John White was struggling to find a partner for a round of golf one afternoon in July, exactly 62 years ago, after he had finished a morning of pre-season training at White Hart Lane.
He tried to persuade some of his team-mates in a Tottenham Hotspur side who, three years earlier, had become the first team in the 20th century to win the league and FA Cup double, and the previous year had become the first English side to win a European trophy — the Cup Winners’ Cup.
Cliff Jones, his close friend and partner in crime with practical jokes that would annoy legendary Spurs manager Bill Nicholson, declined as storm clouds were gathering around north London. Terry Medwin and White’s fellow Scot Jimmy Robertson also didn’t fancy it.
So White decided to play on his own and left his home in Winchmore Hill for the Crews Hill course in Enfield despite the protestations of his wife Sandra who told him “you’re not going golfing” before relenting and dropping her husband off “just for a few holes”.
White never returned home. One of the best footballers in England and the man Nicholson planned to build his ‘new’ Spurs team around was struck by lightning as he sheltered under an oak tree on the ninth fairway when storms hit. He was killed instantly.
Spurs had lost their star inside forward and Sandra, at 22 and with two young children, two-year-old daughter Mandy and son Rob, just five months old, had lost her husband.
“There are so many ‘if onlys’,” Rob White, who has spent the 62 years since discovering as much as he possibly can about the father he never knew, tells The Athletic.
“Cliff Jones hid my dad’s trousers in the dressing room after training, which was an everyday prank for them, but it delayed dad’s world by 10 minutes while he looked for them. Then there was sheltering under the tree. Why did he do that? You can look at it and say ‘how many red lights did he miss?’ Everything could have turned out differently that day.
“I’ve actually played golf a couple of times at Crews Hill. As kids we went to garden centres near there but never to the golf course because it was the stuff of nightmares for me. But when I eventually did go there it was quite peaceful and I definitely felt a sense of closure.”
In 2010, Rob White, together with Julie Welch, Fleet Street’s first female football reporter, wrote a moving book about John called ‘The Ghost — In Search of My Father The Football Legend’ (The Ghost was John’s nickname, derived from his ability to float into space unnoticed by the opposition). Two years ago the story was turned into a brilliant play by writer and director — and huge Spurs fan — Martin Murphy.
On Tuesday, 62 years to the day after the tragic accident, The Ghost of White Hart Lane will be staged for the first time in John’s home town of Musselburgh, just outside Edinburgh.
Actor Callum Lewis Newman puts in an extraordinary performance, playing 31 different characters in this one-man play, principally John and Rob White. “At times it’s as if Callum is my dad,” says Rob. “It’s incredibly emotional for me to watch it. I’m able to get close to how he might have been.”
It is a play that tells an extraordinary story of a superstar cut down in his prime and one that remains largely unknown to a legion of younger football followers, even Spurs fans.
“There was always a silence around me growing up, probably because of the magnitude of the situation,” continues Rob before heading to Scotland for the big night in Musselburgh. “Mum would never talk about Dad. There were no pictures of him at home. I grew up knowing it was too painful for my mum and nan to tell me all about him.
“There was also this weird thing that I felt everybody knew the story apart from me. It would frustrate me. I’d think, ‘It’s my dad, my grief, what’s it got to do with you?’. Funnily enough the other week I bumped into somebody I was at school with and he said something about my story.
“I said, ‘I didn’t think anybody knew about it’ and he said, ‘We all knew about it and were all talking about it but we didn’t talk about it with you.’ It blew my mind there was this chatter going on but I wasn’t aware of it.”
In modern parlance, John White was an attacking wide midfielder on both the right and left, ‘ghosting’ around the pitch. It is difficult to exaggerate just how good a footballer he was, or how shocking his loss was in such freak circumstances at the age of just 27.
Rob’s book carries a quote on its cover from the great Jimmy Greaves that says: “Had John White lived he could have been one of the greatest footballers of all time.” It is not sympathetic hyperbole because it has been echoed by so many to John’s son.
“One of the frustrations for me being a football obsessive was trying to find out just how good my dad was,” says Rob. “Was he Johan Cruyff? George Best? Denis Law? I didn’t know. I talked to Jimmy Greaves for the book and Luka Modric had just joined Spurs.”
“I said to Jimmy, ‘I really like Modric, is he like my dad?’ and Jimmy just started laughing and saying, ‘Nowhere near as good as your dad’. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
“So many important people in football who were around at the time rated him so highly. I met Alex Ferguson and he said so many beautiful things about my dad.
“As Spurs fans there’s no way we can disregard the opinion of Bill Nicholson, who was our finest manager of all time, and he was definitely going to build his next team around my dad. He had just given him a pay rise and apparently had intimated that to him.
“Denis Law was adamant if Dad had lived England would never have won the World Cup in 1966 because Scotland would have done it instead. Imagine that!”
Yet for all his undoubted ability, White’s death did not elicit the huge reaction that the closest modern equivalent tragedy, the death of Liverpool’s Diogo Jota at 28 last year, brought. Sandra White and her two children were left mainly to fend for themselves.
“I grew up with my mum and grandmother and I thought Bill Nicholson’s first name was ‘Bloody’ because it was always ‘Bloody Bill Nicholson’,” says Rob, always destined to be a Spurs fan and who now lives in Tottenham “seven minutes from my sofa to the stadium”.
“It was like my dad’s death was more a huge blow to Bill’s plans for his beloved Tottenham Hotspur than a tragedy, but now I think I can see how much it all hurt him.”
“(Legendary Spurs goalkeeeper) Pat Jennings told me his first official day at Spurs was the day of my dad’s funeral and he remembers Bill breaking down in tears in the dressing room and having to go into the showers to compose himself. So I think that’s an insight into how much my dad’s death shattered him as a person as much as a football manager.
“The players were paid a bonus at the start and end of the season, which I think was £1,000, and because my dad died when he did, in July the club used his money to start a fund for us and then there was a testimonial.
“We were also given a couple of complimentary tickets for games but my nan used to have to ring up and ask for them and it stopped around 1980. There was some money raised but the club could have done a hell of a lot more.”
Now that is all in the past and Rob, a former non-League footballer himself, is at peace with the club he has spent his life supporting along with Scotland — he now even plays for Spurs’ walking football side — and his lifelong search for his father is as complete as it can be.
“I think it’s definitely a sense of pride in him now and there’s a lot more of a settled feeling,” he says. “When I was younger there was that anger, the not knowing and the embarrassment because if I told someone who my dad was there would be this cloud of grief. I’d say, ‘Don’t worry, I didn’t know him’ but now I feel I did know him.
“There was a lightbulb moment when I was training to be a counsellor (Rob’s second career after photography) and I found out how important the first six months are in an infant’s development.
“So actually that thing about not knowing him was bull****. I knew him; I knew what he sounded like and smelled like and I knew he had this presence.
“It does make me sad that his presence just disappeared one day from my life and that’s why I’ve been so determined to get that connection. And I do feel more connected now than just this abstract dialogue I’d have with him in my head.”
“I don’t think my search will ever be totally complete, but in a good way now rather than a disoriented way. I have built the best picture I possibly can, with the help of the play, of my dad.”
The Ghost of White Hart Lane is at Musselburgh on July 21-22, in the West End of London from July 31-August 2 and then the Edinburgh Fringe from August 5-31