Back to school, I have spent a fascinating – indeed, highly educational – day at Stanley Crook primary, up on the hill top. The book progresses.
In the playground a code of conduct is headed “Play fair at football” and includes the injunction “Play the ball and not the player.” They may not always have taught that across the fields at Stanley United.
The caretaker also turns out to be the world’s No 1 Chuckle Brothers fan, but that’s another story.
It’s to women’s boxing that somewhat surprisingly we turn, however, and to 21-year-old Georgia O’Connor’s professional debut this Saturday evening on the Sky Sports show at the Utilita Arena in Newcastle – a bill topped by Hartlepool boxer Savannah Marshall’s world middleweight title defence.
Vicky, Georgia’s mum, is a teacher at Stanley – the school which her daughter attended. Georgia trains between law studies at Northumbria University. John, her dad, started training her at home in Waterhouses – west of Durham, where Esh Winning play – when she was barely out of nappies. “He always wanted me to be able to defend myself because the world’s not a nice place” she tells Sky.
I first met Geeorgia when she was seven, already training for a national martial arts title and watched proudly by Jackie O’Connor, her late and lovely grandfather – a man known to a generation of football fams as the Little Black Rat.
Spennymoor United’s outside right for much of the 1950s, Jackie also played for Middlesbrough reserves and made a couple of Football League appearances for Hartlepool – the nickname, he somewhat unconvincingly reckoned, because of his ability to fight his way out of a corner. His work as a miner at bearpark may have had something to do with it, too.
“Even now when I go dancing at Tudhoe (Spennymoor) people ask if I’m the Black Rat,” he once told me.
He was also a prolific poet and a very canny cricketer for Ushaw Moor, turning out in the early days in grey trousers, cream shirt and football boots painted white.
At seven, Georgia was still happy to play with her dolls but with sights fixed firmly on combat. At 17 she won a boxing gold in the Commonwealth Youth Games and silver in the world games and held many amateur titles. A couple of years ago, however, a blood clot on a lung threatened, as Sky puts it, more than just her boxing career.
“I thank God every day for the rest of my life” Georgia tells Sky.
Between sparring and studying she also plays the guitar and sings. “”My idea of fun is reading a book in bed. I’ve never touched alcohol,” she says.
So which will win out, boxing or the law? “She loves them both but her ambition’s to become a multi-millionaire through boxing and to retire when she’s 40” says Vicky. “A lot of her values she learned at Stanley schol.”
Grass Routes 