Robokurt eyes double whammy

Tomorrow night he battles for the British welterweight belt in total combat, the martial art where anything - almost anything - goes.

Barely 18 hours later it all kicks off again - but this time the gas pipe fitter hopes to be in the Coundon Conservative Club side which faces Wernley, from Birmingham, in the FA Sunday Cup quarter-final at West Auckland.

It isn't, admits Kurt, the ideal preparation. "I'm fairly optimistic of being able to do both. There was a problem after the last fight when I thought I'd broken a bone in my foot through kicking someone, but it turned out just to be bruising.

"I wouldn't like to say which I'd like to win more, but it could either be one of the very best weekends of my life or the very worst. It's funny how these things come together."

Cons Club manager Paul Aldsworth also believes his man can deliver a double whammy. "If anyone can do it, it's him. I've never known anyone train so hard. We call him Robokurt because he just never stops running."

Though things can get a bit nasty in the ring - or cage, as sometimes is the case - Kurt's football record is exemplary. In 13 years he's never been sent off and been booked just twice, can't remember the last time, supposes it couldn't have been for much.

A former Northern League player with Evenwood Town, Shildon and West Auckland, he gave up senior football to concentrate on total combat, claimed to be the world's fastest growing sport.

Tomorrow's title match is at the Rainton Meadows Arena, near Houghton-le-Spring, once known as the McEwan's Cricket Centre, from which the sport was once banned on health and safety grounds.

After a previous draw between them, his opponent is Ross Pearson, from Chester-le-Street.

Kurt, who lives in Coundon with his wife and daughter, insists that it's safe. His daughter even has a DVD of his last fight - the sort of thing which once might have been labelled "Not suitable for those of a nervous disposition" - on her laptop.

"To me it's just a bit of fun, like all sports," says Kurt. "There may seem to be a lot of rolling around and punching but it's mainly about movement and technique. It's very skilful; we're highly trained, carefully matched and there's a referee and judges

"My wife watches, too. She was a bit uneasy at first but now she's completely happy with it.

"I've had a few injuries in training, popped my knuckles out, broken a few ribs, but nothing much during fights.

"We wear gloves but they're just like little mitts. You can kick, punch, knee, all that, but the things you can't do include biting and pulling hair.

"A lot of it is mental focus, about going into the ring confidently. It's not like a football match when you have ten mates to help cover for you."

He trains five, sometimes six, times a week at gyms in Ferryhill and Spennymoor, hasn't had a drink since New Year, promises himself quite a large one on Sunday evening when the weekend battles are over.

Whatever the sport, says Paul Aldsworth, there'll always be 100 per cent from Robokurt. It's doubtless what's called total commitment.

l Coundon Conservative Club's FA Sunday Cup quarter-final kicks off at 3pm at West Auckland AFC's ground - the team mostly Arngrove Northern League players from the Coundon area. None is paid twopence, says Kurt. Admission is £3 adults, £1.50 concessions.

The last time the column got to grips with total fighting, April 2000, the piece featured British champion Ian "The Machine" Freeman, a father of three from Dipton, near Stanley.

Canny lad, too, bit quiet, had his picture taken with the moggy. "Oh yes," says Ian, "I remember that."

Though it had been outlawed in two US states - "Two men can get married in America," he'd said dismissively, "it shows what they're like" - he'd forecast that in ten years total martial arts would be more popular in Britain than boxing and have attracted its big money backers. Does he stick by it?

"Certainly," says Ian, son of a former ABA champion from Sunderland. "People are getting bored with boxing, the same thing happens all the time.

"Two people come out, throw a left, throw a right, the referee breaks them up. The excitement is missing, our sport is much more exciting than that."

Much has happened to the former nightclub doorman since then, including starring in a film called Sucker Punch, about bare knuckle fighting. "We wanted someone menacing," said the producer. "They don't come any more menacing than Ian Freeman."

He's become a Sky TV commentator and presenter - Dale Winton described him as "sensational" - launched a magazine called Fighters Only, is earning a name as a raconteur and after-dinner speaker and has overcome a serious attack of chronic fatigue syndrome.

