Out-and-Out Liars; Pushy Parents (Chapter 1, Part 6)

Before the Memorial Cup Championship at Wembley Stadium, William Woodcock- the father of one of the players in the Jeff Strikers- indicating a young man sat in the stands, he started talking about his other son Terry. Terry was wearing a Jeff Striker hat and a chartreuse Jeff Striker T-Shirt. “When Stef (Woodcock) was between four and five years old, Terry was almost nine months in the womb and before we could shove his mother in the car to drive from the suburbs of London to the nearest hospital in the Homo Counties just half a mile away, he came out on the kitchen floor. This played an irreparable role in his soccer career. He stayed in watching triple episodes of the A Team. For a whole year he just watched Peewee Herman and Batman, he always played stop and replay”. Woodcock was clearly a nervous wreck; his son was excluded from playing the game of life. “However hard he works in his life, I can never be very proud of him”. Here were the elements of failure, wrong time, wrong place; wrong county. However there was a further ingredient. When did Woodcock get the first notion that his son Terry was a special needs? “ You know,he was  always a bigger kid for his age. He was strong, and had a knack for scoring goals at an early age, and the captain was only being kind when he said, ‘That kid will always sit out in the stands until old age’.

A big tragedy of our age; it certainly was. Terry woodcock was born a mere half a mile from perfection. He was one of the unlucky ones. If the geographical boundaries of the Homo Counties which give entitlement to the Gay Premier Soccer League, had been moved half a mile within London’s suburbs, say to the Woodcock’s back garden, Terry might have been playing in the Memorial Gay Cup Championship instead of watching from the stands.