Death and Legacy
Hunter died at 8:20pm on 9 October 2006 – just five days short of his 28th birthday – at the Kirkwood Hospice in Huddersfield. Prior to the Premier League Snooker matches on 12 October 2006, players Jimmy White, Ronnie O'Sullivan, Ken Doherty and Ding Junhui, along with referee Alan Chamberlain and commentators Willie Thorne and Phil Yates, all stood for a moment of silence to remember Hunter. His funeral took place on 19 October 2006 at Leeds Parish Church. Many players attended the ceremony, and his best friend, Matthew Stevens, was a coffin-bearer at the service.
Fellow professionals Stephen Hendry, Mark Williams, Jimmy White, Matthew Stevens and Ken Doherty have led calls for The Masters trophy to be named in Hunter's memory. Instead, the non-ranking, and now minor-ranking tournament, Fürth German Open was renamed the Paul Hunter Classic in his honour; a tournament first won by Paul Hunter. In 2006 Hunter was posthumously awarded the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Helen Rollason Award – his widow Lindsey accepted the award on his behalf. The Paul Hunter Foundation was set up after his death to give disadvantaged children places to play sport and socialise.
Read more about this topic: Paul Hunter
Famous quotes containing the words death and, death and/or legacy:
“I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“We like the chase better than the quarry.... And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)