It was for one of his fights that Sunderland council had refused permission to use Rainton Meadows. The committee chairman was female. "If any of my fighters were as aggressive as her, I'd never let them into the ring," he said seven years ago.

Now that it's lifted, he blames the ban on ignorance. "They didn't really understand how safe it was. The aim of boxing is to knock someone unconscious, which is very dangerous.

"There are more head shots in boxing than there are in our sport. It's coming, believe me, it's taking over."

One of the region's most improbable football stories - how Cockfield reached the Amateur Cup final in 1927-28 - is being retold by BBC Television.

Colin Briggs and his crew will be filming up at forlorn old Hazel Grove ground - and on the site of Ayresome Park, where the 3-2 final defeat to Leyton was watched by a 12,200 - next Friday.

Cockfield, who'd also reached the semi-final in 1924, had even foregone home advantage against St Albans - in exchange for 100 - and still won 1-0. "The wonder village," said The Northern Echo.

The good news is that the Timeline programme will feature former FA Cup final referee Pat Partridge, born in Billingham but long up on Cockfield Fell. The bad news is that it's due to last just three and a half minutes.

Pat's unperturbed. "I've done these things before," he says. "They film you for hours and you're on screen for 20 seconds. It'll still be nice to remember the glory days of Cockfield."

Coincidence, no more, Peter Wilkinson from Stoke-on-Trent also writes about the 1927-28 season in North-East football, but with a rather blacker sub-plot.

He's researching the life of Joe Mawson, a Brandon lad who played locally for Brandon Colliery, Washington Colliery, Crook Town and Durham City and who, gone to Potteries, hit 50 goals in 93 games for Stoke City.

What particularly interests Peter, however, is a 1929 reference in the Stoke Evening Sentinel that Mawson had been "concerned in the wholesale suspensions for violations of amateur rules."

Ah, that. The pit boot money affair.

It was Crook who started it, suspected of making illegal inducements to amateurs and determined that others would pay for it, too. That the phrase about "squealing" and "stuck pig" comes to mind" is echoed in a 1928 letter to Hear All Sides from Robert McClean in Redcar.

"The situation is Gilbertian," he wrote. "Were there an eleventh commandment, that of not being found out, Crook would certainly come under it."

Durham FA persisted in its inquiry, even receiving a letter from Cockfield captain and centre half Walter Harrison who, stressing his BA degree, suggested far greater felony.

"It is passing strange," said Harrison, "that pit Durham, of all England the area where industrial depression is blackest, should be the one district rich enough to subscribe its amateur football players."

The County FA finally suspended 341 players - poor Mawson doubtless among them - and countless officials. The Echo's front page headline told (a little inexplicably) of the slaughter of babes and sucklings.

Deemed "professionals", the toll included 46 players each from Crook and Bishop Auckland, 28 from Stanley United, 16 from Willington and - after the season in which they reached the Amateur Cup final - 38 from Cockfield. Little wonder.

Last Friday's column about how St Cecilia's church in Sunderland came by its half acre of land - a free gift from Capt Leonard Scott Briggs on condition they all signed a petition opposing changes to the Grand National course - stirred memories for Charlie Westberg, a Sunderland lad but long in Darlington.

Charlie, who knew the Scott Briggs family, was married in St Oswald's - another tin church, nearby - 59 years ago last week. He looks forward to his 60th.

It was February 14. "At the time I didn't even realise it was Valentine's Day," he says. "No one bothered with it in those days, like they do now. It just so happened it was a Saturday."

AND FINALLY...

Tuesday's column sought the identity of four England international goalkeepers, gave clues which we suggested might ring bells, invited by way of corollary the two missing names.

Many tried, the most distant Ian Foster in Chicago. About half succeeded. When they worked out what was going on, Ralph Petitjean and his work colleagues in Newcastle even broke - discordantly, he admits - into song.

The goalkeepers were Clemence, Martyn, Bailey and Stepney, the bells were ringing in Oranges and Lemons and the two missing names were thus Bow and Shoreditch. All fiendishly clever.

One of those who got it right, Peter Birch in Saltburn, invites readers to suggest what football pundits Gary Lineker, Steve Claridge, Tony Cottee, Alan Smith and Stan Collymore have in common.

Common as muck, the column returns on Tuesday.