1) Hubert and Harold Pearson
As the Schmeichel family have recently demonstrated, top-level goalkeeping can run in the blood. There seems to be a particularly proud history of trans-generational glovemanship, with other high-profile clans including the Polish internationals Maciej and Wojciech Szczesny, Spain’s Miguel and Pepe Reina, the Italian aces Fabio and Carlo Cudicini, and the three-generational Bulgarian brood of Biser, Borislav and Nikolay Mihaylov (though sometimes later generations stray from the goal, with Julio Musimessi, who won 14 caps between the sticks for Argentina in the 1950s, notably and disappointingly failing to pass on those genes to his grandson, Leo Messi, who would fairly evidently be a useless keeper).
But few families have had such a gift for goalkeeping as the Pearsons of Tamworth, who over two generations produced four goalkeepers of considerable note. The first mention of the family in the Guardian came in 1869 and had nothing to do with football, but an intriguing case of voter bribery involving as a witness Joseph Pearson, a Tamworth trader who “hawked potatoes, apples and onions about the streets”. It was alleged – and this isn’t strictly relevant to our topic of choice today but is interesting, promise – that Sir Robert Peel, the town’s MP, had bribed the local electorate to vote as he wished by, among other things, giving away free drinks at the 37 pubs he controlled in the area (Peel was another who followed in family footsteps – Tamworth voted in three Sir Robert Peels, with someone of that name representing them for all but 10 of the 90 years between 1790 to 1880, with another Peel holding the fort for that lost decade and the middle one – father of the Sir Robert we’re interested in – serving two terms as Prime Minister). “For months before the election the borough was deluged with beer,” the court heard. “It flooded the streets of Tamworth and the neighbourhood during the period of the election and for weeks, if not for months, before. Men, women and children were reeling about the streets in a state of intoxication.” Political campaigning has changed a lot over the past 150 years, and not necessarily for the better.
Anyway, Joseph’s footballing abilities remain very much uncertain, but one of his three sons, Hubert, turned out to be a fine goalkeeper, playing more than 300 times for West Bromwich Albion, winning the league in 1920 and playing in the 1912 FA Cup final, lost to Barnsley after a replay (that season Hubert also scored two goals, both from the penalty spot, the first scored for the club by a goalkeeper). The Baggies did not reach another Cup final for 19 years, by which time Hubert’s son Harold was in nets. This time goalkeeping success for the Pearson family was guaranteed, because Harold’s cousin Harry Hibbs was at the other end of the pitch wearing the colours of Birmingham City. West Brom won 2-1, and secured promotion to the First Division at the expense of Tottenham Hotspur a couple of weeks later – a still unique double – and Harold was to return to Wembley for the 4-2 defeat by Sheffield Wednesday in 1935, and win one cap for England, a 3-0 victory over Scotland in 1932. His cousin already had 10 caps by then, and was to get 15 more, becoming the undoubted star of the family. Eddie Hapgood, the former England captain, wrote in his autobiography that “to my mind, Harry Hibbs was the best goalkeeper I ever saw”, while his successor in goal for England, Frank Swift, called him “a master of angles”. Another cousin, Horace Pearson, was very much left in the shade by all this but still won a Third Division title with Coventry and continues to hold their record for continuous clean-sheet holding, set in 1934 and standing at 608 minutes.
2) Erwin, Carsten, Andreas, Florian and Natascha Keller
Perhaps the most impressive record of transgenerational sporting achievement belongs to the Keller family of Berlin. Erwin got the ball rolling by playing three times as Germany won hockey silver at the 1936 Olympics, including in the final, when the Germans celebrated the unique achievement of scoring against India. Sure, they conceded eight, but these were opponents who strolled through three group games and a semi-final with an aggregate score of 30-0. In 1936 he married Helga Ackermann – also a German international hockey player – and their son Carsten was born three years later. He went on to play hockey in three Games of his own, coming seventh in 1960, fourth in 1968 and then captaining the team to gold in 1972 (as well as earning a national ranking in tennis and boasting that he “could also play in the Bundesliga”). By the time he retired he had played 133 internationals, a German record. Twelve years later Carsten’s eldest son, Andreas, made his Olympic debut, winning silver in Los Angeles and again in Seoul in 1988 before taking gold in Barcelona in 1992.
