MIKE WADE: Boston in a league of his own down Wigan way

This great old player, now turned 67, will be at Murrayfield today to see his beloved team - the underdogs for once - when they take on St Helens in the final of Kellogg’s Nutrigrain Rugby League Challenge Cup.

He’s not a good watcher - when Wigan lost to Bradford Bulls in the Premiership final last year, Boston left his seat after ten minutes, and spent the game in the Old Trafford bar. But today he’s not expecting a repeat performance. He says: "I don’t know really, but I just fancy Wigan this time."

It was almost an accident, he says, that he lost his heart to rugby league, and a grubby old town which boasts the famous "Uncle Joe’s" sweet factory.

At 18, he had played union for the army at Twickenham, but no "really big football," when some men from Wigan turned up on the doorstep. In the days when the two codes were at each other’s throats, they offered him 2,000 to convert.

He remembers: "I took my mother aside and told her to chase them off. She said, ‘I’ll get rid of them, son.’ She went in to them and said: ‘Give our Billy 3,000 and he’ll sign right away.’ They said OK without any hesitation."

For a teenager who had set his heart on playing union for Cardiff and Wales that offer came as a shock. "I cried my eyes out - but it turned out to be the best mistake I’ve made."

THE son of a seaman, Boston was born in Tiger Bay, Cardiff. He grew up in the same street as Joe Erskine, who was to become British Heavyweight Boxing champion - "We had a couple of dos in our time" - and as a kid he knew a famous daughter of the parish, Shirley Bassey. Later, after he’d signed on at Central Park, Boston loyally went to see her perform in the chorus line at Wigan Hippodrome.

Long before then, he had taken to rugby like a duck to water, though union had its frustrations. "You couldn’t express yourself. You had to kick the ball, and keep out of trouble.

"I remember playing for the army, I scored a length-of-the-field try. The coach told me not to do it again. He said, ‘What if you had got tackled? You’d have put us in all kind of trouble."

Boston’s answer was naive, but it’s logic inescapable: "I didn’t get tackled." And he didn’t very often.

One unpleasant truth, which you have to drag out of him, is that as a young black player in south Wales in the early 1950s, he was the victim of snobbery and worse.

"I wanted to play for Wales, but I don’t think that was possible in those days," he says, grudgingly admitting that racism was an issue. "There was a bit of it, just a little bit. They were great players and I always wanted to play for Cardiff, but it wasn’t to be."

Then he adds briskly: "I’ve had none of that colour stuff in Wigan, none whatsoever. I’ve been treated like a lord."

And no wonder they’ve made a fuss of him. Such was Boston’s impact on rugby league, after only a handful of games he was selected for the British tour of Australasia where he scored 36 tries in 18 matches, a record at the time.

"I felt Wigan had been stupid to pay all that money, but somebody had a bit of insight somewhere. They put me on the wing, where I’d never played before, and I ended up stopping there for good."

A slight man when he started out, he matured and gained weight, becoming possibly the most powerful winger of all time, with the ability to burst out of almost any tackle. In three seasons he scored 50 tries or more, reaching an amazing 60 in 1956-57. In all, he scored 571 tries, the most by any British player.

After all that glory faded, he ran a pub near Central Park for a while, but now he’s retired. He’s still the uncrowned king of Wigan though - they made him a freeman of the borough a couple of years ago. And the warm feelings are mutual. "I love the place to death," he says, "Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and all."