Spurs’ Most Fanatical Fan
Have a mosey down the sports aisle of any good book shop these days and it won’t be long before you fix eyes on a whole gallery of po-faced- often barely old enough to drive-footballers staring back at you. Autobiographies, biographies, picture books; no-one, it seems, is without a story to tell and they don’t mind who’s around to listen. Whether you’re a twenty-one year old ex-Southampton striker- I was buzzin’ when I got that phone call from Wenger– or a World Cup winner, it’s likely you’ve had your mug plastered on a hardback with a ‘buy one get one free’ sticker fastened to your chin.
Not often, though, does a book come along where the content is so lively and genuinely interesting that even a single anecdote could be stretched out into a volume all of its own. All killer, not an ounce of filler. Even more remarkable, when the star of the show during the two-hundred odd pages, isn’t a player or a manager…but a fan.
One extraoridnary fan.
Superfan: The Amazing Life of Morris Keston is just such a thing…
“Starring: Bobby Moore, Jimmy Greaves, Geoff Hurst, Terry Venables, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and many, many more…
Superfan is a collection of wonderful anecdotes and stories from one of football’s – and England’s – great characters.
Morris Keston was once just a regular football fan, but then he started befriending the Spurs players (sometimes by following them out of the ground and sitting next to them on the bus!). By the time the 1966 World Cup came around Bobby Moore and Jimmy Greaves were popping round for tea between training sessions, and when Spurs reached numerous cup finals in the seventies and eighties the players from both teams would flock to his wild after-match party instead of the club’s official dos.
Beyond football he became friends with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali. He regularly travelled to Vegas in Sinatra’s private jet and still goes into a cold sweat when recalling the time Stirling Moss gave him a lift and reversed down a narrow street at 90mph.
He had a whole chapter devoted to him in Hunter Davies’s classic sports tome The Glory Game, but now the amazing adventures of Morris Keston at last have a book of their own.’’
I really couldn’t recommend this book enough. It’s a terrific read. And, as our friend over at JimmyG2 often says: I’m not always wrong.
The co-author, Nick Hawkins, has kindly had the publishers send me an advance copy which will be up for grabs next week. As well, Nick’s given me the chance to throw a few quiestions toward Morris, which, I’m told he’ll be happy to answer.
Bloody good eggs, the pair of them.
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