Reg Tovey has maintained Torquay Gulls' pitch, entirely unpaid, for fifty-one years. In that time he has missed exactly one home match: his wife's funeral, in 2011, on a Saturday the club moved kickoff by two hours so he could attend and still make it back for the second half.
He is eighty-one now, still out most mornings before training, and shows no sign of stopping. The club offered him a modest stipend two seasons ago, which he turned down flat, on the grounds that the pitch “was never a job to start with.”
He asked instead for a new set of line-marking wheels, which the club happily provided.
Torquay Gulls marked his fifty-first year with a brief pitchside acknowledgement before a recent home match. By all accounts, Reg found the attention far more uncomfortable than fifty-one years of early mornings ever were.