John White to be remembered by Ex-Tottenham stars

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One of the heroes of Tottenham Hotspur’s all-conquering side of the early 1960s will be remembered in a special memorial game featuring the Spurs Legends team on May 18. The official Spurs Legends team, which tours the UK regularly to help raise funds for worthy causes, is set to take on FC ScotSpurs, a dedicated team of Scottish fans of Tottenham, in a memorial match for John. Guesting in the FC ScotSpurs side will also be Flav, Charlie Marks, and [...]

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Hi folks,

Really pleased to see this getting some attention.

I've been working on this game for ages and for it now to be only a week ago is equally scary and exciting.

Hopefully we will get a great turn out on the day.
 
My dad John White, the Spurs legend

Footballer John White was killed by lightning in 1964, aged 27, leaving behind a widow, two children and a legacy of match moments. His son Rob has been trying to build a sense of the father he knew only from other people's memories
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In search of the Ghost of White Hart Lane ... Rob White with his mother, Sandra and sister Mandy. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
There's an old black and white photograph on my wall at home of several players of the 1962 Tottenham Hotspur team holding up the FA Cup at Wembley. It's signed by all the players except one, and it's one of my most precious pieces of football memorabilia. There are similar photos in Rob White's home. His, too, are unsigned by the same player. Only it's rather more poignant for him, because the player in the photograph is his father.

John White was a Spurs and Scotland legend. He was a key member of the Spurs team that won the league and FA Cup double in 1961, the FA Cup the following year, the European Cup Winners cup the year after and was capped 22 times for Scotland. Yet in many ways all these achievements have been overshadowed by the suddenness of his death. At the age of 27, with much of his career still ahead of him, he was killed by lightning while out playing golf in July 1964. He left a widow, Sandra, a two-year-old daughter, Mandy, and Rob, aged six months.

If you are old enough, John's death is a footballing JFK moment: you can still remember exactly what you were doing when you heard the news. Rob and Mandy were far too young for any such memories; their only experience of their father is his absence. And by the time they were old enough to understand who he was, they had learned not to talk about him. "We both intuitively felt it would be too upsetting for Mum," says Rob.

Sandra went into shock and closed down when John died. "I was a 22-year-old widow with two kids," she says. "I didn't really know what had hit me. I just felt completely on my own. In the early 1960s, footballers didn't really show how they felt; Bill Nicholson [the manager] came round once, and that was it. It was as if John's death was an embarrassment."
Rob and Mandy remember the few weeks they spent each year with John's family in Scotland as their happiest. "There was no pressure on us there," Mandy says. "I don't know if Mum felt in some way closer to Dad when she was around his brothers or if it was just the release of being far away from London; whichever it was, it was the only time we really relaxed together."

Back home in London, the children retreated into themselves. For Mandy, that journey was rather more straightforward. "None of Dad's friends paid me too much attention, so I was left to grieve in my own way in private," she says. "I was a girl and no one had any expectations of me as my father's daughter. No one ever thought of taking me to matches, and I grew up thinking football was a stupid game. It's only comparatively recently that I've come to enjoy it."
Things were more complicated for Rob. If it's bad enough for a child to lose a father so young, it's even worse when your father is someone so well-known and loved by others. "I grew up with a strange emptiness," he says. "There were all these thousands of people out there who seemed to have much more of a relationship with Dad than I did.
"I can clearly remember the first time I actually saw my Dad moving. It was a fleeting piece of newsreel footage from the Spurs v Leicester 1961 cup final shown during the build-up to the 1973 cup final. I felt an instant connection and it was just about the first time I really felt he was part of me and I was part of him."

Mostly, though, Rob had to live with the legend rather than the father. From time to time, friends – and sometimes strangers – would tell him how brilliant his father was and how proud he must be of this man he had never met, but even when people said nothing he felt under scrutiny. There was never any getting away from the fact that he was the son of the footballer who was killed by lightning.
His response was to keep a low profile by never mentioning his father in public, but he couldn't avoid the insecurity. When his school sent him to try out for the Middlesex Under-15s team, he wasn't sure if he had been chosen because he was good at football or because his father had been. Even as an adult he generally chose anonymity, pursuing a career in photography: when the club recently asked him to represent his father as one of the double winners by coming on to the pitch at White Hart Lane during the half-time interval, the season ticket holders who had been sitting next to him for years were amazed. They didn't know who he was.

