Sporting Bygones: Seventy years ago in Bridlington, teenager Ernie Cooper landed a penalty kick of 81 yards for a world record which stands today

Only a slight wind blew across the field to mark a game in which they needed merely to avoid defeat to ensure they would finish the campaign unbeaten.

Their opponents that day were an army select team, which comprised rugby league players because some of the union boys had been called up to war.

Midway through the second half, the army team were penalised deep in Bridlington territory and a penalty was awarded.

Ernie Cooper, a 17-year-old winger for Bridlington, placed the ball and pointed to the posts.

He was five yards in from the touchline and one yard outside his own 25-metre line.

The distance to the posts was a staggering 81 yards, or 74 metres.

“What does that silly bugger think he’s going to do from there?” the opposing captain was heard to quip as his players went and stood under the cross bar, anticipating the ball would drop short.

But Cooper, unruffled, merely went through his routine, dropping back three paces before accelerating through the ball with his right foot.

There was a “slight, moderate cross-wind” the school report noted, but it mattered not.

Cooper’s kick travelled the 81 yards through the air and never looked like dropping short. It cleared the cross bar comfortably and even landed beyond the dead-ball line.

“I was delighted to have knocked it over, but the most important thing that day was that we drew the game and managed to finish the season unbeaten,” recalls Cooper, who scored a try and a conversion as well that 
day.

The enormity of the achievement was lost on the teenager and, to be fair, most of the participants that day.

In fact, it would be nearly three decades before the true value of that monster kick would be learned, when it was put into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest kick in the history of rugby union.

It is a record that still stands today.

“I have a card from Jonny Wilkinson that reads, ‘It must have been one hell of a kick, Ernie’, and I suppose it was,” smiles Cooper.

As well as going relatively unrecorded for 30 years, the irony of that day was that Ernie Cooper was not a traditional kicker, nor was he after that.

“I was a winger by trade who just kicked occasionally,” he said.

“I went to Birmingham University after I left Bridlington School and wasn’t a kicker then.

“Nor was I for much of my career.”

What Cooper was, however,was a terrific servant to Yorkshire rugby union. He had broken into the Bridlington School team at the age of 13, playing alongside, and against, boys who were sometimes five years older than himself.

“I was a sports fanatic. In union I had a strong hand-off and I was fast when I went down that left wing,” he says.

“I also loved athletics and was a sprinter, a high jumper and a discus thrower, among other disciplines, at school.”

His union career took in six Yorkshire teams.

Cooper played for Bridlington, Scarborough, Headingley and Roundhay when he lived and worked in Leeds, Hull and East Riding and York Unicorns.

The Unicorns were his last team, with his final game of union coming in a midweek league game in January 1990.

Cooper was 64. He had played union in Yorkshire in six different decades, from the 1940s to the 90s. Even now he still serves the sport in the White Rose county as president of Yorkshire One side Bridlington.

“I follow them home and away, even at my age,” he says.

“But I can’t run any more...”

His family name also resonates in Yorkshire rugby. Cooper’s son Tim is the president of Driffield Rugby Club, while his grandson Oliver plays second row for the same team.

Their paths cross often on the field, and in the bar after another derby. “It’s nice to continue the Cooperhood in Yorkshire rugby,” laughs Ernie.

His long service to the sport in this county was honoured last season when his beloved Bridlington reached the RFU Junior Vase final at Twickenham, and he was asked to lead the team out.

“What an honour that was,” he says.

“It was a fantastic day for our club, one none of us will forget.

“And the hospitality that day? Out of this world. Anything you wanted you could have.

“We lost unfortunately (30-22 to Brighton), but we were an amateur team, up against a team with money.

“That’s the big change I’ve seen in the sport over the years, the advent of professionalism has meant money rules, which is a shame.”

It is a far cry from the innocence of Cooper’s early days and, indeed, the majority of his gloriously long career, when such events as an 81m kick were greeted with polite applause and two teams who just got on with it.