Sport in East Kilbride
THE article by Richard Winton in your paper (Local Hero, August 10), stated that East Kilbride's athletic heritage does not extend much further than Ally McCoist. Obviously, Olympic and Commonwealth Games representation does not count.
Graeme English of East Kilbride was British 90kgs wrestling champion more than a dozen times and competed in, I think, four Commonwealth Games (winning medals) and the Seoul Olympic Games. He was also Scottish heavyweight judo champion at least once and competed many times for the British team.
Now we come to Big Rab.
Robert McNamara has won the Cumberland-style all weights world championship 10 times in a row, only the current agricultural crisis stopped it being 11, and when in the army he was the forces shot put champion. He is so well known that a Japanese TV programme sent a sumo wrestler to East Kilbride to meet him in in a challenge match which was shown on Japanese TV.
Big Rab easily won and is described by the English sports writer Roger Robson as, "the most dominant heavyweight wrestler in the past 150 years in the sport".
Mr Winton may wish to check Roger's weekly column in the BBC.
William Baxter, ex-Olympic coach, Glasgow
Scotland strip a joke
What lovely nylon blouses Scotland wore at Murrayfield.
I particularly liked the fetching sweat stains under each oxter, and the way that we are not going overboard on our national colour which, I seem to remember, used to be navy blue.
What a good idea to have so much dirty grey and white - it must confuse the hell out of the opposition, especially in close contact and reactive situations, when it is so important to be able to sense when a team-mate is next to you. The idea of patching the stockings with different colour wool is just so trendy and the blue bum-bags built into the white belts must be really useful. What an embarrassment.
Peter K Fraser, Aberdeen
Plastic fantastic?
You referred to an offer by Montrose FC to Celtic to use their FieldTurf pitch prior to their match in Moscow. Montrose do not have a FieldTurf pitch but a surface supplied by another manufacturer.
It is a FieldTurf pitch which Celtic will play on in the Luzhniki Stadium. As sole supplier and installer of FieldTurf in the UK, EDRC have made an offer to Celtic to arrange a training session on a facility which is the only surface in the UK similar to that in Moscow.
Dave Reynolds, EDRC
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