Another one from Dementia
I have copied text from Mike Amos blog (who is writing a book along with Bills wife) below.
Former Middlesbrough footballer and millionaire sports shop owner Bill Gates died on Saturday evening after long and difficult years of living with dementia. He was 79.
He was a miner’s son from Co Durham. Sir Bobby Charlton, another North-East miner’s son and another who headed a football countless times in a long and luminous career, had died earlier that day.
Sir Bobby, too, had long lived with dementia. Many more former players suffer similarly; many others now fear that they are likely to.
Readers may know that No-brainer, my book marrying the Bill Gates story with his wife Judith’s tirelessly inspiring campaign for awareness and change is due for publication on February 1.
The billion pound game, Paul Frost’s film on the same subject and featuring the “no headers” game at Spennymoor Town, has its premiere at the Arc in Stockton on Wednesday morning.
The book’s sub-titled “A great grandmother’s fight for safer sport”. For Dr Judith Gates the fight will go on.
*Bill Gates was one of five brothers, all with the middle name Lazenby, brought up in a terraced house in Dean Bank, Ferryhill. Eric, a younger sibling, played with distinction for Ipswich Town and Sunderland and was twice capped by England.
Academically bright, Bill attended Spennymoor Grammar School, captained the England Youth team and at 16 was playing Northern League football for Spennymoor United.
In 1960 they had a school trip to the Olympic Games in Rome – some say his pocket money supplemented by football earnings, but it couldn’t have been because the Northern League was still amateur – and it was there that he got to see more of Judith (but only, as the book narrates, because the blonde from Shidon turned him down.)
He was a useful cricketer, too, playing for the Ferryhill-based side Dean and Chapter – named after the pit – despite iffy eyesight which led to contact lenses of the approximate size and opacity of beer bottle bottoms.
They married when he was 17 and she 16. Judith, no less academically outstanding, was also pregnant. Bill joined Middlesbrough, said to be the country’s first £50-a-week footballer, the couple given a club house but not a telephone
“I’d be ringing my mum from the call box at the end of the road asking how to make mince” she recalls in the book.
At much the same time a magazine produced a list of 100 people worldwide predicted to make a mark on the still-young sixties – Jackie Kennedy, Yves St Laurent, J D Salinger, Sonny Liston and William Lazenby Gates.
Described in The Who’s Who of Middlesbrough as “a great all-rounder”, Bill went on to make well over 300 first team appearances in several positions, but mainly central defence where regular heading practice was obligatory.
Thanks to child minding help from both sets of parents, Judith went to teacher training college in Durham, became the country’s youngest head teacher at 29, a schools inspector at 35 and an academic thereafter. Bill, meanwhile, was training in the morning and studying accountancy in the afternoon.
His playing style was no-nonsense, his academic approach no less rigorous. Migraines worsening, he retired at 30, opening his first sports shop in the Boro – still ahead of the game. Soon Monument Sports had a dozen shops across the north.
In 1988 he sold up, the family moving for tax reasons to a beachside villa in the Cayman Islands – only a very small yacht alongside, they reckoned – but keeping their home at Castle Eden, on the Durham coast, to which when Bill’s health deteriorated they permanently returned.
He wasn’t, of course, the only greatly successful businessman of that name, prompting an airline stewardess to ask if he were the Microsoft mastermind.
Bill insisted that he wasn’t. “Can you not be his dad?” she said.
Their elder son David still lives in America. Nick, the younger, runs the global football charity Coaches Across Continents, spans the world but latterly has spent more time at Castle Eden where Judith rediscovered the joy of the English seasons and of an English country garden.
*The charity Head for Change was formally launched at the beginning of 2021, Judith one of three trustees. A couple of months ago it was superseded by HeadSafe Football – remember that inflatable elephant at the end of Neale Street in Dean Bank?
They’d talked about it when Bill was first diagnosed with possible chronic traumatic encephalopathy – able to be confirmed only after death – in 2014. No good for him, said Bill, but good to plant a tree so that others might benefit from its shade. His legacy, they agreed.
When the book began 18 months ago he was still ambulant – walking endlessly and sometimes recklessly – still able to hold a limited conversation, still able to watch (if not quite to comprehend) football on television.
His decline seemed quite rapid, if not at all unexpected. Recently living in a care village, he has been almost completely without speech or understanding. His brain will be donated to Dr Willie Stwart, the Glasgow-based neurologist who’s among the leaders of worldwide research into brain traumua among sport players.
Judith will carry on, perhaps yet more determinedly. Formidably and forensically bright, as was her late husband, she is a tireless networker and incisive communicator.
There’s still very much to be done, she s. It’s Bill’s legacy now.
arconline.co.uk
www.gazettelive.co.uk
