Plenty of sports autobiographies eventually run into a familiar problem. The face on the cover is enough to sell the book but the life inside isn’t enough to hold the story. Once you strip away the sport, you’re not left with much you want to read about.
Roddy Collins is not saddled with this problem. The further you go into his autobiography – written in conjunction with the inexhaustible Paul Howard – the more obvious it becomes that his football career is among the least interesting things about him.
Collins shared a dressing room with George Best as a teenager and went on to play for or manage 22 different clubs. But you could take every football story out of this book and still be left with more than enough high-grade material to carry the enterprise.
The Rodfather is like a Naked Gun movie but with anecdotes instead of jokes. You didn’t care for that yarn? Don’t worry, there’s another on the way.
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Here’s one about the 50 grand in cash Roddy kept in the attic that his kids dipped into so often they came to call it The Hole in The Wall. Here’s one about him finishing up a high-profile football job in England and training Travellers in bare-knuckle boxing to turn a pound.
Here’s one about the time one of his players was having a shocker of a game and Roddy asked him what was up and the player said he couldn’t get his head straight because he’d left a chicken in the oven and one of the staff got the player’s house keys and went off to sort it and the becalmed player had a stormer in the second half and the staff member arrived back in a rage and said the f**king oven hadn’t even been turned on.
There are hundreds of these and they make the book zip along at a breakneck pace with laughs on just about every page. It scarcely lets up. Plenty of sportspeople achieved much more than Roddy Collins but very few have lived a life this full and rich and are able to tell the tale.
Hard to imagine there’ll be a more entertaining sports book for quite a while.
