I was taught a lesson by old master Bill Shankly’s wit
Jul 2 2008
Former Liverpool Daily Post journalist Brian Reade’s book 43 Years With The Same Bird: A Liverpudlian Love Affair is already top of the Amazon mail order bestsellers list – and it is not even published until this Friday, July 4. Here, however, Daily Post readers can have a preview of what they can expect.
BILL SHANKLY’S bare manhood stood three feet away from me. OK, stood is an exaggeration.
We were getting on well but not that well.
Slacks with a crease that could shave a werewolf’s four-day shadow had been removed with military precision and were being placed on a dressing room hook with his left hand. In his right was a pair of black crumpled shorts so old you could smell the boot room on them.
And the shorts, which made their way to the expectant toes of his left foot were abruptly pulled away.
“A rugby school?”
“No football.”
Relief. Then animation.
“Thank Christ for that. I hate rugby, I remember in the air force turning up at a new post in Wales and asking for a football. This officer says to me we don’t play football here only rugby. So I says right give us a rugby ball and I’ll squeeze intee a fitball.”
I join in the laughter and he knocks me on the arm and says for a third time: “I’ll squeeze it intee a fitball. Christ, it’s funny what things come back to you. I’d forgotten all about that.”
Let’s get this straight here. I should be at school battling to stay awake through double economics. Instead I’m joshing away with Bill Shankly at Melwood like a groom and his best man preparing to rip up the town on a stag night. Goolies on parade and everything. I’ve been in his company for five minutes and he’s already told me a story nobody has ever head before. Granted, in the league table of Shankly anecdotes it’s six points behind Stenhousemuir. But it’s mine, and mine alone, to drop casually into conversations for eternity As this dawns on me a shiver jolts the blood.
Fearing the joshing will stop, I tap dance through the silence like a rhino in AirWair.
“And did you?”
“What?”
“Squeeze it into a football?”
He tugs on the shorts, stands bolt upright, hands, hips and eyes snapping into Cagney mode, the wrinkles on his forehead contorting into a map of the Alps.
“This De La Salle, son, did you say it was special school?”
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