Don Robinson has passed, and a club’s fanbase mourns.

The man is a real giant in Hull City’s history, almost anything good you can think of that happened in the 1980s can be traced back to him and his flair for showmanship.

Larger than life long before he became involved in Hull City: the wrestling career, the rugby career, the ownership of zoos and aquariums, essentially inventing dental tourism, he was a forward thinker and a left-field thinker.

In 1982, he took on the first football club in the land to slip into receivership, a club that had been in severe and steep decline since the mid 1970s and he infused new life into it. You could call him gimmicky, and he was a pro wrestler once after all, but his gimmicks got noticed and stuck in the memory: riding around the pitch on a white horse dressed as a cowboy (complete with six-shooter), taking the team to Florida to play NASL sides after negotiating sponsorship by an airline, the dancing bear, posing with a live turkey (and Brian Horton) on North Road to promote the Twydale Turkeys sponsorship, the release of the single ‘The Tigers are back’ on DON records, declaring an intent to be the first club to play on the Moon, having the Harlem Globetrotters play in the Boothferry Park gym, the clubs own soft drink brand in Tiger Cola, all of these things are golden threads in the tapestry of Hull City’s history.

Sometimes his ideas were a bit daft, he effectively gave away shirt sponsorship to Hygena for free, thinking that maybe they’d then pay for it (they didn’t) and a few years later he put the name of unloved nu-county Humberside on the shirts, which irritated fans who consider themselves Yorkshire-folk somewhat.

Some of his ideas were beautifully altruistic and quite profound: he ran a scheme that allowed unemployed people to get into some games for free. My dad was a welder and boilermaker in the region’s ship building industry, which endured hard times in the 1980s, and it was piece-work, so he was out of work a lot. It was that initiative that spurred him to pay for me to go to my first game, in January 1983, and that created a fan for life. So for me personally Don Robinson’s altruism and knack for promotions had a life altering effect.

Then there was the promotions, with City moving from the Division Four basement to Division Two, where the dream of sitting at the top table starts, courtesy of ascension under Colin Appleton in 1982/83, and then a third place finish to go up in 1984/85 under player-manager-director Brian Horton.

As a kit historian, I’m duty bound to note Don Robinson’s contribution to the sartorial history of the club, and he introduced red as a tertiary colour in the Tigers kit palette. There’s no definitive answer as to why he did so but there are several theories: Dennis Booth told Radio Humberside that he told Don that Watford added red to kits and their fortunes improved, some people speculate it was a reference to Scarborough his former club, though he often spoke in programme notes about wanting City to emulate Liverpool on the pitch, could copying the use of red have been in his thinking?

We might never know, and one of my regrets is waiting too long to contact him to ask, because by the time I had, he’d forgotten we had red in the kits at all. Still, at the time, in true bombastic Don Robinson style he said it represented the blood the players were willing to shed for the club’s cause, and when Billy Whitehurst played in red trimmed kits that blood was shed most by opposition goalkeepers.

It’s funny, at the time I really didn’t like red in the kit, I was bought a City scarf once and I remember being unhappy about the red, reasoning that you only saw red on a tiger when it had been shot. However, viewed through a prism of nostalgia, the red kits were worn during a period of real upward mobility for the club, so I now view it with fondness, as do many people.

The man was inimitable, and to Hull City fans his true title was Sir Don Robinson OBE.

Raising a bumpy-bottomed can of Tiger Cola, we salute you Don.

PS. As part of a kit design tutorial I once conceived of a kit that was a tribute to ‘The Don’, with red trim and detail referencing his comments about playing on the Moon…