Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  • • •

  Mike Brearley, a professional psychoanalyst, wrote when Hutton died: ‘I suspect that behind the engaging surface was an unease, even a sadness.’ In my own dealings with Len I sometimes detected the same thing, but I put it down to a wistfulness about what might have been – if the war hadn’t interrupted his career in his prime, if he hadn’t damaged his arm, if he hadn’t had to bear the full brunt of the Australian attack in the immediate post-war years, if Yorkshire had behaved better toward him … above all, a sense that he didn’t know, and would never know, whether he had reached the peak of his talents.

  But my impression was that he looked at that reality with the same straight gaze he applied to the bowling of Lindwall and Miller. Beyond that I sensed an enviable serenity, the wry fulfilment of a Conradic hero who had been severely tested by life and had finally come through, though he wished perhaps that he could have found a way to talk about these things more openly. A phrase by J. M. Kilburn, the Yorkshire cricket writer, stuck in my mind: ‘Hutton’s is a very romantic story, but Leonard wasn’t romantic.’ He said to me in our TV interview two years before he died: ‘It’s nice to be remembered for the 364 and so on, but really and truly I would like to be remembered for the sort of person I am, rather than for what I’ve done.’

  Archbishop Runcie wrote in a letter of condolence to Lady Hutton:

  When you have idolised anyone in youth, it’s sometimes a disappointment to meet him in later life. Of nobody was this less true than Len. Someone so modest, so free from cant or pretentiousness, was an inspiration. He seemed to me to have the highest standards for character as he did for the game of which he was such a master.

  It is a mark of Len’s human quality that he should have obliged such serious people to think so hard about him. When I produced a book about him, I was conscious of something Brearley also felt in writing about him – an anxiety about intruding and thereby hurting or embarrassing him. It shows the unusual spell he cast that such considerations should still have force beyond the grave. Len once offered these cryptic words of advice to Tony Greig about leading an England team on tour: ‘Don’t say too much.’ He might have said the same about this chapter, but I hope not. Unlike most cricketers, Sir Leonard Hutton deserves to be remembered for rather more than cricket.

  CHAPTER 18

  STANLEY

  I was having lunch in a restaurant in Madrid when the call came from the Daily Telegraph sports desk: ‘Donald, your column’s a few inches short. Can you add a par or two?’ I looked around the room in search of inspiration – and then I found it.

  The wall above my lunch table was decorated by a framed photograph of two of the greatest footballers the world has ever seen: Stanley Matthews was shaking hands with Alfredo Di Stéfano, the Argentine genius who had played for Real Madrid. In 1956, when an award for European Footballer of the Year was first introduced, Matthews had beaten Di Stéfano by forty-seven votes to forty-four.

  I scribbled down and then dictated a brief item, describing the photo and asking why one never saw pictures of Stanley Matthews in an English restaurant. A week or two later, a letter in spidery handwriting arrived from Matthews himself, having been sent on by the newspaper. He thanked me for the reference to him and said he would like to meet me. And so began my friendship with the man who was a schoolboy hero, not just to me but to every sports-loving youngster of my generation in the 1940s and 1950s.

  • • •

  I had started writing a weekly sports column in the Daily Telegraph as soon as I left The Observer in 1993. About eight years before that, Max Hastings, the editor of the Telegraph, had sent me a note inviting me to write such a column if I ever left The Observer. He had been inspired to write, he said, by reading a book I had published about snooker. At the time, I was involved in a major public row with my owner, Tiny Rowland of Lonrho, and it didn’t look as if I would survive for long in the editorial chair.

  When I finally did leave The Observer in 1993, I wrote to Max reminding him of the letter he had sent and asking if he was still interested in me writing a sports column. He rang immediately and said he had arranged for me to have lunch the following day with his sports editor, David Welch. The following week my column made its first appearance and continued for fifteen years.