They do now, and so will everyone else, for Rob has chosen to go public in his search of his father in The Ghost of White Hart Lane – John's nickname was The Ghost, a reference to his football skills. "It's something I've wanted to do for a while," he says. "It was partly to make sure my father's genius was properly remembered, but mostly because I wanted to understand what kind of man he really was. I'd had enough of the Goldenballs legend – the man against whom no one could say a word because of the way and age at which he died. I wanted a sense of the real him.
"I've got two daughters – Elsie and Martha – and it's sometimes hard to know what a father is supposed to do, because I've never really had one. All I'm aware of is what I've missed out on: the man who could have shown me how to be a man, the man I could have loved, the man with whom I could have got angry, the man who would have forgiven me. So I needed to wait until I was secure enough in myself, so that I could cope with whatever I found out."

Often the search was elusive. There was precious little left of John's physical presence after his death. "Everyone wanted something to remember John by," says Sandra, "and it felt as if the house had been cleaned out by the time the last person had left after the funeral. Even his tools had gone from the garage. It was as though the place had been burgled."
Some items have come back. Rob has a pair of his father's old size seven boots and one of his Scotland shirts. Handling them makes me feel guilty for the pleasure they give me to touch. For, instantly, I feel a strong physical connection with the unsigned figure in my own photo, a sense of reclaiming Rob's past for my own: the very thing he's spent a lifetime trying to get away from. "Don't worry," he says, laughing. "I can cope now."

Besides, it's the memories that count, often those of other people, though these too are up for grabs. "One of the loveliest things in the course of writing the book was going to see one of my dad's old team mates, Terry Medwin," says Rob. He started crying when he saw me. He said it was like looking at John."
There were other gold-dust moments. "It's odd but the things that made me feel closest to him were those where he was less than perfect," Rob says. "The fact that he once drove home completely drunk. The fact that he might have got another girl in Scotland pregnant before he met my mum. It's weird to think I might have a half-brother somewhere, but it's kind of nice to think Dad was capable of fucking things up as well. It makes me feel a lot less guilty about the things I've messed up in my own life."
One thing that Rob never did discover was what had happened to his father's body. For years, the family version had been that John's ashes had been scattered at White Hart Lane immediately after the cremation. But then Rob realised no one is given the deceased's ashes straight away. Sandra can't remember what happened to them – she seems almost embarrassed that she was in such shock that she she has blanked out all memories. But these things happen. For a while the destination of John's physical remains threatened to become all-consuming.

"Then something clicked," he says. "I realised it didn't really matter where he was; the uncertainty was part of his story. I'd found enough of him. Because in looking for him, I had refound our family.
"For almost the first time ever, Mum, Mandy and I were able to talk honestly to one another about how we felt and what he meant to us. We're closer now than we've ever been."

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RIP
 
Just found this link too:
John White and the day the sky fell in at Tottenham

I know it's two years old now, but it's a compelling , and heart wrenching read written by his son, about arguably one of Tottenham's best ever players, literally struck down in his prime.

If anyone hadn't seen the article before, here it is in full. (if you didn't wanna clink on the link!)

John White and the day the sky fell in at Tottenham
World Soccer July 27, 2014

The sad, but heartwarming story of John White, who was killed by lightning 50 years ago, but who is still fondly remembered by the Spurs faithful.

North London, July 21, 1964. That first day of Spurs pre-season training was a casual, almost disorganised affair: team photos at White Hart Lane, Dave Mackay running up and down the terraces to rebuild his broken leg, the schoolboys and girls waiting outside the gates to grab a word with their heroes. After training my dad played tennis with Terry Medwin in the indoor ball court, because he always had enough energy left to power a small town, and Terry needed help with his injury rehab. While all that was going on Cliff Jones, Dad’s accomplice in many a prank, drove off with his trousers.

Dad was planning on a game of golf but had to drive home first to collect a new pair. The sky turned black, he had no one to partner him, but he still went ahead. It was all part of a chain of causes leading to something that would normally be preposterously unlikely; a thunderstorm that left my mum widowed at 21 with two kids under two, and the future of Spurs fragmented like a plane falling apart in the air. He had been an essential part of Bill Nicholson’s all-conquering Double-winning side; now Danny Blanchflower was at the end of his playing days and Bill had just told my dad that he was going to build the new Spurs round him. That stormy midsummer afternoon has always been one of the great turning points of the club’s history.

This week it’s the 50th anniversary of that day. In a gallows humour frame of mind, you could call the freakish way John White died, playing golf on his own at Crews Hill, sheltering from the storm under a tree and killed by a bolt of lightning, the ultimate Spursy way to exit this planet.

