Tottenham and Chelsea legend Jimmy Greaves was one of a kind

JIMMY GREAVES was almost as gifted a storyteller as he was a footballer.

His wife Irene will tell you that, when his ten grandchildren were young, he’d spin them all sorts of yarns.

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“Grandad was once a cowboy who fought at the Alamo,” he’d tell them, or “Grandad was an astronaut who flew a rocket ship to the moon.”

The grandkids would lap it up, nodding their heads, eyes wide, mouths agog.

The problem was, when they got a little older and were told that their Grandad had been by far and away the greatest goalscorer England had ever seen, they struggled to believe it.

That was the story he never told them, one they gradually pieced together for themselves.

This week there’s a new biography out ‘Natural — The Jimmy Greaves Story’ by David Tossell, and it is a tale well worth telling.

The book arrives just as Tottenham finally move into their new stadium tomorrow night — and that’s a happy coincidence for the publishers, given that nobody could possibly have planned it that way.

Greaves is, by a distance, Spurs’ all-time leading scorer with 266 goals, yet his scoring ratio was even more prolific before that, in a Chelsea team he often described as ‘crap’.

We often talk as if English football was invented in 1992 when the Premier League started.

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But while Alan Shearer is out on his own with 260 goals in the modern era, Greaves netted a staggering 357 times in English top-flight football, despite retiring aged 31.

Until two years ago he was the leading all-time scorer in the history of Europe’s top five leagues.

Two men have overtaken Greaves since then — Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. As a goalscorer, they are his only peers.
But that isn’t even half the story.

Greaves’s rich tapestry involves an ill-fated move to AC Milan, missing out on the 1966 World Cup Final through injury and being bombed by Tottenham after four top-flight ‘golden boots’ in eight seasons.

Then came a round-the-world rally, a descent into alcoholism and Greaves’s triumphant reinvention as one of the nation’s best-loved TV presenters.

Greaves has put his name to six ghost-wrtitten autobiographies, of various slants and standards.

But as Tossell correctly says, self-analysis — and certainly self-praise — are not among the man’s many qualities.

He always insisted that he had no idea how he was quite so good at what he did.

That title ‘Natural’ sums him up as a footballer and a talker. I had the ridiculously-great privilege of ghostwriting Jim’s newspaper column, which meant that for five years, I’d spend about an hour and a half each week on the phone with him.

The column took 20 minutes, the rest was just shooting the breeze with one of the warmest, funniest and most engaging people you could ever meet.

And all the while enriching my love of football with his first-hand accounts of so many greats, from Pele to Lev Yashin, from George Best to Bobby Moore and Stanley Matthews — names from history books described as flesh-and-blood mates.

It is fair to say Jim was always much better at analysing human beings than football matches.

In his book, Tossell tells us how Greaves was identified for a TV career thanks to a 1980 documentary, Just For Today, during which he spoke to camera, at length and with great clarity, about his battle with alcoholism. That would have been during his second year on the wagon.

More than 30 sober years later, he was telling me that the disease was still as real a part of his daily life as a one-legged man having to screw a prosthetic limb on each morning.

Thankfully, of late, it is becoming ever more common for men to discuss their struggles with addiction.

Forty years ago, it was extremely rare. Greaves’s honesty would have had a huge impact on many in an age of just three TV channels and countless emotionally-repressed men struggling to cope with their own drinking.

It was little wonder he’d become so well loved over the next 15 years, especially for the Saint & Greavsie show with Ian St John.

I’ve been banging of years about the scandal of Greaves never having been recognised in Britain’s honours system. And the release of Tossell’s book — just a week after Greaves’s great successor as Tottenham’s goal machine, Harry Kane received an MBE — has brought welcome extra volume to that argument.

His son Danny admitted this week, any such gong would almost be too late, for the man himself.

Greaves suffered a devastating stroke almost five years ago which robbed him of his mobility, and much of his personality.

Now aged 79, his great human qualities are dimmed, though not completely lost. He still understands but finds conversation difficult.

He will know Tottenham are moving into a new stadium and despite his many years of sadness about their decision to sell him in 1970, he’ll doubtless wish them well.

When the new stadium is named and they start to christen parts of it after former greats, Jimmy Greaves will surely be at the top of the list.

The best years of his life are gone now but what a life, what a footballer — and what an absolute diamond of a bloke.

• Natural — The Jimmy Greaves Story is out now, published by Pitch Publishing Ltd, priced £19.99.

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