  • • •

  I happened to be in Madrid because I was doing some consultancy work for a Spanish-based company that produced supplements about individual countries. These supplements, which generated substantial advertising revenue, appeared in many of the world’s major newspapers. My job was to open doors for the company into the offices of leading editors in Britain, Europe and America and to guarantee the editorial quality of the supplements.

  I remember once ringing Conrad Black, when he owned the Telegraph group, to ask him to see the owner of the Spanish publishing company. The Canadian growled: ‘What’s in it for me, Donald?’

  ‘He wants to give you a million pounds, Conrad.’

  ‘In that case I’ll see him.’

  My introduction resulted in the Telegraph carrying the supplements for several years, and almost certainly producing the bumper revenues I had promised.

  Matthews had said in his letter that he liked to meet people at a Crest Hotel off the M6, not far from his home in Stoke-on-Trent. At the time, I was travelling up every week from London to Sheffield, where I had launched a new Department of Journalism Studies at the university, so it was no problem to arrange a meeting with the great man. In fact, this became several meetings when we found we got on so well together. One reason for this was that I knew the names of the top players of his generation and he enjoyed being taken back in time to reminisce about them all.

  My father had taken me to see Stanley play at Molyneux, the ground of Wolverhampton Wanderers, when I was ten or eleven years old. In those days, little boys rarely saw any action on the field, even on their father’s shoulders. Descriptions of a goal or a special piece of skill were passed back through the crowd by word of mouth to those at the back of the terraces. One had to take Matthews’s genius on trust, so to speak.

  But I had managed to watch the famous FA Cup Final of 1953 on a flickering old 9-inch black-and-white TV set at the house of a friend. This became known for ever more as ‘the Matthews final’, though when I used the phrase Stanley said it failed to do justice to his friend Stan Mortensen, who had scored a hat-trick.

  Their Blackpool team had beaten Bolton Wanderers by four goals to three, thanks mainly to mesmerising runs down the right wing by Matthews and his impeccably placed crosses into the penalty area. His team came from 1–3 down with half an hour to go to score the winning goal from a Matthews centre in the dying seconds.

  The victory was all the sweeter because Matthews and Blackpool had lost the Cup Finals of 1948 and 1951. Stanley sent me an artist’s depiction of the moment he crossed the ball for that winning goal. It still occupies pride of place in my study.

  The year 1953, that of the Queen’s Coronation, was also the year in which England’s greatest jockey, Gordon Richards, finally won the Derby, the year Len Hutton won the Ashes against Australia for the first time since the war, and the year a British-led team conquered Everest. It seemed as though the country’s sporting efforts were being blessed from on high.

  • • •

  When I entered the bar of the Crest Hotel, there was no mistaking the great footballing legend, even though he was approaching eighty at the time. He was wearing a sky-blue lightweight suit and skipped across the floor in loafers like a man several decades younger. His silver hair was wrapped around his head in a style that took one back to the 1950s.

  I asked him about his fitness, which had carried him to British records that will surely never be beaten – of playing first-class football to the age fifty and appearing for England at forty-two. He said he had never smoked or drunk alcohol and stopped eating meat early in his career. He never ate at all on Mondays, drinking eight pints of water instead. His pre-match meal
consisted of egg, milk and glucose powder.

  Long before sports science was invented, he had taken vitamins and fruit juices and believed in the energising power of deep breathing. He used to run on Blackpool beach between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. every morning – ‘now I just stroll round the garden,’ he added ruefully, though he could never completely break his lifetime habit of early-morning exercise.

  He attributed his fitness regime to the example of his father, who had been known as ‘the fighting barber of Hanley’, a district of Stoke-on-Trent, where Stanley had been born and started and finished his football career. It was from his father that he acquired the dancing feet that were to leave despairing full-backs in his wake.

  He told me that his aim had been to make himself the fastest man in the world over ten yards. He became known as ‘the wizard of dribble’ after practising his moves round kitchen chairs in the back yard at home as a boy. To improve his speed, he had ultra-light shoes made specially for him which lasted for only a few games at a time.

