Stan Anderson was a young adult before he had even heard of golf. It soon became his passion.
What do retired people and professional footballers have in common? Time on their hands during the week to play golf when nearly everyone else is at work.
And golf-playing footballers, like the retired, come in all categories: from hackers who spend more time in the long grass than on the mown stuff to a sizeable group who are really rather good. And then there are the very good indeed.
Stan Anderson was one of the very good ones despite having been totally unaware of the existence of the game until he was a young adult.
Anderson, who was born in 1933 and died earlier this year aged 85, came from a mining community, Horden, not far from Sunderland, where his father, Jim, had worked underground until suffering the chest problems that were the coal miners’ lot.
Young Stan might also have been a miner had it not been for the fact that his talent for playing football was soon evident. He would go on to have a brilliant career as a stylish midfielder who captained the North East’s three great clubs: Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough. He also won two caps for England.
But his sporting life might well have taken a very different course had he found golf earlier.
Don Revie, who joined Sunderland as a player from Manchester City in 1956 and later went on to manage England, introduced Anderson to golf. ‘I remember the first thing I ever heard Don say in the dressing room was, “How many lads play golf?” I’d never heard of it. Golf? He said, “You come up and caddie for me, Stan”.
‘So I went and carried his clubs. I watched him and a few others playing and they were hitting the ball all over the place. I thought, “I can do better than that”.’
At this point Anderson interrupted the saga of his love affair with golf to give an insight into how he ticked. ‘The point is if you’re going to do anything you’ve got to do it the best you can. It’s like any game, squash for example.’
And he recalled a conversation he had with the chairman of Doncaster Rovers when he, Stan, was the Doncaster manager.
Chairman: ‘Do you play squash, Stan?’
Anderson: ‘I’ve never played squash in my life.’
Chairman: ‘Right, I’ll take you down to the squash club and we’ll play.’
‘I hadn’t got a clue,’ Anderson said. ‘Four bloody walls and a line up there and another one there. I thought you had to hit the front wall all the time. I struggled and he beat me.’
Chairman: ‘Same time next week, Stan?’
Anderson: ‘Yeah, OK, Tony.’
During that week Anderson went to the library, took out a book on squash and gained a far better understanding of the game. ‘Only then did I realise you could hit it off that wall, too, and so long as the ball didn’t go below that line… and the next week I beat him easily.
Anderson: ‘Same time next week, Tony?’
Chairman: ‘No I’ve got something else on.’
Anderson never played the chairman again but, with his interest in the game kindled, he did not lose interest in it.
‘I was playing some really classy players. There was a lad called Alan Murray, who was good. He’d heard about me playing squash and said he’d give me a game.
‘The club where we played had a ladder and he was third or fourth and I wasn’t even on it, obviously. And I beat him and, of course, all the lads were taking the piss out of him.’
Anderson took the same resolute interest in golf once he had watched Revie and others give what he instantly recognised as a pretty lousy demonstration of how to club a small white ball with power and precision.
Things weren’t easy to start with because as a left-hander he had difficulty getting hold of a set of clubs. But a drinking mate of his father’s had a friend who sold him some, not a full set, for four pounds. He was on his way.
‘A year later I ordered a full set and got down to playing regularly. I played all that summer and eventually got my handicap down to one.’
The game became a passion for him. Even into his early eighties he was still playing twice a week. He seemed affronted by being asked whether he ever shot rounds of lower than his age. ‘Oh, I do that regularly,’ he said, dismissively. When we met he had just done a round of 78.
He regarded his greatest golfing feat as finishing joint first in the 1991 Yorkshire Seniors amateur championship.
In his prime he shot a round of 65 in Scotland. It wasn’t on one of the big courses. ‘But I did play at St Andrews on the championship course and got a 72, which I thought was a good score.’
Based on an interview Stan Anderson gave in 2014 for the book When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.