Heroes and Humanity
Originally published in The Blizzard, Mike Calvin penned this piece about the late, great Bill Shankly, and the lessons his later years taught us about the heartlessness of football.
I was a novice writer, on a dream assignment, interviewing Bill Shankly. So why, then, was it a faintly troubling experience? Why did he appear diminished? He was 68, exercised daily and neither drank nor smoked. His olivegreen suit might have drawn the colour from his face, but there were hints of the virility he exuded at in his prime.
I knew of his compulsive generosity to Liverpool fans in retirement, the invitations to tea at his semi-detached house near Everton’s training ground, and kickarounds with local kids, but there was something missing. His spirit. It took years for me to appreciate the impact of his isolation from his legend and the setting of his achievements.
He passed away later that year, on 29 September 1981, from a second heart attack in the space of three days. A city mourned, a game grieved and a nation pined for the simplicity of his example. But did it learn from the callousness football showed to one of its own in the final years of his life? Events suggest not.
We will never reclaim the innocence associated with the first time I saw Shankly in the flesh, as a ballboy for Watford’s FA Cup quarter-final win over Liverpool on 21 February 1970. That defeat prompted him belatedly to break up his first great team, which had dominated the mid-sixties, winning the league twice and the FA Cup once, in 1965.
“I had a duty to perform for myself, my family, Liverpool Football Club and the supporters,” he said. Roger Hunt, a World Cup-winner, was eased out, along with his totemic captain, Ron Yeats, and Ian St John. A new generation, featuring the likes of Emlyn Hughes, Ray Clemence, Steve Heighway, John Toshack and Kevin Keegan, won the Uefa Cup within three years.
His philosophy blended the power of his personality with political principles that meant so much to me, brought up to respect benevolent socialism in a closely-knit working-class family. Shankly’s playbook was drawn underground, working in the Scottish mining industry that has vanished, along with Glenbuck, the pit village in which he was born.
I loved his invocation of team spirit as “a form of socialism”. He spoke compellingly, of camaraderie and the potency of the collective: “I am not a militant man. I’m not talking about politics in the true sense of politics. I’m talking life. I’m talking about humanity, people dealing with people and people helping people.”
That fateful FA Cup tie at Vicarage Road is a time capsule, offering social and sporting insight. The commemorative edition of the Watford Observer, a newspaper I would join after abandoning my A levels at the local Grammar School, breathlessly informed fans that “Shankly had a million pounds to pick from.”
Watford’s struggling Second Division team was valued at £30,500. First prize in the Golden Goal competition was £20, and the club paid forelock-tugging homage to ‘‘The Worshipful The Mayor," for donating the match ball. An advertisement offered a “low-cost luxury” bathroom suite for £55.
The tie was duly condensed into cliché. Watford was “the club with a yen for a place in the sun”. Shankly was “a man for all seasons”. The editorial in the programme implored fans “‘to show Liverpool we have a Kop”. The crowd, glimpsed through a half-opened frosted fanlight in the ballboys’ changing room, felt weighty with excitement.
Keith Furphy, the manager’s son, got the plum job operating behind the goal at the Rookery End, and would be picked up by the television cameras, dancing like a demented urchin when Barry Endean, a striker plucked from a pub team, scored the winner.
I was positioned in front of a low-roofed stand, an eyesore which adjoined the hospital in which my mum worked as an auxiliary nurse. On shift when Gareth Southgate was born there later that year, she passed on the good news to his Uncle Mick, who lived at the end of our road.
Look hard and you will see me play a key role in the only goal of the game, in the 64th minute. I collected the ball in front of a sign advertising Double Diamond (the slogan “Works Wonders” now seems particularly apt) and quickly tossed it to £7,000 signing Ray Lugg. He took a short throw to the winger Stewart Scullion and moved into space to receive the return pass.
In a flash of virtuosity out of keeping with his status, and that of a pitch which had the consistency of bread mix, Lugg nutmegged Peter Wall, the covering full-back, and delivered an outswinging cross. Endean timed his run perfectly, left the ground with the grace of a Lancaster bomber, and met it with a diving header.
