HE was coach of Scotland's Commonwealth Games athletics team in Jamaica 50 years ago this summer, architect of success at the 1970 edition in Edinburgh, and team manager in 1998, but now in his 85th year, veteran coach John Anderson is still going strong. Despite a heart attack which he ignored for 10 days.
His multi-faceted career embraces senior appointments on Olympic teams, chief GB Paralympic coach, and chief coach to British sport for the blind. He has a unique portfolio of coaching honours – all while holding down demanding "day-jobs": PE teacher in Glasgow's East End, director of PE at Heriot Watt University, chief leisure and recreation officer in Nuneaton, and director of leisure in the London borough of Southwark.
He has coached a British internationalist, male and female, in every athletics discipline – more than 170 of them, including several world record-holders, as he reminded me yesterday.
A combined events match in Salamanca next month will mark yet another milestone, when Niamh Bailey makes her GB debut.
Having helped Will Sharman to European hurdles silver in 2014, he decided that was it. "I'd have needed to drive to Loughborough several times a week. I could not give the level of support for a full-time athlete, so I stopped. Then Niamh came along, a local girl near where I now live. I can never refuse. If somebody asks for help, I say 'Yes'."
It seems a travesty that the one-time Gorbals lad is best-known to the general public as the former Gladiators referee, with his trademark, gravel-voiced: "Gladiators, Ready".
Successful proteges include Dave Moorcroft (whose 5000m world record in 1982 was the last at the distance by a non-African), double Commonwealth 10,000m champion Liz McColgan, and quietly unacknowledged, world 10,000m record holder Dave Bedford. "He moved from London without even telling me he was coming. I didn't want to be seen as someone grabbing athletes, so we kept it quiet. But I guess I can claim a wee bit credit."
He describes himself as having been "a second rate – no, 10th-rate athlete, the classic scrubber.'' But he was accomplished on the trampoline, and played for a Scottish Schools football team, all of whom signed professional. He and his pal, future Scotland manager Ally MacLeod, won the Glasgow tennis doubles title. He was best man at MacLeod's wedding.
He was first home Scot to gain a full FA coaching certificate, in the days when only four were awarded annually. Scottish clubs, mired in tradition, ignored him. Soccer's loss was athletics' gain. Anderson took every senior athletics coaching award available, then was appointed peripatetic national coach covering England and Wales.
He promised a bunch of five apparent no-hopers at Maryhill Ladies that they'd be the best club in Britain within five years. He was club coach, secretary, treasurer, and general factotum.
When driving to the English cross-country championships, their minibus broke down. They camped out overnight in a blizzard, with Anderson in a soaking sleeping bag under the bus. The cylinder block was frozen, so they were towed to a garage and the engine was thawed. They arrived at the race to discover it was eight to run, four to count. They had only four, so all had to finish. Fired by a typical Anderson motivational speech, they won the English title.
He was Scottish national athletics coach for five years, succeeded in 1970 by Frank Dick. The iconic Games in Edinburgh owe as much to the one as the other.
Anderson has only recently stopped playing tennis, "but I'm on the bike three times a week, and the gym three times." As an afterthought, he adds: "I was walking the dog last June and felt a slightly odd sensation in my right chest. After 10 days – still on the bike and in the gym, walking the dog and mowing the lawn – my wife, Dorothy, insisted I see the doctor. They said I'd had a heart attack. They stuck some stents and I am fine. I am too ugly to die."
Among his fondest memories is walker Lisa Kehler, whom he says he began coaching by default. Double Olympian and Commonwealth silver and double bronze medallist, Kehler recovered from being struck by a motorbike to finish fourth in her fifth Commonwealth Games, having had four children. "She's one of my heroines. Managed to do a very tough programme I set, had her children while becoming a consultant paediatrician. She is still walking."
Biggest disappointment was David Jenkins, European 400m champion in 1971.
"Discovering Jenkins was a cheat upset me more than anything. I wanted to know if he was cheating when I coached him. I deplore drugs. It cast aspersions on everyone I coached. Reports said he was not, if you can believe anything he said. That's a slight consolation, but I want nothing to do with him."
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