Carsten’s first marriage produced one other child, Torsten, an enthusiastic player as a child but never an Olympian, but both children from his second marriage did somewhat better. His daughter Natascha – winner of multiple junior tennis titles in Berlin – was next to take over the family mantle in hockey, coming sixth in 1996 and seventh in 2000 before winning gold in 2004. She came back in 2012, carrying the German flag at the opening ceremony, before announcing her retirement when Germany again came seventh. Natascha’s younger brother, Florian, felt horribly excluded by all this medal-winning, having been forced by injury to retire from hockey at the age of 21, but after witnessing his sister’s success in Athens he decided to have another crack: in Beijing four years later, he too won gold. “We are a very modest family,” Carsten insisted last year. “Sometimes it’s embarrassing to always be asked about it.” There may well be more generations of champion Kellers to come: Andreas has three children and reports that they show promise. As well they might: as if the Keller genes weren’t enough, Andreas’s wife, Louisa, was Germany’s gold medal-winning goalkeeper in 2004. “I don’t mind if our child does something different,” said Louisa, then pregnant with her first child, in 2006, “but of course in our family it will always have hockey.”
3) The participants in Manchester United 0-0 Tottenham, 15 March 1995
It may have finished goalless but this game – like, it transpired, the footballers participating in it – was far from sterile. “There is a rich history of outstanding matches between United and Spurs and this was another pulsating example,” enthused Stephen Bierley in the Guardian. “The only element lacking was goals. There was more fluid, thrilling football in the opening 15 minutes than most matches manage in 90.” Andy Cole missed several chances, hitting the post and the bar but never the net, a failure that was to have painful consequences as United went on to miss out to Blackburn Rovers in the race to the title by a single point, with a considerably better goal difference.
But the match earns its place here not for the quality of the football, which is irrelevant for our purposes, but for the quality of the footballers. None of their children have played in the Premier League this season – though Alex Bruce would have come in handy at Hull but for his achilles injury – but it is quantity that counts here, and no other match that we have found can boast quite so many transgenerational footballing talents.
Manchester United, managed of course by the then plain Alex Ferguson (father of Darren), featured Peter Schmeichel (father of Leicester’s Kasper), Steve Bruce (father of Alex), Paul Ince (father of Tom, currently at Derby County) and Andy Cole (whose son Devante is now at Fleetwood Town), as well as Brian McClair, whose son Liam spent several years in United’s academy but failed to make the grade and is now a singer, and Mark Hughes, whose son Curtis might not be a footballer but does at least work with them, as player liaison officer at Stoke City. Tottenham’s team included Nick Barmby (father of Jack, previously on the books at both Manchester United and Leicester but now at Portland Timbers), Teddy Sheringham (father of Ebbsfleet United striker Charlie), Jürgen Klinsmann (whose son Jonathan is a promising goalkeeper, currently in the USA’s Under-20 team) and Ronny Rosenthal (whose 20-year-old son Tom was released by QPR at the end of last season) as well as Ian Walker (son of the former Watford and Colchester goalkeeper, and Norwich and Everton manager, Mike), Gary Mabbutt (son of Roy, who played nearly 500 times for Bristol Rovers, and brother of the former Bristol City and Crystal Palace forward Kevin), as well as Justin Edinburgh (whose son Charlie is a player agent).
4) Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris
Old Tom Morris was born in St Andrews in 1821 (he wasn’t old then), the son of a letter-carrier and keen golfer who, according to a biography published in 1907, “began to handle a club as soon as he could toddle”. “I’ve played golf close on 80 years, and that’s longer than most folk get living,” he said. “I began on the links doon there as soon as I could handle a club, and I have been doing little else ever since. I began to play when I was six or seven, maybe younger. You ken a’ St Andrews bairns are born wi’ web feet an’ wi’ a golf-club in their hands.” He learned his craft as a caddie and apprentice to the great Allan Robertson, eventually becoming his preferred playing partner.
Young Tom (We’ll call him Tommy, for the sake of simplicity) was born in 1851, the year his father was abruptly sacked after being discovered using the controversial new guttie ball on the links of St Andrews. Old Tom returned as groundsman in 1865, five years after the Open, a competition he created, was played for the first time, and the year young Tommy made his debut in it, aged 14. The elder Morris, winner in 1861, 1862 and 1864, came fifth, and claimed his fourth and final Open win in 1867. The following year Tommy won his first Open at the still-unequalled age of 17 – leaving his father in second place, a familial feat again unheard of in majors – and enjoyed it so much he won the next three as well, again without equal. After his third in a row he got to keep the red belt that had been presented to the tournament’s early winners, and his became the first name to be engraved in its replacement, the Claret Jug. He tied for third in 1873 and came second in 1874. It was to be his last Open.
The following year, a week before the tournament, his wife and baby died in childbirth. “Young Tommy never really recovered from this shock and grief,” wrote Dr WW Tulloch, his father’s biographer. “He had been married less than a year, and he was devotedly attached to his wife. And now he had lost her in the saddest and, to a young husband, in the most pathetic manner. He went about like one who had received a mortal blow. Even his beloved game failed to rouse him. He lived as if in some trance, all his light-hearted buoyancy gone.” Within months Tommy too was dead, officially the result of a burst artery in the lung, his body discovered on Christmas Day.
