Beware meeting your heroes
Meeting your heroes can destory long-cherished assumptions. Just ask Dougal - he'll tell you.
Wind the clock back to 1977; I'm nine years old and I'm huddled under the bed clothes in a clandestine tryst with our kid's transistor radio. Everton are playing West Ham Utd in the FA Cup semi final at Elland Road and we're one nil down in extra time.
I should be asleep, of course - there were nuns to contend with in our convent school and they didn't take kindly to bleary eyes. "Paver, yer little gobshite, open yer feckin' eyes or I'll t'rash the life out o' yer". Then a belt round the head, to be sure.
Anyhow, Billy Wright's driven cross screams across the penalty area and Bob Latchford, a powerful six footer, gets down low, quick as a flash, to arrow a header in to the opposite corner. Cue pandomonium - and not a little cheer from under my blanket.
Bob Latchford: a sporting giant. My hero. A complete footballer. A blue. He walked on water - they said so, in the Street End and we sang as much in the convent yard. (The nuns said that was blasphemous and made us say a novena to St. Jude. I couldn't have cared less).
I cried myself to sleep that night because Billy Bond, the shaggy-haired cockney oik, screamed straight up the other end and scored the winner. No Wembley for us and a broken heart for me, never mind poor Bob Latchford.
Some 25 years later I met my sporting hero. I shouldn't have.
On the plus side, Latchford looked slimmer and younger than when he graced Goodison. If I'm in half that condition when I'm 50 I'll be more than happy.
But - and I must pick my words carefully here - it's fair to say that Mr Latchford's handling of a simple audience Q&A session wasn't indicative of a man with a generous dose of grey matter. It was painful to watch and somehow diminished him.
It shouldn't have, of course: he wasn't employed because of his ground-breaking doctoral thesis on latent nuclear energy in granite. We just needed him to score goals, and he did that in abundance - 138 in 289 appearances, in fact. But I still somehow came away thinking less of the man (and I'm ashamed of myself for that).
And so it is that I fast forward to this Thursday's Echo & The Bunnymen gig at the Echo Arena, Liverpool. The men who penned the seminal album of the mid-eighties - Ocean Rain - are playing it in full, with orchestra, to 11,500 hard core afficionados, ten of whom are Paver Smith friends and clients.
The point is that we've blagged an invite to the legendary Mac McCullough's after-show party and I don't want to go. Let's just call it the Latchford effect.
COMMENTS
Chris Hulme - Fri 28th Nov 2008
Met Mac in Circo after the show - he was chilled out and gracious and not the least bit disappointing
Martyn Best - Thu 27th Nov 2008
Dougal - and so you should be ashamed of yourself. I met Bob last year, and while I would agree his knowledge of latent nuclear energy in granite was not great - how's yours by the way - he was a very gracious, self effacing and generous fellow who signed umpteen items brought in by adoring fans, including a 1979 copy of shoot and a picture of "that perm". To me it raised him into a genuine warm human being who had carved out a life in Germany beyond football, and still had time to speak at our level, to his still adoring fans - everton's second highest all time goal scorer, behind Dixie Dean, as we both know. Now go and say a novena or two !
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