And then there’s the irony. The fact that my dad’s nickname was the Ghost. Why the Ghost? Because of how he looked – pale and insubstantial. Because of how he played. He was elusive. He knew what was going to happen before everyone else. You’d think you had him in your sights and then you looked again and, whoosh, he’d vanished. Just like a ghost. He was a futuristic kind of player that the fans barely appreciated at first, because they couldn’t see what he was doing. Nor could defenders. He was impossible to man-mark.

I was just five months old when it happened, and it’s always been one of those immense frustrations, that I was around but too young to know anything about him, to have seen him play, to have witnessed his unique talent for myself, not just avidly consumed brief clips from Pathe News. But I know from what people have told me and from the many words written about him that he was modest, generous, dedicated, mischievous and likeable. And he had an irrepressible joy in life. People who knew him, when they talk of him they smile.

When I was growing up I often had this sort of weird sense that my dad was still with me, someone to be asked in spirit what I should do about something. Part of growing older has been that I don’t need that security blanket any more. Since I wrote about him in The Ghost of White Hart Lane, I’ve felt his presence less, and I’ve been thinking that maybe that book did literally lay The Ghost. But there’s still the occasional nudge from him that he’s around – the part of him that played practical jokes, the jester who specialized in weird serendipitous happenings.

This, for instance. While I was working on my book, I went to Gullane in Scotland – the country of Dad’s birth – for an early round of golf on my own. The receptionist asked for my mobile number and I asked her why. ‘It’s just in case there’s some sort of emergency,’ she said. ‘Like, say, you were struck by lightning.’ There’s no answer to that.

And this. A couple of years back, we arranged for a memorial plaque to be set up for him at Crews Hill. They sent me the wording they were about to get engraved:

In Memory of The Ghost of White Hart Lane

John Anderson White, 1937-1964

Struck by lighting, whilst playing this hole
Spurs and Scotland
All glory comes from daring to begin.

Struck by lighting. I spotted it in time to get it changed. But he would have loved that, the image of death by standard lamp.

Alloa was my dad’s first pro team and now and then when I go and see my family in Musselburgh (John’s older brother Eddie, and his kid sister Janette still live there) I pay the club a visit. I like it there. Though it has obviously changed since 1956 it hasn’t undergone the massive transformation of Falkirk, where the old Brockville stadium is now a supermarket and car park. White Hart Lane is hardly recognizable from the days when Dad played there. But at Alloa I’m looking more or less at what he would have seen – one end where a goods train goes past, a stand with no roof and crumbling, old-fashioned steps, the Ochil hills in the distance. It’s comforting, looking at it, and sometimes I think we carry inside us the imprint of sights and sounds experienced by our forebears. Somewhere like that would have been a real fond place for my dad and I’ve kept a bit of that fondness somewhere in my heart.

It’s run by football people who are totally passionate about the game in a way that is completely the opposite of the modern plc mindset. They haven’t got much but they’ll give the fans what they’ve got. The Scottishness of the whole thing, the humour, the hospitality, really resonates deeply with me.

In March I was there for Alloa v Falkirk. My dad’s two Scottish clubs, both now in the Championship. Alloa were on a bad run, Falkirk pushing for promotion. Alloa won 3-0. It was the game that kept them up. And I met Lawrie, a guy around my age whose dad grew up five doors up from the White boys in Links Street, Musselburgh. He’d brought along an older cousin who had vague memories of John, Eddie and Tommy.

I’m just chatting away to him at the bar and I say, ‘What do you do for a living?’

He gives me a strange look and says, ‘I knew this was going to come up and I’ve been dreading telling you. Basically I fit lightning conductors.’

I was going to end this article there, suddenly, which I guess is a bit like Dad’s life. But it would be a shame to leave it like that. John White was part of the golden generation of Scotland players, and part of the best midfield of the twentieth century. He cost Spurs £20,000 from Falkirk in 1959, and you have to wonder what he’d be valued at this summer if Real came calling for him to join Modric and Bale. Would I have liked him as a modern player? Wouldn’t everybody? I’m massively biased, of course, but I don’t even think of him as modern. He’s timeless – a Cruyff, a Best, a Pele, the one you build a side around, not a component but a complete original, unrepeatable, irreplaceable. There should be a White in that pantheon but there isn’t because he was stolen, just turned 27, on the brink of reaching his prime.

It’s easy to put a dead person on a pedestal, just to console yourself for their being dead, but 50 years on my dad remains held in such high esteem that when his name comes up grown men and women still get a wistful look in their eye. And when his image is shown on the White Hart Lane Jumbotron 35,000 people, most of whom weren’t born when he played, stand up and cheer John White, the Ghost, to the skies.

By Rob White

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John White (front, 2nd left) with Tottenham's 1961 double winning side.


Just wonderful.
 
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