Once I had returned to earth, I looked around and marvelled at the spectacle. Fans on a narrow ledge were clinging to the outside of the stand with one hand, while using the other to initiate joyous free-form semaphore. Watching strangers lost in the moment was oddly life-affirming and enduringly influential. Even at the age of 12, I wanted this to be my workplace.
I couldn’t resist asking Shankly about that match a decade or so later. “A bitter day, son. Bitter,” he answered in that familiar Ayrshire drawl, which pulled words and emotions along like a locomotive towing coal trucks on a narrow-gauge railway. The album he was promoting, autographed in two pens (mortifyingly, the first one, blue, ran out after the first word of his message), has become a treasured memento.
It acts as an oral history since he brings the ghosts and the greats of the game to life in staccato sentences. His summary of his 16-year playing career, as a right-half for Preston North End either side of the Second World War, is memorably succinct: “I was hard, like steel. I had the will.”
His eulogy for Tom Finney, in his estimation the greatest player he had seen, built to a crescendo: “About five seven, five seven and a half, eleven stone. Sturdy-legged. Strong calves. They gave him natural lift and he was good in the air. Left-footed, quick, elusive. His close control was unbelievable. He could attack you from the front, facing you, and run past you. Just shake himself and be gone. Like all the great players he had a great awareness, not only of his ability, but your ability too.”
Raich Carter would “have scored a hundred goals a season” had he had been in the same team as Finney. He “leathered the ball into the net.” Alfredo Di Stéfano was “a magnificent man”. Other Real Madrid legends, Raymond Kopa and Paco Gento, were “more showy and flashy, more twisty and turny. They seemed to be in a bigger hurry than Tommy. He was more composed.”
Shankly was at Wembley to watch the end of empire when England were beaten 6-3 by Hungary in 1953. His recollection is forensically precise to the point of being focused on a single pass, from Ferenc Puskás to Nándor Hidegkuti, the deep lying centre-forward whose movement into midfield exploited the inflexibility of the self-proclaimed masters: “I was glad I was there because I remember the ball. I could see the markings on the ball as he was hitting it. It was propelling. As it was reaching its target, it was spinning like Jack Nicklaus had hit a golf ball, you know? You could see it reverse itself.
When it reached Hidegkuti, it was slowing down, ready to control…”
Shankly watched a training session at Melwood before Panathinaikos, managed by Puskás, beat Everton on away goals in the last eight, on the way to the European Cup final in 1971. His evocation of a finishing drill, from a central position on the edge of the 18-yard box, is tinged with awe: “He hit it, left-footed, a foot inside the post twelve 12 times in succession. He’d long finished playing, and he lashed it, a few inches above the grass.”
Shankly suggested Pelé “ranks amongst them all. Not only could he play but he was as strong as an ox. He was a light heavyweight. Bone and muscle. He could run like a gazelle, like Eusébio, who was taller and quicker.” Jimmy Greaves “was a [Wilf] Mannion, a [Peter] Doherty, a Len Shackleton, blessed with confidence”. Denis Law was “brilliant in the air, good with his feet, quicker in the box than the rest of them because he didn’t carry any weight”.
His summary had a raw lyricism: “Every player should be taught what to do, in every situation. If the goalkeeper stays, do something. If he comes out, do something else. If the goalkeeper stayed, Jimmy would take it to him, sidestep him, angle himself and put it into the empty net. Thanks very much. Law and Greaves and Doherty: they knew what to do. The things that these men knew…”
The things Bill Shankly knew. He was betrayed by football, but reminds us, from the grave, of its fundamental humanity. Cut your heroes, and they bleed.
Mike Calvin (@CalvinBook)
This article comes to you from The Blizzard, who recently released their 50th Issue - containing 50 articles from 50 writers writing about a football moment that is special to them, including Miguel Delaney, Shaul Adar, Elis James, Cecilia Lagos, Rob Smyth, and Gunnar Persson.
Pick up your copy here: https://theblizzard.co.uk/shop/issues/issue-fifty/