 hours 40 minutes) and an 80 mile run, covered in 27 hours 24 minutes.

"I started to doze off in the middle of the night on my bike so decided I'd better have a couple of hours sleep, " admits the 66-year-old barrister - still practising, but clearly a law unto himself.

He'd have been a couple of places higher, he reckons, had the gears on his bike not packed up with 180 miles to go. "Unfortunately it was quite hilly, I had to do it all in one gear, " says Arthur.

The title was won by a 34-year-old Italian. "A youngster, " he adds, not unreasonably.

Not just any old ironman, he left school with two O levels, became a polliss and was called to the bar at 29, played rugby for the Boro, remains a successful canoeist and has represented Great Britain at bridge, playing in two world and eight European championships.

"Bridge is every bit as demanding, probably more so, than the triathlon.

It's certainly more vicious, " he once told the column.

The triple decker may merely be a warm-up exercise, however, before his attempt in Hawaii next month to defend the world decabiathlon title he won over 12 days two years ago.

He hopes to add the decatriathlon, too ? and insists that he enjoys it.

"There are moments when you wonder what on earth you're doing there, but it's a wonderful feeling when you've finished.

"These things are absolutely marvellous. You meet all your friends, catch up on all the news, generally have a great time." Pensioner power, he believes, can help him return the ironman title to Steel City. "Last weekend was relatively short. I think there's a bit of capacity in me yet."

THE death this week of Australian cricket legend Keith Miller, a hugely popular former airforce man said to be capable of crash landing a plane at 11am and playing a Test match at noon, stirred memories for Pat Woodward in Durham of the summer of 1956.

Pat was at Jesmond when the Aussies, thrown at the deep end to Jim Laker, took on the less demanding Minor Counties in a two day game on September 8 and 10.

The weather had been wretched, the outfield sodden - "plodgy", says Pat - the match went ahead on good will.

Miller, inexplicably known as Nugget, captained Australia in the absence of Ian Johnson, though it was on another occasion as stand-in skipper that he was advised that they had 12 men on the field.

Miller thought tactically. "One of you had better bugger off then, " he replied.

At Jesmond, at any rate, the kids clamoured around him for close-of-play autographs.

"Today's players would have been straight into the bar or the dressing room, " says Pat.

"Miller, a god in those days, calmed them all down, formed them into an orderly queue and signed every one.

It wasn't a very pleasant evening and he must have been there an hour.

"I don't know why they called him Nugget, but he was the golden variety, undoubtedly."

WHO else should have been playing in that match but the redoubtable Jack Watson, capped by both Durham and Northumberland and still equally familiar in the winter game.

"Both teams stayed at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle, " he recalls. "I told them it wasn't far for me to come from Shildon, but they wouldn't listen." Benaud bowled him for 18 in the first innings, Pat Crawford caught him off Neil Harvey for four in the second and in four overs he went for 47 runs.

It's the broken batting pad strap which Jack, now 83 and still in Shildon, best remembers, however.

"I signalled for a replacement pad but Keith - smashing feller, a pleasure to be playing with - told me to get off the field and while I was there to find out how their horse had gone on." Back, strapped, Jack duly reported the good news that the bet had indeed come good but the bad news that the horse had started at 1-2.

"Keith had the ball in his hand and threw it with tremendous force into the wet ground.

"It went so far down, the ball was almost back in Australia before he was."

CAUSE and effect, no doubt, workmen trying to fill in the recently opened crater at Tow Law's football ground have struck coal ? a six foot seam, 20 feet down, running the length of the pitch.

Ignoring the advice about holes and digging, however, assistant club secretary Steve Moralee looks for the positives. "Instead of playing football on it, " he says, "we're thinking of open casting it instead."

MANCHESTER UNITED, we learn, will be playing at Shildon in the FA Cup this season. Sadly it won't be at Dean Street, or even against the fellers.

The counter attraction is the FA Women's Cup when South Durham Royals host United ? beaten 3-2 by Chester-le-Street last Sunday ? at the stadium in Middridge Lane.

We also hear that Chester-le-Street manager Bill Godward has been in tetes-a-tetes telephone conversation with Brigitte Bardot, former sex kitten and latter day cat woman.

"He definitely sees a role for her and she's keen to help, " says our man with the women - but that, for the moment, will have to remain another story.

SOMETIMES these occasions are a little less than ladylike, of course, as in Middlesbrough women's match at Billingham Synthonia on Sunday when a Tranmere Rovers player was sent off for using offensive language and continued in similar vein on the way to the dressing room. Midstream, her progress was interrupted by an assistant referee who pointed her towards the posters issued by the Albany Northern League and visible all around the ground. "Swearing offends" they say.

STEVE SMITH, who lives in Oxfordshire and regards the Backtrack column as a sort of distance learning, has been preparing the programme this week for his local side North Leigh's FA Cup third qualifying round tie with once mighty Newport County - the furthest North Leigh have ever progressed.

"We need to supply ten times more than the usual amount of everything, " he says.

County have been managed these past three weeks by John Cornforth, born in Whitley Bay and thus twice capped by Wales, who made his Sunderland debut as a 17-year-old in the old first division.

It was May 1985, the crowd a miserable 9,398, the 2-1 defeat - Ian Wallace's goal notwithstanding - merely confirming Sunderland's relegation.

After 23 starts in five years, his career embraced Swansea, Birmingham City (a £350,000 signature), Wycombe Wanderers and Cardiff and a spell as manager of Exeter City.

We hope to catch up with him shortly.

And finally...

The three Newcastle United players apart from Alan Shearer to have scored hat tricks in European competition (Backtrack, October 12) are Rob Lee, Andy Cole and Tino Asprilla.

Alf Hutchinson in Darlington today seeks the identity of the club which, prior to this season, had conceded the most goals in the Premiership.

Premier league as always, the column returns on Tuesday.

Published: 15/10/2004