Mackenzie Thorpe, a painter internationally renowned and phenomenally successful, was rather less proficient at football.

At raggy arsed school in Middlesbrough he'd always be the last kid to be picked for the team. Dyslexia and impaired co-ordination probably didn't help.

The portrait of the artist was of an often lonely young man amid the teeming streets of Teesside, not so much Thorpe outside left as Thorpe left outside.

"Football has always been a challenge to me," he admits, carefully. "I never stayed with the ball long enough to do anything or really followed or supported a team."

He still remembers queuing all night in the snow to get a ticket to see George Best play, however, owning a pair of Adidas San Diego football boots, possibly with two left feet - "each time I visit San Diego I remember my boots" - and playing in the back street with a battered and deflated caser, both laceless and faceless.

"It was like heading a brick and it stung your hands if you saved it. Looking back, those back street matches seemed as intense, as crucial and as filled with passion as any I have witnessed since."

Now the man best known for his square sheep paintings and for his vivid Christmas cards for former Tory leader William Hague has turned an artist's eye upon the people's game - with a result that will overflow from the sports pages and hang in the homes of football for ever.

A series of 50 football related paintings, called The Game of Life and with a distinct Ayresome aura, kicks off an 85 gallery tour on April 27, with limited edition prints from £295 and a book in both limited and standard editions.

Associated items - "highly collectable," as they say in the trade - include limited edition T-shorts, cuff links, watches and, for £29 95, bone china mugs.

On June 6 there's a £150 a head Institute of Directors lunch at which he will join fellow VIPs like George Best, Gordon Banks and Sir Bobby Charlton, on June 16 an auction of the originals from which part proceeds will go to sporting charities.

Thorpe, 46, spent much of his schooldays drawing on anything to hand - fag packets, quite often - using anything from pencil to the eyeliner purloined from his mother's handbag.

GCEs being unavailable in such subjects, he left school without qualifications, laboured in the shipyards and almost failed to get into Middlesbrough Art College because they couldn't read the application form. At 20, it is recorded, he attempted suicide.

Now he has an honorary MA from Teesside University, sells paintings for up to £50,000, has won top awards from the Fine Arts Trade Guild and lives with his wife Susan, a former school nurse, in millionaire luxury in California.

All that may be less than idyllic is the price of baked beans. "He mutters about it all the time. I have to take him over cans of Heinz," says Wendy Bowker, director of the Thorpe owned Arthaus in Richmond.

It was she, an ardent Liverpool fan and former season ticket holder, who first mooted the idea of football themed paintings whilst enjoying the Thorpes' pool in San Francisco.

"I told Mackenzie that football was sexy, that it was savvy and that it was where it was at. He simply asked what I thought was sexy about it," says Wendy, a former Durham prison officer and co-owner of an internet cafZ in Darlington.

(A story followed about Fabrizio Ravenelli. It need not concern us here.)

"I just suggested he tried some football themed work and see how it went," she says. Mrs Thorpe enthusiastically agreed, and proposed a football show.

Thereafter, says Wendy, the momentum was amazing. Renowned for the speed at which he produces remarkable paintings, Thorpe increased his goal from eight football works to 50.

His paintings principally reflect the environment, not the action. Some, an untrained observer might say, have a hint of L S Lowry - the Daily Express once suggested a cross between Lowry and Raymond Briggs - many more are vividly, memorably Mackenzie Thorpe.

Titles include A Goal in Winter, Won't Somebody Play With Me ("a bit close to home, maybe" says Wendy) and something called South Bank, Sunday Morning.

A cheering crowd simply called Goal will grace the programme cover for the Albany Northern League Cup final - it is fervently to be hoped - and stages still more impressive.

Her boss, admits Wendy, remains more interested in folk than in football. "We've been offered tickets to everywhere, but if I took him he'd be watching the crowd, the bloke in the burger queue or who'd won the golden goal draw.

"He's a sportsman,. But he'd rather be standing with a pair of binoculars, watching eagles soaring overhead."

Thorpe returns to launch The Game of Life and will be back in Richmond for viewing, mass media attention and a few long anticipated pints in the Unicorn on May 10-11.

"The appeal of football goes far beyond the pitch," concedes the boy once left on the sidelines. "The magic has got through to me.

