It’s 25 years since ‘the captain’ died. Here Jeff Powell pays poignant tribute to his much-missed friend and national hero... IMAGINE HOW WE’D PARTY IF BOBBY WAS STILL AROUND
CAN it really be a quarter of a century since Bobby Moore and I stood on the nostalgic steps of the Royal Garden Hotel and said our goodbyes?
Twenty- five years since he walked away, still upright with that blond head high, despite the cancer which would take his life 62 hours later?
He had chosen the venue for our last lunch. This place in Kensington where he and his England team-mates had wined and dined in celebration of this country’s only winning of the World Cup.
Not that he could eat much now. Just pick at a salad. Nor was he supposed to drink. But he took one lager, then another: ‘What the hell?’
We both knew what this was about. But not a single maudlin word passed our lips. Never once since the fatal diagnosis had he asked: ‘Why me?’ He wasn’t about to start now. We talked of the good times. Of West Ham days and London nights. Of running on holiday beaches. Of dinners with Pele and Beckenbauer, Best and Cruyff, Eusebio and Carlos Alberto, Venables and Menotti. Of family and friends. And of World Cups won and lost. ‘Always thought we could win it in ’66,’ he said. ‘Never thought we might lose it in ’70.’
Where have the years all gone? If not quite yesterday it seems like only last year that he was pulling on the long red-leather coat he prized as a gift from Malcolm Allison, to keep out the February chill.
FIFTy-TWO years since that almighty day at the grand old Wembley. Twenty- five years this football Saturday since the day the captain died. And still only that one World Cup.
Now it’s another World Cup year. Again, we ponder the odds against history finally repeating itself.
Again, the legend of Bobby Moore will be revisited. In sepia hues. At the foot of his imposing statue as he stands guard at the portals of the new Wembley Stadium. Horatius at the bridge.
The morning after we unveiled that monument to the greatest No 6 of all time his partner at the crux of England’s defence, Jack Charlton, went back on his own. ‘To talk to Mooro,’ he explained. ‘I miss our chats.’ In that, Big Jack is not alone.
Bobby’s daughter Roberta recently commissioned half a dozen three-foot bronze sculptures of her father to commemorate this poignant anniversary, the sixth and thus by number the most meaningful of which will shortly go on display and for sale at a Bobby Moore exhibition opening soon at the National Portrait Gallery. The Bobby Moore bowel cancer fund started by his widow Stephanie hopes to reach the £25million mark in this World Cup summer.
These few words of mine are a personal memoir. The story of Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore has been told a million times.
It is embedded in the folklore of the greatest game. Even more deeply than the time capsule buried years ago beneath the entrance to the Royal Garden which contains the history of mankind as we know it, to be unearthed by a curious generation in some future century after the books have been burned by the internet.
‘Do you think we’re in there?’ Bobby asked. ‘Us boys of ’66?’ ‘Big mistake if not,’ I answered. Football is the greatest sporting drama of our times, Moore one of the leading players on that global stage. It is the people’s game, and hhe was a man of the people even though he looked llike a god.
Similarly, the lady who uused to live next door to wwhere we were talking. The hotel sits beside the gates to Diana’s palace. They share in the only conceivable consolation for dying too young, that of being always remembered as in their prime. She beautiful, he handsome. Forever young. This was where he had led the lads out on to the balcony that halcyon night long ago to show the Jules Rimet Trophy to the throng in the street below.
What will not be recorded in that capsule are some of his lines most familiar to those who knew him.
When told by a fan who engaged him in conversation in an East End pub how surprised he was that a hero portrayed as aloof could be so polite and modest, Bobby put an arm around his shoulders and said quietly: ‘If you are quite good at something, you don’t have to tell everybody.’
In our single days, when this chronic insomniac telephoned in the early hours he would say what he always used to when heading from leafy Chingford to central London: ‘Coming through.’
When he arrived we would watch the dawn come up from my flat’s tiny balcony, glass in hand.
AS I watched him leave the Royal Garden that final time I glanced at my watch. It was just gone four in the afternoon. He would pass away three mornings later at six minutes past six. That No 6, again.
Bobby invariably opened conversation with this inquiry as to your health and circumstances: ‘All is well?’ This time it was a not a question, but a statement. The reassuring of a friend that he was ready for what lay ahead, as ever.
But for heaven’s sake, he was only 51. Hell, what would we have got up to in the last 25 years?
Details of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition and sale of the sculpture at www.robertamoore.co.uk
News of the bowel cancer fund at www.bobbymoorefund.org
We will always remember him in his prime... handsome and forever young