Billy Boston, the retired Welsh rugby star who was a figure of pilasses for black professional athletes in Great Britain, was a knight from King Charles III in a special ceremony to Buckingham Palace on Tuesday.
Boston, 90, is widely considered one of the best to play Rugby League, the fastest and more free flow version of the game, with 13 players on a team instead of 15, as in Rugby Union. He spent most of his career with Wigan Warriors, where he marked 488 appearances from 1953 to 1968, and ended his career with a British record of 571 attempts, the equivalent of touchdown rugby in the American football.
He was the first black player to represent Great Britain in his national Rugby League team, during a tour in Australia and New Zealand in 1954. He scored 24 attempts in 31 international appearances for Great Britain and played a fundamental role in the World Cup of the Rugby League World Cup of Great Britain in 1960, marking against Australia in the final.
Boston, who in 2016 revealed that vascular dementia had been diagnosed, did not make a public declaration on the knight. The BBC reported Tuesday that his wife, Joan, said that his family was “enthusiastic that everything he did for sport and for our community has been recognized”.
His son Stephen, who appears to his father after the ceremony, said that the knight was “for a long time” and “should have been long before”, noting that his father was the first player in the 130 -year -old history of the Rugby League to be a knight.
Boston collected several main honors in Wigan, said the team on his website and won the Challenge Cup, the oldest rugby League Cup in the world, three times.
Mike Danson, Wigan's current owner, said on the team's website that Boston's knight was “richly deserved honor”.
“Without a doubt, Billy was a player who was – and is still – the greatest favorite of the crowd in the rugby League,” he said.
In Wigan's victory of 1959 Challenge Cup against the hull, Boston scored two attempts in front of a crowd of almost 80,000 at the Wembley Stadium. It was the most prolific triple in the history of the Rugby League and “an iconic figure in the history of British sport”, said Tony Sutton, CEO of the League, in a note Tuesday.
Politicians in the north of England, where the rugby championship is more popular, had expressed frustration for years that a rugby league player had not received a knight, in particular given that several rugby players had been honorary.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Great Britain declared on social media that it was “a historical error” that it took so long because a player from the rugby alloy received a knight. Boston, he said, was “a legend of the game that passed the prejudice to represent Great Britain and opened the doors to a more diversified game”.
“The first knight in the rugby League could not go to a more deserving player,” said Starmer.