sport news 'It was too late for him, but he asked me to make a promise': One WAG's fight ... trends now
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.’
Bill Gates, pictured with Judith in 1962, was Britain’s first £50-a-week footballer
Manchester United legend George Best is tackled by Middlesbrough defender Gates
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