  He was never booked on the field, never dived, never queried a referee’s decision and never retaliated when he was roughed up by frustrated full-backs – a regular occurrence. He said to me: ‘When a full-back kicked me, I knew I’d got him. It showed he was frightened of me.’

  I asked if, these days, he would be marked out of the game. ‘They tried that in my time, putting three big blokes onto me, and remember they wore heavier boots then. But concentrating on me just made it easier for the rest of the team.’ These days, he thought, his talents would be best employed as a mid-fielder, spraying pin-point passes from deeper positions.

  I asked which of his many achievements he was proudest of.

  Well, the FA Cup medal, I suppose – my father had made me promise on his death bed that I would get one. But really and truly I’m proudest of other things – coaching boys in Africa and South America, for example, which I did for many years. They even had an all-black team called ‘Stan’s Men’ in Soweto in South Africa, which was unheard of in the days of apartheid. I even took them to play matches in Brazil. The South African government didn’t dare to stop us because of the publicity my name would have generated.

  Was there anything he regretted? ‘I’m still ashamed that we gave a Nazi salute in Berlin before playing Germany in 1938. The England team was ordered to do that by the Football Association.’ He had many stories that reflected badly on the game’s administrators. He said he was once the subject of an FA inquiry because he charged sixpence on his expenses for a scone and a cup of tea.

  He said he despised the FA officials who denied a request from him and Tom Finney to stay on in Brazil to watch the World Cup after England had been eliminated in 1950. ‘Tom and I were fascinated by the way the South Americans, in particular, were playing the game, their astonishing skills and tactics. They had so much to teach us. But the blazers said they could teach us nothing – after all, England had invented the game!’

  Once, when he was already an England international, he knocked on the chairman’s door at Stoke to ask for an increase on the basic wage of a few pounds in winter and even less in the summer. ‘When I got no response I knocked again. Still no answer, so I tapped on the door and walked in. The chairman said: “Matthews, who invited you in? You can stand outside until I’m ready.” That was the kind of attitude you faced in those days.’ He told me that in the early days he had to perform with his brother as a touring music hall act to make ends meet in the summer.

  Was he proud to have played as long as he did?

  As a matter of fact, I could have played a couple of seasons longer. I called it a day because I was taking more and more time to get over minor knocks and niggles, but I regretted that decision afterwards. I actually played my last game of competitive football at the age of seventy, you know. It was a charity match in Brazil and some of their World Cup winners were on the other side – people like Amarildo, Tostão and Jairzinho.

  • • •

  Stanley’s last league game was against a Fulham team containing Johnny Haynes, the star of the next generation. Even though Haynes was born in 1934, the year Matthews won his first international cap, they played together for England several times in the 1950s. Funnily enough (a phrase much favoured by my father), I got to know Haynes as well some years later when I moved to Majorca. A fan of his made a flat available to him and his wife on the seafront at Puerto Pollença every year at the same rent he had paid twenty years before.

  We were introduced by a mutual friend and Johnny would come to our house and sit chatting by the pool. Again, I was able to indulge my unquenchable appetite for hero worship. I asked him if there was anything he regretted missing when he saw the game today. ‘I don’t envy them the money,’ he said (he was the highest-paid player of his day, the first £100-a-week footballer). ‘But I envy them two things: key-hole laser surgery’ – his career never recovered from leg injuries suffered in a car crash in South Africa – ‘and grass pitches prepared like lawns. I had to play on mud patches.’

  I’m sure Stanley would have agreed with him on both counts. It’s amazing to recall how much these great maestros of the art of passing a football managed to achieve in such terrible conditions. I have a vivid memory of Johnny cycling along Puerto Pollença’s famous Pine Path to join me for a coffee and leaning his bike against a tree. A few weeks later he collapsed while driving his car and died in the resulting crash.

