By STEVE MASCORD
THE people you meet huddling under a marquee at the Varsity game.
You’ll remember last week Mascord Meets… spoke to Mark Ramsdale, the guy who runs the annual dust-up between Oxford and Cambridge.
This year’s game was delayed due to the weather and when it finally went ahead, it was still wet as an otter’s pocket (copyright Ashton Sims) and cold enough for me to regret only wearing one pair of socks.
And there, next to me, was one Ken Hughes.
“I’m a died-in-the-wool St Helens fan – for 50 years,” says Ken, replete in a very flashy parka.
“And I’m also a graphic designer-cum-printer. I’ve been able to combine my passion for art and rugby.”
How? When Saints moved from Knowsley Road to what is now the Totally Wicked Stadium, Ken had a deep-seated fear the new venue would feel soulless. He offered to do something about it – and despite everything you hear about professional rugby league clubs, they took him up on the offer.
The sprightly 73-year-old takes up the story…
“I wanted to bring the old players with us and not forget the history and everything that the old ground was about,” he says, standing next to the Mascord Brownz stand at the Honourable Artillery Company.
“So I had the idea of stylising some of the old players and bringing to life the new stadium.
“I started a long time ago, 1990, doing the Arsenal old ground, Highbury. They knocked the old stand down and it was an eyesore. You could just see buildings behind so I created a giant mural of what the new stand would look like.
“That really started me thinking ‘this is good, this’.”
How did he know Langtree Park might lack a bit of soul? “I’ve been to Old Trafford, I’ve been to a couple of other football stadiums, I’ve been to Wigan’s ground and they’re OK when you sit around the pitch.
“But when you go inside, they turn into a bloody mausoleum. And they’re all the same: tasteless, characterless and all grey concrete.”
How do you get a professional rugby league club to embrace an idea in this day and age? Most of them, it’s only a good idea if it’s their idea….
“I went straight to the top: Eamonn McManus, the Saints chairman, I invited him to my factory and showed him – not what what we had in the factory but – other jobs we’d done for other clients around the world and he was kind of blown away.
“I said ‘will you just give me a chance? Will you just let me show you on a little part of the stadium and if you don’t like it, you don’t like it’. And when he saw it, he just fell in love with it and said ‘OK, off you go”.
Ken now has 72 murals inside the Totally Wicked Stadium! Seventy-two!
“Within the first three seasons … but we’ve also done interior rooms. We’ve done the players’ lounge, the hall of fame and I’ve done the boardroom because the boardroom’s really boring.
“The history of the St Helens club, right from 1873, I’ve done that on the walls of the boardroom.”
OK, so how exactly is this done?
“We create it on the Apple Mac and then we transfer that … we have a lot of big printing machinery, we can print to any size you want.
“It’s an easy process, really, you create it on screen and you like it and it’s got movement and passion and you print it onto a rigid material that goes straight onto the walls.”
The physical aspect sounds “easy”. But could someone do it who knows nothing about the club?
“You need to have a bit of passion about either the game and the way that players look or don’t look, and you need to know the players themselves.
“You show me 10 photographs of Tom Van Vollenhoven. I’d pick the best two that show him as he actually was. That’s a bit of skill, really.”
Hughes jokes that the only club he’d never work for would be sworn enemies Wigan. But I get the impression he would.
“I’m doing a little bit for Leeds, I’ve done their training facility,” he said.
“I’ve been approached by Widnes to have a look at theirs because people come to St Helens and they see it and they think ‘this is nice’.
“Wigan, even though they’re the enemy and I don’t want to do it for them, it’s a football club predominantly and they don’t want to be inundated with lots of rugby photos.”
But this isn’t just a lofty concept to remind fans, players, and directors that they are part of a lineage. They can make money out of it.
“They sell a place on the mural for you to put your individual company logo. They sell it to you for five years, they make revenue from it.
“I want to do everybody’s! The company is Vinyline.”
Oops. There’s already one advert on this page, right? But in a sport that probably underplays its history somewhat, Ken is providing an invaluable service. We do need more of him.
