Norman Gordon out for 103

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Cape Town

TEST cricket lost its oldest player on Tuesday when Norman Gordon, who earned all of his five caps for SA in the 1938-39 series against England, died 27 days after his 103rd birthday.

Brian Gordon, however, said goodbye to much more. “He was a wonderful man with a lovely sense of humour; he was very kind to everyone,” he said of his father on Tuesday.

So, Gordon in person did not match the persona of the big, bad fast swing bowler whose haul of 20 wickets in that series was one more than even the great Hedley Verity took, who dismissed Wally Hammond and Len Hutton three times each, and who sent down 738 balls in the Timeless Test at Kingsmead alone?

“Not anymore,” Brian Gordon said.

Did he remember any of his father’s exploits on the cricket ground?

“No, I’m only 70.”

Gordon, nicknamed “Mobil” for his habit of taming his hair with significant quantities of vaseline, took 126 wickets at 22.24 in a first-class career that spanned a week short of 15 years.

That might have been the end of his cricket story, but on August 6, 2011 he was rediscovered by the modern generation as the first former test player to reach 100 on the more important side of life’s boundary.

“He was one of the most well-known players of his era, and the fact that he lived to over 100 made him a star,” Clive van Ryneveld, who played for WP against Transvaal in Gordon’s last Currie Cup match, a New Year game at Newlands in 1947, said on Tuesday.

Gordon played the last of his 29 first-class matches for Transvaal against the English - flying the flag of the Marylebone Cricket Club, of course - at Ellis Park in Johannesburg in December, 1948. He was 37.

Had World War Two and the suspension of sport that came with it not intervened, Gordon would doubtless have played many more tests.

“How he was not selected for the 1947 tour to England I do not know,” said Ali Bacher, who made his first-class debut more than 11 years after Gordon played his last game but has memories of the tall, handsome, black-haired former fast bowler nonetheless.

Once Gordon was done with playing cricket, he could devote his professional attention to running Norman Gordon’s Luggage Craft in Eloff Street in Johannesburg’s beating heart of Braamfontein. Bacher remembers being taken there by his mother to buy a cricket bat in every spring of his boyhood.

Some 30 years ago, the Gordons bought a flat in what was once among the most fashionable of Johannesburg’s residential areas: Hillbrow. But property values deteriorated in the wake of the authorities’ decision to neglect the upkeep of the district as a perverse punishment for Hillbrow’s growing multi-racial character.

So, because too much money would have been lost by selling the flat, Gordon continued to live there. In fact, he died there at around 2am on Tuesday morning. Yes, of old age.