WAG’s battle to cease right now’s gamers assembly her husband’s tragic destiny

It is a love story, no less. The story of how she, a grade A student, and he, a promising young footballer, met on a school trip to the 1960 Rome Olympics.

How he bought her a single rose there and they threw three coins into the Trevi fountain, before a teenage marriage which neither of them had planned. It is a story that would not have been written just now, in a contemporary way, bursting with detail, had it not been for the heartbreaking way things turned out.

He was Bill Gates, miner’s son, dashing England youth team captain and a talent so coveted that Middlesbrough made him Britain’s first £50-a-week footballer in 1961. She was Judith Curry, a fashion-conscious 15-year-old of the early Sixties when she first turned up at his family’s redbrick back-to-back at Ferryhill, County Durham, in a lavender mohair belted coat and winklepicker stilettos, and was offered tinned red salmon, thickly buttered bread and chips for tea.

The Gates family, including younger son Eric, who later played for Ipswich Town, had known no visitor like this before. ‘I was immediately a misfit,’ she says.

She fell pregnant in 1961 — ‘falling wrong’ as they called it up there, back then. Her mother encouraged her to drink gin while sitting in a hot bath. Her father cried. And she was forced to abandon school and all her dreams. 

‘I felt as if my anticipated life had come to an end,’ she says. ‘My heart learned how to break. But Bill and I stood together.’

She describes herself as a WAG of her time — taking their two young sons to Middlesbrough’s Ayresome Park, as her centre half husband helped Boro gain promotion from the old third division in 1967 and, later, reach the First Division in Jack Charlton’s squad. But she was always a lot more than that.

She rekindled her academic dreams, attending a teacher training college with Sandie Shaw hairstyle and sometimes the children in tow, became the country’s youngest headteacher at 29 and a schools’ inspector at 36. When her husband was forced to give up the game in 1974, wracked by excruciating headaches, she helped run the sports shop he’d opened. There were nine stores by the time they sold the business.

Their plan was to travel the world — and they did. But there were moments when things did not add up. Like the time, in 2014, when Bill forgot he had left the car at Durham railway station. It took them an hour to find it. 

The cognitive thread had unravelled much further by the time a specialist clinic in Toronto diagnosed probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – the progressive, incurable neurodegenerative condition first applied to punch drunk boxers, clinically only diagnosable after death and caused by repeated forceful impacts to the head. 

Gates was far from the only one. The weight of evidence pointing to a link between footballs being hammered at a player’s head and damage to the brain is overwhelming. Footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die from a neurodegenerative disease than the average person, exhaustive scientific research tells us.

But Judith Gates, as she was from the age of 16, always did have a wisdom beyond her years. She discerned how hard it would be to press home this message. It’s a grey, complicated story and people don’t have time for detail these days, even when the safety of our children is at stake. She set up a campaign organisation, Head Safe Football, which is doing more than any other in its field, though it is the new book telling the story of her life with that boy she met at the Trevi which does most to puncture the apathy.

Some, including the FA and PFA, declined requests for help, as the book’s author Mike Amos sought to chart how football approached growing awareness of the disease. Alan Shearer, who fronted a BBC documentary on the subject, told Amos his diary was regrettably ‘rammed’.

The book does the job perfectly well without them. It is beautifully written, immaculately researched and pulls no punches. Its title, No Brainer, is a brutally honest summation of what this illness inflicts on its victims.

The memoir (Haythorp Books, £14.99) was launched last night at Ferryhill — where that girl in the lavender coat once knocked on the Gates family’s door — to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Gates’ testimonial game between Middlesbrough and Leeds United at Ayresome Park.

Since that game was played, 13 players from the two squads have died — at least 55 per cent of them from a neurodegenerative disease. The great Paul Madeley lived with Parkinson’s. Don Revie and Willie Maddren contended with motor neurone disease. Dementia cut down Jack Charlton, Gordon McQueen and Gates, who died last October.

‘For over 60 years, Bill and I stood shoulder to shoulder,’ his wife writes in her foreword to the book. ‘Standing next to me when he received the devastating diagnosis, acknowledging it was too late for him, he asked me to make a promise, “That you will do all in your power to protect the players of today and tomorrow from this disease”. I made that promise. Now I am trying hard to fulfil it.’

‘Yosser’ sent shivers down Souey’s spine

Bernard Hill, who has just died, played Yosser Hughes with such intensity that Graeme Souness, arriving on set for a cameo role in Boys from the Blackstuff, was convinced the actor was about to punch his lights out. 

The series captured the brutal economic realities of early 1980s Liverpool, where money was so tight that there was a 25 per cent reduction in Anfield attendances over three seasons. 

Bob Paisley’s team bestrode the continent in the face of that struggle — an extraordinary side befitting Hill and his unforgettable work. 

Cup final pressure

The season will end with some significance for my eight-year-old grandson’s team, who having reached a cup final, will play in what he calls a ‘proper stadium with seats’ this Sunday. 

There’s been a midweek ‘friendly’ preparation match. They lost heavily. The coach gave them what-for. It’s pressure in the way that wet Saturday mornings in the rain, without seats, have not been, all winter.

It’s his first season of junior football. Winning already feels too important.

Sad Hollywood ending 

When you’ve followed a struggling club for years, sudden success isn’t everything. 

The shining light at my team, Wrexham, in the dark days was Luke Young — captain, talisman, the one who would front up after a drab defeat. 

It was quietly announced last week that Young is being released. 

Wrexham will advance to League One with the star names that Hollywood ownership has bought but a light has gone out for me.