Jimmy Greaves

[trevo]

He was one of the main reasons I started supporting Spurs. I wish him and his family strength at this time.

 

[GosfordSpur]

He was one of the main reasons I started supporting Spurs. I wish him and his family strength at this time.

Like many others here, Jim was my boyhhood hero. Saw him score a hat-trick on his Spurs debut against Blackpool and was hooked. A magical genius.
Get well Jim, you're really loved

 

[Flashspur]

Boyhood hero. Very sad news. Thoughts are with him and his family. Get well soon Jimmy!

 

[riggi]

Did the club announce it at half time during the city game?

 

[riggi]

He's in our hospital in chelmsford. If anyone's local...

 

[littlewilly]

Words can't describe the feeling of watching Spurs with Greavsie in the team - it was just the most magical of times and nothing has since come close to the elation most of us felt in those halcyon days.

I was too, one of the privileged few who saw the greatest goal ever scored.

 

[Dharmabum]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...tml?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

*Mod note. Please don't post the entire article.

 

[ohtottenham!]

50 years ago, in infant's school, I became a Spurs fan because of Jimmy Greaves. Pure legend! He has helped shape this club and its identity forever.

 

[riggi]

West Ham drove him to drink, there's a surprise...

 

[TheBlueRooster]

Get well soon.

A recent Spursshow podcast - worth an hour to be with a remarkable man

Brilliant. Very funny and as always honest as the day is long.

 

[Spurger King]

A bit of an update:

A statement from Greaves's wife Irene read: "Jimmy is having to do what he is told and understands the seriousness of what has happened to him.

"He's in the best hands."

His agent Terry Baker confirmed Greaves is "conscious but unable to speak".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/32594079

 

[CosmicHotspur]

In for the long haul Jimmy... that HoF evening will happen, but later than planned.

Still with us though which is good but now the struggle begins.

 

[DaSpurs]

A bit of an update:

A statement from Greaves's wife Irene read: "Jimmy is having to do what he is told and understands the seriousness of what has happened to him.

"He's in the best hands."

His agent Terry Baker confirmed Greaves is "conscious but unable to speak".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/32594079

Thanks for the update.

That he "understands" what's going on around him and is only unable to speak is relatively good news. Means likely an isolated stroke of his Broca's area (speech), and as it did not affect Wernicke's area (speech comprehension), then we can likely rule out him having a more severe stroke to the bigger artery which would have also affected other areas which include movement and conscious reasoning. So still unfortunate and he may never speak again, but it's relatively good news nonetheless.

 

[Shea]

Very sad news - I'm happy to hear he is concious again and i hope that he will make a full recovery or as close to one once the nuroplastisity takes place to compensate for any necrosis that may have occurred

Unfortunately with strokes after the initial rapid progress seen once the inflammation clears is over any functional deficits left over can be much more difficult to over come

I'm happy to hear he's in good hands and is concious and responsive

I'm not even sure my dad has heard the news year - Greaves is beyond question my dad's all time favourite player and no doubt his boyhood hero (along with a few marvel comic characters perhaps)

His record and goal scoring ratio says it all, I never had the pleasure of seeing him play but you simply don't score that amount of goals in the amount of games he played for club and country without being a truly special player

All the best Jimmy - you're a true legend of the club in the real sense of the word not the all too commonly used bastardised version of the term legend now used to describe good players when it should be reserved for the all time greats...... LIKE JIMMY

 

[BuryMeInEngland]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...tml?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490

20 pints of beer a day and a bottle of vodka before bed: But Jimmy Greaves - who's clinging to life a stroke - shows up today's footballers as the pampered pygmies they are
By ROBERT HARDMAN FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 23:43 GMT, 4 May 2015 | UPDATED: 01:27 GMT, 5 May 2015




He remains one of the most successful and gifted footballers this country has ever produced.

Many of today’s multi-millionaire Premier League mediocrities would gladly swap their entire car collection and property portfolio for a fraction of his achievements — an unbeaten 357 goals in the top tier of the English game; 44 goals — including six hat-tricks — in 57 matches for his country; membership of the most successful England squad in history.

And yet the story of Jimmy Greaves always seems to be viewed through a prism of disappointment.

Here is a postwar soccer titan of whom people invariably ask: what if? Here is a sportsman whose 14 years at the very top of his profession are still eclipsed by two setbacks — his absence from the 1966 World Cup Final and his battle with the bottle.

Connoisseurs might liken his genius to that of current superstars such as Lionel Messi. More often than not, though, he finds himself compared to two of football’s famously thirsty flawed geniuses — George Best and Paul Gascoigne. As Greavsie himself might say (and usually did): ‘It’s a funny old game.’

Last night, however, the former England, Tottenham, Chelsea and West Ham striker was fighting for his life at the age of 75.

