Second wind

Inevitably, he feared it might be the final whistle. Incorrigibly, he remembers his last words before curtain down in the theatre. “At least if I don’t wake up again, I won’t have to worry about buying Christmas cards.”

With the possible deletion of one or two expletives, he also recalls his first words upon coming round again. “I suppose I’ll have to buy some Christmas cards now.”

The surgeon nearly died laughing, he says.

It has been a fearful time – first diagnosed with bladder cancer, then lung cancer and finally, as the gentleman himself puts it, “dropped the biggest bloody hernia you’ve ever seen in your life.”

The 6ft 3in former County Durham police officer, now 76, lost five of his 18 stones. “I was just a skeleton, a dead man walking,” he says. “Some of the neighbours told me afterwards that they didn’t think I’d last a month. Neither did I. You just can’t believe a year like it.”

Happily, it’s behind him. This weekend, he plans his first 18 holes since the original diagnosis in March last year. At a dinner last Saturday he received four awards for 50 years of truly outstanding service to refereeing.

“I’m as proud as punch, these are my fellow referees, the people that matter,” he said, though there was one small problem. His clothes, now much too big, have all gone in bin bags to the charity shop. Fitting the occasion, he had to buy a new suit.

HIS services to football include 19 years as national president of the Referees’ Association, an almost full-time role for which he received no wage, claimed only minimum expenses and never lost a disciplinary case in which he represented a referee.

“If all barrack room lawyers were like Peter Willis, they’d be growing tomatoes in the Catterick glasshouse,” the column observed in 2002.

“I never represented a guilty man,” says Peter.

Chiefly, however, the miner’s son, from Newfield, near Bishop Auckland, is remembered for the 1985 FA Cup final, Everton v Manchester United, in which United’s Kevin Moran became the first player to be sent off in the Wembley showpiece.

The FA had paid him £43, out of which he had to find his wife Helen’s train fare. “They let us share a hotel room,” he concedes.

Usually, he’s reluctant to talk about it – “I want to be remembered for other things than that” – but within a minute of our meeting at the former police house, in Meadowfield, near Durham, he has produced a 2011 paperback called Fields of Courage, sub-titled “The bravest chapters in sport”. It includes sixtimes Wimbledon champion Suzanne Lenglen, who dared to show a leg, Chariots of Fire athlete Eric Liddell and Ross Emerson, the umpire who called Murali and was in turn called worse than muck.

Peter Norman Willis has a chapter, too, author Max Davidson extensively quoting from – though not, of course, acknowledging – that 2002 interview. “I saw what happened and I had a decision to make. I could have put the whistle on the ground and walked off or applied the laws of the game and sent Moran off.

“I’ve never felt guilty about it, because I knew it was the right decision.

I just wish it hadn’t happened.”

England international turned pundit Jimmy Greaves claimed on air that it wouldn’t have happened had not the game been live on television.

Peter successfully sued, the damages going to a referees’ charity.

“It was dirty money and I didn’t want it,” he says. “It was just the principle that mattered.”

Based on the 2002 column, Max Davidson reached his own conclusion.

“You can hear the voice of the old-fashioned copper. That’s essentially what he was.”

WE are old friends. None may be more principled or more honest, more rough, more bluff but not – perhaps – more tough.

“I was the softest man in the hospital,” he insists.

He played up front for Spennymoor Grammar School, three years ahead of fellow FA Cup final referee George Courtney, but kept goal in the Crook and District League when only 14. When Durham FA found out, they banned him.

He made a few appearances for Newcastle United Reserves – one of several in a queue behind Ronnie Simpson – played Northern League football for Willington and Tow Law, won a Wearside League medal with Langley Park.

Trophies great and small overflow the china cabinet. Those commemorating his two holes-in-one are on the bookcase. “There were no top games or bottom games to me,” he says. “It was football, I loved them all.”

He became village policeman at Cassop-cum-Quarrington, near Durham, kept goal for the village side, took up refereeing when the official failed to turn up and – being a polliss in the early 60s– he was the only one with a whistle.

He qualified in 1963, reached the Football League line just five years later and by 1971 was the man in the middle, where he stayed for 15 seasons.