Tom kept working and playing until, aged 86, he walked through the wrong door of the St Andrews clubhouse, not realising it was the way to the cellar, fell down the stairs and sustained fatal injuries.
5) Ahmed Hasan Khan and his daughters
The Natural History Museum of Rotterdam has a fine collection of stuffed birds, among which live a couple of particularly curious exhibits. One is the corpse of a mallard duck, which after its demise – caused, improbably, by it flying into a window at the museum itself – became the first recorded victim of homosexual necrophilia among water birds. Another is a sparrow which innocently flew into an open warehouse window in 2005, not knowing that the people inside were laboriously laying out 4,155,476 dominoes in an attempt to break a world record, accidentally causing the premature toppling of some 23,000 of them and so infuriating organisers that they immediately hired a trained killer to shoot it down with an air rifle. The following year the latter bird, by then stuffed and mounted onto a box of dominoes, was one of two star exhibits at an exhibition in Rotterdam dedicated to its species. The other was flown in from England, where for 80 years since being hit and killed by a cricket ball during a match between MCC and Cambridge University it had perched at Lord’s, attached to the very cherry that felled it.
Jahangir Khan, the Lord’s sparrow-killer, was having a big couple of years, certainly bigger than could have been expected of someone who had died in 1988. Also in 2005, a few months before the Domino Sparrow beat its wings for the final time and the year before the people of Holland were treated to the sight and the implication of the most famous ball he ever bowled, his grandson made his Test debut for Pakistan, the third generation of his family to play Test cricket. Jahangir had been the first, playing four times for the pre-partition India team between 1932 and 1936, followed by his second son Majid, a brilliant batsman who played 63 Tests between 1964 and 1983.
But credit for these good genes should probably go instead to Ahmed Hasan Khan, a cricket-loving civil servant born in 1883. Four of his children reached adulthood: Ahmed Raza Khan, who played first-class cricket for many years but never reached Test level, and three girls: Iqbal Bano, Mubarak and Shaukat. The eldest son of Iqbal Bano was Javed Burki, who played 25 Tests in the 1960s; Mubarak married the sparrow-killing Jahangir Khan – who had also represented India at the javelin at the 1934 British Empire Games, now known as the Commonwealth Games – and Majid was their second son (the first, Asad Jahangir Khan, also played first-class cricket); Shaukat had four daughters and just one son: the great Imran Khan. For three sisters to each have sons who played Test cricket is a unique achievement, and for two of those children to still be considered among the greatest cricketers of a great cricketing nation is, if not the cherry on the cake, at least the blossom on the family tree.
6) Northern Dancer
Now this is a little unfair. Northern Dancer was always likely to have offspring that won horse races, because a) he himself did, frequently, retiring with a record of 14 wins in 18 races, never finishing lower than third b) they were supposed to, and c) there were 635 of them. At one stage his stud fee reached $1m a pop. People magazine described him as the only celebrity that could earn a million dollars before breakfast, and the manager of the farm where he did his work announced that “his semen is literally worth its weight in gold” – not bad for a short, stocky horse that found no takers when his owner tried to sell him for a song as a yearling. Perhaps we should mark him down because he had quite a few children who weren’t very good – 147 of them, in fact, were so disappointing that they never started a race. A further 120 had a go at racing but never won anything. But that still leaves 368 race-winners, of which 26 were great champions, including stars such as Nijinsky, who won the triple crown in 1970, and one that after retirement came to rival his father as the greatest sire of them all. That was Sadler’s Wells, who was an excellent runner but incredibly good at stud, champion sire in North America once, in France three times and in Britain and Ireland 14 times in 15 years, producing 323 stakes winners (a tally that ranks second only to Danehill, one of Northern Dancer’s grandchildren) and winners of every British Classic including two of the Derby: High Chaparral and Galileo. Galileo also ended up at stud, so far producing 62 Grade One winners and Derby victors, including back-to-back wins in 2013 and 2014 for Ruler of the World and Australia. No other horse’s intergenerational influence comes close to Northern Dancer’s, and these days it is harder to find a good horse that isn’t related to him: between 2006 and 2013 92.4% of the 157 starters of the Kentucky Derby were his descendants, including all 20 in 2012; only four of the last 30 winners of that race did not have Northern Dancer in their sire line. Robert Sangster, the British racehorse owner and breeder who bought as many of his line as he could get his hands on, once said that “there are two kinds of horses: Northern Dancers, and the rest.”
