David Hookes dies

Posted by: Chris Metcalfe on 19 January 2004

I'm sure there must be cricket fans from the last 3 decades who remember the centenary test of March 1977; I can remember staying up all night listening to it (Randall 174).

David Hookes, who scored a fast fifty I seem to remember and was an expert player of fast bowling, has apparently been killed in a nightclub fracas at 49.

In an irony apparently lost on the journo who filed the story, he died after 'an encounter with a bouncer'... ironic, as he was so good at fending them off during his career.

Posted on: 19 January 2004 by Bruce Woodhouse

I do remember, and also staying up to listen to that match. A great memory.

Derek Randall was a bit of a hero of mine, so scruffy and eccentric. I can't think of any modern sportsman with anything like the same style. I met him a few times in the early 90's at a cricket centre he was running in Nottingham and he was disappointingly normal then-all his clothes seemed to fit for a start. I vainly hoped that when he played he would still have those shapeless frayed pads but no such luck.

Just to add another famous name I did once bowl at my REAL hero, Graham Gooch. He did me the honour of his trademark enormous back lift and then looked rather odd waiting an apparent age for my best effort delivery to arrive. He then missed it (I'd say because of prodigious swing, he'd say because he was bored) and had to donate a fiver to charity! If he hit it I would have made the donation. It was a fun event.

I never met Hookes. Never will now.

Bruce