Every sports journalists seems to have a Brian Clough story which is being recycled on the back of the rave reviews of 'The Damned United' film and the portrayal of the mercurial manager by Michael Sheen.
Clough was manager of Nottingham Forest when Barrie Williams was editor of the Nottingham Evening Post. I interviewed Barrie in September 2005 for Press Gazette just after he had left the editorship of the Western Morning News. These were some of his memories of Clough from his Nottingham days.
"Clough rang up one day and said, ‘I want to come and work for you. I want to do a column.' I said: ‘but we pay peanuts.' He said: ‘OK, I'll do it for a case of champagne each month.'
"The finance director wanted to know what sort of champagne Brian wanted. When I asked him he said: ‘fuck it, I'll do it for nowt.'
"The column was so good that freelance stringers used to park outside the office at 7am to be the first to sell it to the nationals. Brian didn't like to be ripped off, so once he wrote a complete load of old crap, complete rubbish — and it still got sold."
Williams asked Clough to present the Disabled Sports Personality of the Year Awards: "We were in the foyer of City Hall when a woman walked in with a child in a wheelchair who was so disfigured everybody instinctively looked away.
Cloughie picked this child gently out of the wheelchair and kissed him. He carried him away across the room and sat him on his knee. I have never forgotten that."
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