Years ago, when Sixer, Malcolm Dawson, John McCormick and Monsieur Salut were still young, or at least a long way from qualifying for bus passes, Salut! Sunderland reproduced a nice little interview that formed part of a Celebrity Supporters series for the newsletter of the London and SE branch of the SAFC Supporters’ Association.
The interviewee was Steve Cram, then as now president of the branch as well as being “The Jarrow Arrow”, a world record-breaking middle distance runner with impeccable credentials as a Sunderland supporter.
He had some terrific anecdotes to share and you can see them all – minus photos like the one above that I managed to re-locate, all stripped by successive migrations of the site to new servers – at https://safc.blog/2007/05/all-the-presidents-men-in-red-and-white/. Especially priceless was his memory of his dad, a copper, having to lock up the FA Cup in 1973 when the lads visiting the local workingmen’s club became too legless to be trusted to watch it.
And now we have one of those Q+As that the newspapers and magazines favour, not quite the same as our Who are You? interviews but the format is recognisable.
See it, reproduced from the free London mag Sport and with thanks to my confrere Andy Lines, the award-winning but Chelsea supporting chief reporter of the Mirror, by enlarging this image …
I loved Steve’s answer to the question about his earliest sporting hero:
A guy called Charlie Hurley who played centre-half for Sunderland. He was a real larger-than-life character. He had a big barrel chest, and I used to think he was Superman.
And so did we, Steve. Lovely memory of the man you succeeded as the SAFCSA London branch president
