Rudi Koertzen, the former South African umpire, has died aged 73. He was a part of the ICC’s elite panel and died in a car accident while driving from Cape Town to Despatch in Eastern Cape in South Africa, where he lived with his family.

In the game of cricket, Rudi Koertzen was the adjudicator of death, as are his workmanlike pallbearers. Retired or waiting to retire. Dead or, waiting to,… no, kind of shocked to sharply come to terms with one’s own mortality. Umpires have ways: quick and fair, quick and crooked, deliberate and sit on it for those 10 seconds to process it, and a genius once in a while.

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Along with Pakistan’s Aleem Dar and West Indies’ Steve Bucknor, Koertzen was one of three umpires to stand in over 100 Tests. Fellow South African umpire Marais Erasmus said: “Rudi was such a strong character, physically and mentally. He paved the way for South African umpires to get to the world stage. Made us all believe it’s possible. A true legend. As a young umpire, I learnt a lot from him.”

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Unlike the quick death that was in store for Koertzen, in his mortal human life he was among the slow ones, if not the slowest, to pass the verdict on matters life and death.

“Batting is about death. And life of course. It’s all about how useful – how good – a life you lead before you die. You are surrounded by pitfalls and bayed about by enemies, but the good person will come through adversity to triumph. And the less good person won’t.

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That life-and-death metaphor gives cricket its USP: its own particular force and vividness. Cricket—red-ball cricket in particular—is all about the little death of dismissal. Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means,” Simon Barnes wrote for The Cricket Monthly in a piece titled The Batting Life.

The human factor old-timers rue is that its absence has taken personality out of the game. The umpiring error for which there can be an umpiring balance within the game or, if not, you can say that the game like life allows for luck.

Someone though, for a five-day game especially, has to say that it was a good game, which basically means it wasn’t decided by the blunders of the umpires. The Wisden collection for some of the best cricket quotes that the game has produced has on its cover an Umpire dressed in black pants, white coat, tie and formal light/white shirt, and the background of the Yellow Bible. He has a raised finger and someone, you figure out the naivety for that anonymous who, has the best quote of the book as the headline: “What are the Butchers For?”

Rudi Koertzen jr, Koertzen’s son, was philosophical, hardly a surprise for an umpire’s son, when he confirmed the news. “He went on a golf tournament with some of his friends, and they were expected to come back on Monday, but it seems they decided to play another round of golf,” Koertzen Jr told Algoa FM News, a South African website.

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Cricketers will have stories about him. Umpires will talk about him as a comrade and his family would miss him as applicable: father, husband, grandfather, and so on. The son’s philosophical statement though is a bridge between the two games, or a privileged one between life and death.

A lot of cricketers, and perhaps umpires too as we now learn, take to golf after retiring. The English first-class cricketer Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, who also—and the irony could not have been keener—lived to be 73, once said: “Golf is a game to be played between cricket and death.”

Rest in Peace, Rudi Koertzen. You didn’t have to take that literally.