There's a sudden resurgence of interest in Britain's greatest athlete.

The fact that he never existed outside the pages of the Wizard hasn't stopped one of our posh broadsheet papers, prompted by Michael Parkinson, from examining once again the career of the Amazing Wilson.

He was the man who ran the three-minute mile, climbed Everest in his bare feet (running backwards, if I remember rightly) and was the most devastating fast bowler ever to play for England.

His bowling broke stumps, left scorch-marks on the wicket and put the willies up the Australians even more thoroughly than Harold Larwood ever did.

It was his training for this that inspired our gang. Wilson, you see, didn't go to the indoor nets at Lords. He trained on the Yorkshire moors. Using an iron ball made by the local blacksmith and a rock as a wicket.

There wasn't much left of the rock after Wilson had found his length and settled down for 20 overs or so at about 150mph. It was reduced to the consistency of Filey beach.

After training with a lump of iron, an ordinary cricket ball was as nothing to Wilson. He not only shattered stumps, but often cracked the bat if the man wielding it was lucky enough to get it near the ball.

This was heady stuff for us. We knew Fred Trueman was fast (he'd told us often enough), but Wilson was in a different dimension. And as all heroes, we wanted to emulate him.

All we wanted was a cast iron ball; but, since blacksmiths were extinct in our bit of Bradford, this was a bit of a problem.

Tonto solved it. There was an old church not far away with iron railings which had escaped being carted away during the war to be melted down for munitions. And on top of each mainstay was a prize worth having - an iron ball, just the diameter of a cricket ball and with a raised welt round the middle, just like a seam.

All we had to do was detach one of these and within weeks the England selectors would have been clamouring at our doors. And the Aussies would have been drawing lots to decide their batting order, and being led to the wicket attended by a chaplain and with time allowed for a last fag.

How do you cut through iron? Hacksaws and files were the usual implements. We hadn't got a hacksaw (indeed we weren't too sure what one looked like) - but we could get our hands on a file. After all, women used them to smooth their nails, didn't they?

A little petty larceny from a handbag by Spud gave us all we needed, and a bit of teetering about on the edge of the steps down to the church basement put us in the right spot.

Alas, what worked perfectly on fingernails had no effect on cast iron. It didn't even scratch the paint. We might as well have been using a banana.

Spud, in desperation, seeing his chance of being a sporting hero slipping away thanks to low-quality steel from the Far East, shuffled around to try to get a bit more purchase.

Unfortunately he shuffled a bit too far.

With a sound like three hundredweight of nutty slack shuttering into a coal cellar, he disappeared.

We waited, aghast for any sound from below. What we heard was reassuring. It was the sound of Spud effing and blinding and tottering up the stairs.

He reached the top and uttered one of the finest examples of stating the obvious it has even been my privilege to hear: "I fell," he wheezed.

Amazingly he suffered only a twisted ankle. As Tonto unkindly remarked, he must have fallen on his head, the least vulnerable part of his anatomy.

It served him right. There was only one Amazing Wilson; and, as far as we knew, Wilson hadn't yet retired and fate had obviously reserved special penalties for would-be usurpers.

And who knows if Wilson isn't still out there somewhere, like Francis Drake or King Arthur, sleeping and waiting for his country's call at time of danger?

Maybe he wakes up for a quick practice now and again.

It would explain those moorland fires we get in those increasingly rare dry summers.

It's not a careless hiker, or a bottle top - it's the amazing Wilson striking sparks off the millstone grit with his yorker.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.