15 Years-old Champion-of-Champions

Memories

Huddersfield Examiner, 11 October 1975

By PETER MUFF

The pupil beat the masters on Saturday in the sort of story which is customarily confined to the pages of a boy’s magazine Fifteen-year-old Doncaster schoolboy Gary Leighton won the Huddersfield “Champion of Champions” Invitation Merit at Lindley Liberal Club and left some of Yorkshire’s top players wondering what had happened

The pint-sized player in the blue sweater and striped flared trousers produced some of the best bowling I’ve seen in the final stages of a big event for some time. He wasin superlative form as he captured the hearts of the spectators and the tournament’s honours prize money. By the time he had reached the final to meet Yorkshire Merit winner Gene Bardon and gone 4 down after two ends however the majority of the people on the green edge were thinking that he’d had all his moments of glory and that he would blow up But he hadn’t and he didn’t.

He retaliated with a seven break went 17-10 up and though Bardon got back to within two at 17-15 in a great final the little champ struck and finished a 21-16 winner Gary back behind his school desk today with his pocket money for the week increased by £20 and the exceptionally warm plaudits of a Huddersfield crowd still ringing in his ears had earlier upset the applecarts of some well-known names in this all-winners tournament.

Indeed on his way to the title he beat three present county players Roy Nicholson David Harrison and Gene Bardon, a past county man in Peter Murgatroyd And he did it all with unruffled aplomb the lad had any nerves at all he left them back at school.