Earlier, his family had released a statement saying: ‘Football legend Jimmy Greaves suffered a severe stroke on Sunday, May 3, and is in intensive care in hospital. His wife Irene and four children have asked for privacy during what is a worrying time for the family.’

Messages of support and encouragement have been coming thick and fast from across the wider sporting community ever since.

The news came just ten days before what would have been a landmark both for Greaves and for the club where he enjoyed his greatest success. On May 13, he was finally due to be inducted into the Tottenham Hotspur Hall of Fame at a sellout ceremony. But the most striking thing about this event was that it had taken so long to organise.



For Greaves was not just a key Spurs player during a golden era for the North London club. He remains the greatest marksman in its history, with 220 league goals during his nine-year spell at White Hart Lane. On his watch, Spurs became the first English team ever to win a European trophy, the 1963 Cup Winners’ Cup.

Yet it is only now, 45 years after his departure from the club, that he is finally to receive this richly deserved accolade.

It is not down to any snub or oversight. It is because Greaves had no great appetite for these events. He didn’t want all the fuss.

Much as it may baffle football fans who assume that their heroes are every bit as obsessed with the game as they are, Greaves is not. In recent years, he admitted to the near-heresy of not enjoying football matches very much at all.

‘I don’t go to games, I never have,’ he added. ‘When I was young, I played all the time. I’ve never supported one team over another and I don’t apologise for that. I enjoy watching at home on TV.’

Indeed, he has admitted that he finds cricket and rugby just as interesting as his former profession.

‘I’ve got a lovely giant-screen HD TV, a lovely dog and a warm fire. That’s where I watch sport, including football, and it’s very nice. I’m not interested in driving in heavy traffic and enduring big crowds and being freezing cold. I love it on TV.’

In March, there were reports that Greaves had been invited to Wembley for the Capital One Cup Final, as it involved the two clubs with which he is most closely associated, Spurs and Chelsea. ‘I wouldn’t have gone if they did,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t invited.’

He wasn’t being an old misery-guts. He still loves the game itself and has spent many years doing speaker tours and writing books on the subject. He just couldn’t face another long slog around the North Circular to watch a match that was on the telly anyway.

Born in London’s East End just in time for the Blitz, James Peter Greaves should have been spotted by his local team, West Ham. Instead, he ended up on other side of the capital, playing in Chelsea’s youth squad.

Earning just £19 a week, he was quickly promoted to Chelsea’s first team and set a new club record of 124 First Division goals before being sold to AC Milan for £80,000 in 1961.




Greaves didn’t enjoy life in Italy and was back in England that same year, signed by Spurs for £99,999. The team’s manager, Bill Nicholson, knocked a pound off the deal to spare Greaves the burden of being branded ‘the world’s first £100,000 footballer’. And there he spent a very fruitful nine years, helping Spurs to European glory and two FA Cup victories.

At the same time, he was thumping them in for his country. In just one game, against Northern Ireland in 1963, he scored four goals in an 8-3 victory and another hat-trick against the same opposition a year later.

As England prepared to host the World Cup Finals in 1966, Greaves ensured his place in the squad with four goals in a 6-1 friendly against Norway. Selected for all three opening group matches, he was badly injured in the third.

‘A crunching tackle poleaxed me,’ he recalled in his autobiography. An opponent’s studs had dragged down his shin. Greaves’s sock was soaked in blood and he needed 14 stitches — meaning he was unavailable for the quarter-finals and semi-finals, his position taken by a precocious young talent called Geoff Hurst.

Though Greaves was fit in time for the final, England manager Alf Ramsey decided not to tamper with a winning formula. It was a decision with which few could argue after Hurst’s hat-trick secured the greatest victory in English footballing history.

For Greaves, a mere spectator, it was a bitter blow. How could it not be?




‘I danced around the pitch with everyone else,’ he wrote years later. ‘But I had missed out on the match of a lifetime and it hurt.’

There was further hurt in 1970 when Spurs sold Greaves to West Ham in a part-exchange, a move he regarded as something of a betrayal. And it was at West Ham, by his own admission, that his alcoholism began.

Some days he would go straight from training to the pub and stay for the rest of the day. It was a short-lived move. And after leaving West Ham in 1971, Greaves did not go near a football pitch — as player or spectator — for two years while his weight and alcohol consumption kept rising.

In due course he attempted to resurrect his career in non-league football at Brentwood, Chelmsford City and, most notably, Barnet. But for much of that period, life was a blur.

‘I lost the Seventies completely,’ he once said. ‘They passed me by. I was drunk from 1972 to 1977.

‘On occasions I would drink up to 20 pints of beer in the course of a day, go home, then drink a whole bottle of vodka before going to bed.

‘I couldn’t go without a drink. I used to put a bottle of vodka by my bed so I could have a few drinks as soon as I woke up. That stopped my hands shaking, steadied my nerves and set me up for another day of binge-drinking.’

By the end of the Seventies he was living in a one-bedroom flat and earning a living selling women’s jumpers.