BILLY Bell's funeral attracted a Northern League select of the highest quality: lads like Eddie Ross, Colin Hallimond, Peter Joyce, Bob Tookey - about to start his 45th successive cricket season with Lands - and the rapscallion Tony Monkhouse.

"I'm a changed man," he insisted. "Haven't had a fight for four years."

Billy, as last Friday's column noted, had managed Northern League championship winning sides in four successive seasons - 1969-71 with his native Evenwood Town, followed by Spennymoor United and Blyth Spartans.

Due to an error made ten years previously, the column also used a picture of former Evenwood councillor Ken Walton which we identified as Billy.

"I'll forgive you if you buy me a pint,." said Ken, also at the funeral, but apologies to everybody concerned.

St Peter's at Evenwood, where Billy had been a choirboy, was full - one of the few occasions when women are outnumbered in church.

They carried him out to a recording of Matt Monro singing Softly As I Leave You and will remember that, and Billy Bell, for many years to come.

AT Billy's wake we'd wondered aloud about Derek Newton, goalkeeper for Evenwood and Shildon around 1970 and a veteran of more operations than the US Seventh Armoured Division. Blow it, if he wasn't on the answering machine next day in response to the plea in Tuesday's column for an old leather case ball. There are two on offer at Leyburn Auction Centre, says Derek, around £40 each. We were hoping, in truth, to get one for around £40 less....

IN September last year we reported that Dave Morrison, 59, was finally hanging up his wicket keeping gloves. He's rung, too.

"It looks like I'll be playing a week on Saturday," he says.

Dave, in his fifth spell at Darlington RA - in 40 years he's kept occupied at umpteen other clubs, too - had hoped to concentrate on being cricket manager.

Eight days to the season, however, he's not been able to find a replacement stumper. "There must be a young second team lad able to make the step up.

"The trouble is commitment. Their wives won't let them stop out all day."

The first match, doubtless coincidentally, is away to Darlington - the team whom RA beat in the last game of 2002 to deny their arch-rivals the championship.

"It's as good a place as any to start," says Dave, recently installed landlord of the Black Horse at Kirby Fleetham, near Northallerton. No peace for the wicket keeper, he's on 01609 748008.

A Football League referee, anonymous for reasons which will become understandable, tells us that Sheffield United manager Neil Warnock is known throughout the black clad brotherhood as Colin. It cannot fully be explained, but readers may care to print the combative gentleman's name and to think laterally....

FRESH from chatting away on the Johnny Walker show on Radio 2 - "I thought it was a bottle of whisky," he insists - George Reynolds has been on about the plumbing arrangements.

On a trip to Italy, he says, he discovered such state of the art urinals - "styled like Ferraris, you know what the Italians are like for design" - that he determined to have some in Darlington's new stadium.

"They do everything except pull your zip down, flush your important bits, the lot. The taps even take your temperature so you don't get scalded," adds the Quakers' chairman.

The must-see WC will only be available for executive box holders, however. "You know what posh people are like," says George. "Lazy."

*Col Jones in Spennymoor was so impressed by the Johnny Walker programme that he sent an e-mail. "Fascinating. It showed the big man's humble side," he insists.

AFTER six straight defeats, Tow Law Town supporters John Coates and Colin Forster are getting on their bikes.

The pair hope to raise much needed money for the Albany Northern League first division club by cycling the 140 miles between Whiteheaven and Seaburn between next Tuesday and Thursday.

The coast to coasters would greatly welcome sponsorship. John's on 0191-584-4330.

FOUR years after his side were demoted from first to fourth division for failing to attend the annual meeting, John Grange of the Touchdown in Hartlepool is the Over 40s League's manager of the year.

John, working, had asked someone else to represent them. The other guy forgot. The Forcett Darts and Dominoes League, memory suggests, expels teams for similar absent mindedness.

The Touchdown simply picked themselves up and started all over. Now they're about to be promoted back to the first division. "What I liked about it was that instead of moaning on, they just got on with the job," says league secretary Kip Watson.

The presentation night is at Sunderland Catholic Club, the league sponsors, in June. Mr Grange is expected to attend.

THE three clubs other than Arsenal for whom David Seaman has played (Backtrack, April 15) are Peterborough, Birmingham City and Queens Park Rangers.

One today from the ever-admirable Hole in the Wall FC programme in Darlington: which Scottish football club played the first final in their history, against Rangers in last season's CIS Insurance Cup.

The answer, with luck, after Easter.

Published: 18/04/2003