Bill Elliott
As I entered the grounds of the Easthampstead Crematorium, I noticed the meandering graveyard opening up before me was abutted by a golf complex. Serendipity has never raised its pretty head more appropriately. I, like many others on that drab March day, was on my way to say a final farewell to an old friend, the redoubtable John Paramor, widely acknowledged as the best of the best when it came to the minefield that is the Rules of Golf.
We shared the same birthday, April 4, although I made my legal free drop into the world ten years earlier than him. For a long time, I neither knew nor cared that this daft old game contained an ever-winding pathway of nuanced rules that required more study than the average PHD. John knew them backwards and sideways. More importantly, he knew how to apply them. His own rule that over-rode everything else was simply to “be fair, play fair”.
A big man, he spoke quietly, gently and with elegant cohesion. Try to browbeat him into submission on the course and you’d lose, as Seve famously found out at Valderrama during their long discussion over whether a hole containing Seve’s ball was made by an animal. After 20 minutes of passionate submission, Seve gave up. When I asked how he felt about winning that particular argument – a television camera recording every second – John smiled and said, “I didn’t win any argument, the Rules of Golf did and I just applied them. Fancy a drink?”
Surviving “a drink” with John was both a badge of honour and an initiation ceremony. I don’t suppose Will Shakespeare ever knew John, but if he had, then I have little doubt he would have based a bit of Falstaff’s character on him. Not the corruption, the deceit or the lying, of course, but the zest for life and the eternal lust for good food and great wine.
I first met him in April 1979 as I was standing bemused at Heathrow en route to the Portuguese Open. It was my first tournament abroad as a golf correspondent and I’d flown down to London from Manchester to catch a TAP flight. However, the TAP pilots had decided to go on strike that day and when I asked how I could get there the answer was a shoulder shrug.
A pat on my shoulder revealed an experienced journalist, Gordon Richardson, who I had met once. The young man standing alongside him, John, was heading to Portugal not as a referee but as the tournament director. He was 25 at the time. “Leave it to me, I’ll sort this,“he said.
Half an hour later we were off... on a BA flight to Geneva, where we spent a few hours before boarding a KLM flight to Peru, which crucially stopped off at Lisbon to take on passengers. We got into Lisbon as darkness fell and John hired a car and drove the three of us through the night down to the Algarve. Crikey, I thought, this is better than rocking up at a football ground, if a little more nerve-wracking. It was typical Paramor.
Seven years after he joined the European Tour in 1976, John was joined by Andy Mcfee. Another big, gently spoken man, the two became the closest of mates as they spearheaded the rules gang for The R&A, the USGA, the PGA Tour and a posse of other golf bodies.
At the funeral, Andy spoke of their life together on the road and explained to the uninitiated that to be ‘Paramored’ was to have a hell of a good time but suffer for it the next morning. It was in San Francisco that Andy, making his way to yet another fine steak restaurant and wine cellar, spotted a Hunter S. Thompson quote on a card. He bought it and presented it to John over the second, possibly third bottle of claret that night. “I told him I thought this summed him up perfectly.”
Thompson’s quote, cleaned up, reads: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow, what a ride’.”
John Norrie Paramor: born 1955, died 2023. Very, very well ridden Big Man.
“To be ‘Paramored’ was to have a hell of a good time but suffer the next morning”