  • • •

  Stanley was visibly embarrassed when I quoted some lines about him from a poem by Alan Ross:

  Horseless, though jockey-like and jaunty…

  Expressionless enchanter, weaving as on strings

  Conceptual patterns to a private music,

  Heard only by him, to whose slowly emerging theme

  He rehearses steps, soloist in compulsions of a dream.

  He claimed that he didn’t know the poem (though I found that hard to believe) and asked me to send him a copy.

  I actually gave him a copy of a book of Alan Ross’s writings on sport, containing the poem entitled ‘Stanley Matthews’, when he invited me to his eightieth birthday party in Stoke-on-Trent. I was thrilled to receive the invitation and even more thrilled to find myself seated next to the legendary Tom Finney, who had so often played on the opposite wing to Matthews for England.

  Finney was a delightful man, extremely modest and polite, who had worked as a plumber even while playing as one of England’s greatest ever forwards. There were several of Stanley’s former teammates from Stoke and Blackpool at our table and there was much laughter when someone said: ‘Stan always counted the pennies.’ I was reminded of Len Hutton, about whom the same used to be said, but then both were superstars in their sports when wages were closely controlled.

  When I asked Finney about the modern game, he said he liked Marc Overmars, a Dutch winger then playing for Arsenal. ‘He reminds me of me a bit, the way he takes the ball down the wing, then leaves the defence guessing whether he’s going to cross the ball, run on to the byline or cut inside and have a shot at goal. I was like that.’

  It was a magical evening, full of nostalgia and affection for a great man from friends who had known him for over half a century. When Matthews died five years later, 100,000 people lined the streets of Stoke-on-Trent, where a statue (in fact, two statues, one at Hanley) was built in his memory.

  I was among the crowd of mourners, watching as people stopped working or shopping and children stopped playing in the street, men removing their headgear in respect as the cortege passed by. I feel greatly privileged to have known Stanley Matthews, even briefly, as a friend.

  CHAPTER 19

  GARRY

  How I ever got involved in ghosting Garry Kasparov’s autobiography I can’t imagine. I hardly knew the moves on a chessboard when the world champion asked me to write the story of his dramatic life. My name must have been advanced by the publisher, because I had recently delivered another ghosted book – on Dennis Taylor, the world champion s
nooker player – to the same publisher. What had impressed them was that I had written that book in ten days. But moving from snooker to chess required a substantial change-up to a higher gear. Kasparov could reasonably claim to have one of the highest IQs in the universe; Dennis, with all respect to a lovely man, could not.

  I had already written a book of my own on snooker, having followed the circuit for most of the season that culminated in the epic battle between Taylor, the man famed for his big glasses, and Steve Davis, until then the world champion. Taylor came from eight frames down to win by potting the final black in the thirty-fifth and final frame, having trailed for the entire match until that last shot. I had observed the match from a ringside seat. Eighteen million people had watched it into the early hours on television, a record at the time.

  I got a call afterwards from Barry Hearn (the ‘H’, they say, is silent), the flamboyant sports entrepreneur, who was manager of both players – what you might call a win-win situation. ‘Hey, Donald,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a contract for a book by Dennis now that he’s world champion. The trouble is he can hardly read a book, never mind write one. Will you do it for him?’

  ‘Barry,’ I replied loftily. ‘I’m the editor of a serious newspaper. Writing my own book on snooker was one thing, but I can’t be seen ghosting a snooker player’s book. That’s a hack’s job.’

  After a pause, Barry asked: ‘How much did they pay for you for that snooker book?’

  When I told him, he said: ‘I’ll double it.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go this far. I’m off on holiday to Guernsey soon for three weeks. If Dennis can provide me with every cuttings book he’s got about his career, and if I can meet him in Blackburn’ – where he lived – ‘and also in Coalisland, County Tyrone – (where he was born and brought up) – then I’ll have a go. But if it doesn’t work, then I’ll back out. I’ll know by the end of the three weeks if it’s a runner or not. I won’t sign anything until then.’