Eventually, he realised he had to stop drinking — though he admitted ‘it wasn’t an overnight thing’. Near his flat was Warley mental hospital, where he spent five months of his last year of drinking in 1977.

He had married Irene when he was 18 and they had four children — the first, Jimmy junior, dying of pneumonia aged just four months.

The couple separated during the worst of his alcoholism. At one point, Irene had to sell her jewellery to keep the family home. She also sought power of attorney over some of Greaves’s business interests to stave off bankruptcy. She sued for divorce, but they were later reunited.

Having forsworn the booze in 1978, Greaves had turned a corner. In the Eighties he embarked on a new career as a pundit, with a national newspaper column and regular TV slots, often alongside fellow ex-pro Ian St John.




In 1985, the pair began a weekly ITV programme, Saint And Greavsie, which became required pre-match viewing for British fans. During the programme’s seven-year run, Greaves would often show an avuncular interest in a brilliant discovery at Newcastle United by the name of Paul Gascoigne. Years later, after a move to Spurs, ‘Gazza’ would endure a similar battle with drink. Could Greaves see a pattern repeating itself?


To his great credit, Greaves overcame his demons and has drunk nothing stronger than tea since 1978. In 2005, when discussing the similarities between his situation and that of Gascoigne and George Best, he dismissed any suggestion that they had all been driven to drink by the pressures of the game.

‘I think we missed football. I missed it,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the pressure of playing that made me start drinking heavily, it was the emptiness of not playing.’

With the advent of the shiny new Premier League, TV and football executives wanted a new breed of pundit — more technical, less folksy and irreverent. Greaves came from the era of cheeky chaps in camel coats earning little more than many of their fans. The new bosses wanted fresher, younger faces along with gizmos and crisp analysis.

Where's the pressure in earning £50,000 a week?
Greaves could not be relied on to talk up a lousy match, and had little sympathy for the prima donnas who had taken over his beloved game yet complained about the pressure.

In an interview ten years ago, he said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot see that earning fifty grand, a hundred grand a week, doing what you enjoy and can do naturally — I can’t see where the pressures are.’

Many people will applaud his plain-speaking, commonsense approach to a game which all too often seems to have parted company not only with its fans but with reality.

It also helps to explain Greaves’s attitude to his 1966 World Cup medal. He never received one in 1966 for the simple reason that they were given only to the 11 players on the Wembley pitch (and there were no substitutes in those days). Greaves didn’t complain. But in 2009, after a long campaign by fans (though not himself), he was finally given one.

Last year, he put it up for auction — as most of the 1966 squad had already done — and sold it at Sotheby’s for £44,000. Some fans were disappointed. Others reflected that Greaves should do as he wished. After all, this sum is what some of today’s players, with half his skill, expect to earn in a week or so.

Jimmy Greaves’s greatest achievement is that he remains the all-time top scorer in the top flight of English football, with 357 goals in 567 games.

And there is no medal for that.

Very good piece (unusually so for the Daily Mail). Jimmy beat his battle with booze and I hope he can beat this latest foe.

This part of the the article:
"Where's the pressure in earning £50,000 a week?
Greaves could not be relied on to talk up a lousy match, and had little sympathy for the prima donnas who had taken over his beloved game yet complained about the pressure.

In an interview ten years ago, he said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot see that earning fifty grand, a hundred grand a week, doing what you enjoy and can do naturally — I can’t see where the pressures are.’

Many people will applaud his plain-speaking, commonsense approach to a game which all too often seems to have parted company not only with its fans but with reality."

Speaks volumes about the man and how he loved the game that so many now see only as a wage earner. He's worth 50 of today's footballers.

 

[nipponyid]

Get well soon Jimbo!! you ledge.

 

[riggi]

Very good piece (unusually so for the Daily Mail). Jimmy beat his battle with booze and I hope he can beat this latest foe.

This part of the the article:
"Where's the pressure in earning £50,000 a week?
Greaves could not be relied on to talk up a lousy match, and had little sympathy for the prima donnas who had taken over his beloved game yet complained about the pressure.

In an interview ten years ago, he said: ‘I’m sorry, I cannot see that earning fifty grand, a hundred grand a week, doing what you enjoy and can do naturally — I can’t see where the pressures are.’

Many people will applaud his plain-speaking, commonsense approach to a game which all too often seems to have parted company not only with its fans but with reality."

Speaks volumes about the man and how he loved the game that so many now see only as a wage earner. He's worth 50 of today's footballers.

Not sure he did love the game did he?

 

[nipponyid]

He loved playing the game, not watching it!!

 

[CosmicHotspur]

Not sure he did love the game did he?

He couldn't wait for Saturdays to come around to put on his kit and boots and aim for goal.

 

[Spurslove]

A hero to so many of us, and the main inspiration for so many of us spending our lives as Spurs fans, me included.

God bless Jim, we're all fighting with you mate.