He had charge of the 1982 League Cup final and, when he was 47, the FA final.

When he retired from the Referees’ Association in 2002, not one of the 18,000 members could be persuaded to fill the big man’s shoes. “It had become a big job,” he admits. “You had to love refereeing and you had to love football people. Fortunately for me, I did.”

Since his wife died, however, he has been to only two matches, watched little more on television and no longer speaks publicly – to be regretted because he is a masterful raconteur.

Particularly, he’s concerned about the vast amounts of money sloshing about and about excessive swearing – “filth by mouth,” he still calls it.

“When I was refereeing, if they swore at me it was goodnight. It was the law of the game, it still is. It isn’t the game I knew. If you don’t enjoy your hobby, you should take up a new one. I’m a golf man now.”

The best anecdote doesn’t even concern football, but his time as a traffic policeman in Lanchester. It was a Sunday morning, Peter watching the world go by until a speeding motorist went by even faster. Summoned to stop, the driver tried a novel line: “Can you help me, officer, I’m desperate for a sh**house.”

PC Willis eyed him sternly. “It’s your lucky day, son, you’ve just found one,” he said.

HE’D been on a Portuguese holiday with friends from Crook Golf Club – “bloody good golf” – returned and a week later found blood in his urine.

That one was quickly diagnosed as bladder cancer, though the subsequent discovery of lung cancer proved yet more devastating.

“They said that chemo probably wouldn’t work, I was 75 years old, but if I didn’t do something I’d be dead.”

A surgeon at James Cook Hospital in Middlesbrough agreed to operate – “mega-surgery,” he warned – and proved to be a football fan. “I was in for 15 days, intensive care, next level down, more pipes and tubes than enough. When I came home I was 13st, lying on the sofa like a skeleton.”

Now he’s back to 16st, has regained much of his old vigour, enjoys life with a new partner, Kathleen, who is the widow of an old refereeing friend in the South-West. Life’s good again.

“It was a hell of a time, but now I’ve no cancer in my body and haven’t to go back to the hospital until September. It’s great to be acknowledged for 50 years. I’m glad I bought a new suit.”

And now he begins the second half.

FIFTY four years dedication to football administration, Bob Strophair was honoured by Durham FA at an awards ceremony last week. His wife, Joyce, shared the moment: “I couldn’t have done it without her,” said Bob.

Shildon lad, he started playing with the local Boys’ Club, turning out for several local teams including the distinctly nomadic Middleton-in- Teesdale Wanderers. “I must have been all right, they even came to fetch me,” he recalled.

He became secretary of Shildon BRSA in 1959, has been a Durham FA councillor since 1969 – “a constant source of advice and support,” said DFA president and retired Weardale solicitor Frank Pattison, himself approaching 30 years in the top job –and secretary/treasurer of the Auckland Charity Cup, among other roles, since 1964.

Launched in 1900, the Charity Cup has only ever had three secretaries – the others Joe Nicholson, whose son became a long-serving Northern League secretary and Miley Blenkinsopp, whose son became Durham FA secretary.

Why do it? “I just love football,”

said Bob. “Besides, where are all the young ones coming through to take my place?”

That said, he intends to stand down from the county FA next summer.

“I was born in 1931. You can work the rest out for yourself.”

SEVERAL familiar referees were among the honours, too – officials such as the indefatigable John Lee, the man in the black knee support, still winning honours at 60-odd.

Long service awards, too, for Roly Croysdale, Malcolm Lambert, Rebecca Welsh and Vic Cooke, once the Bishop Middleham Flyer, but now more slowly coming to terms with a new knee.

John Glasper, 35 years whistling, had appeared in the column twice previously, in 1996 and 2011, and in remarkably similar circumstances.

On both occasions – Hunwick v Etherley Dog and Gun and West Auckland WMC v the Miners Arms in Coundon – he’d been locked, apparently inadvertently, in the dressing room before the match.

“I was banging on the windows. A chap went past and looked at me like someone not right,” he said in 2011.

Still refereeing, John is also chairman of the Wear Valley Sunday League. “I think they were trying to tell me something,” he said.