"A heart-breaking but still inspiring insight into the real-life impact of the biggest issue facing the world’s biggest sport.” Jeremy Wilson, Chief Sports Reporter, The Telegraph
This is the story of the ‘real’ Bill Gates. A famous footballer, a successful millionaire and a global philanthropist. This is the story of an incredible man and his remarkable wife, who in his final years made a commitment to use his brain to save the next generation of football players.
Bill was Britain’s first £50 a week teenage superstar who played 333 games for Middlesbrough, where he was the PFA representative. He was the first entrepreneur/businessman to make sports shops the centre of high-street fashion. He was a philanthropist who travelled the world using football to change the lives of millions of children in over 100 countries.
But in 2017 his life changed when he was diagnosed with football’s best-kept secret, probable Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, caused by repetitive head impacts including headers, a brain disease with no cure.
Author Mike Amos perfectly captures the incredible life of Bill and Judith, from a coal mining village in Ferryhill in the 1950s, a brilliant 13-year professional career in the 60s and 70s, a chain of sports shops in the 80s, to a millionaire’s lifestyle on 7 mile beach on Grand Cayman in the 90s, to their most difficult journey together to ensure the future of the beautiful game. He shares Judith’s work, designing the Billion Pound Game of Football that captured the attention of media around the globe and highlighted the need for changes in sport.
Their ground-breaking Head Safe Football charity has led to research and education, and supported families of players with CTE. Designed to protect the future of the game, Head Safe Football educates players, coaches, sports scientists, and parents to recognise that CTE begins in young footballers and can be prevented with common sense Head Safe Football policies and training.
No-Brainer explains how one man and his family have galvanised the football world around facts and science to impact player care and child safeguarding policies for both males and females.
If you have ever headed a football, if your child or grandchild are heading footballs, then this is the one book that you need to read.
Reviews
"A heart-breaking but still inspiring insight into the real-life impact of the biggest issue facing the world’s biggest sport. But does football care enough about its former heroes to take sufficient action?” Jeremy Wilson, Chief Sports Reporter, The Telegraph
"What a brilliant read. Took me through every emotion from laughing and smiling to tears of true sadness. A great insight into the dark and oh so sad side of the beautiful game. A must-read, not only for the light-hearted reminiscing of football anecdotes and memories, but to learn the startling truth behind a game touching so many lives, and the devastation it can cause." Hilary Maddren, widow of Willie Maddren, Middlesbrough player and manager who died of neurodegenerative disease
"Not just an important read for football fans, but for anyone whose life has been touched by the slowly unfolding despair of dementia." Harry Pearson, author of The Far Corner
"No Brainer is a meticulous and moving read that exposes the cost of football’s collective failure to protect players. One day, football will thank women like Dr Judith Gates who fought to spare future generations the pain they suffered as they watched their loved ones slowly succumb to diseases like CTE." Warren Manger, Daily Mirror
Foreword
1. ‘It was many years before I could properly enjoy a gin and tonic’
2. ‘I want to tell them there’s a ticking time bomb. As you are, once was Bill’
3. ‘A rugged centre half who wouldn’t flinch at a head-on meeting with Cassius Clay, if he was wearing a No 9 shirt’
4. ‘There are lots of opportunities in life. Some people take them and some people don’t’
5. ‘The authorities don’t seem prepared to admit the scale of the problem. People like my dad loved football, and it’s killing them’
6. 'When it all comes out, what has happened in football will be seen as a scandal worse than Savile, worse than Grenfell Tower, worse than Windrush'
7. ‘My mum knows nothing about football but she is the most dangerous woman in the game’
8. ‘Judith’s formidable, that’s the word. She’s driven, and she’s not going to let it go now’
9. ‘I knew there wouldn’t be conversations, I’d no illusions about that, but in many ways he wasn’t my dad’
10. ‘He didn’t need much persuading. I think the quid pro quo was a small box of Milk Tray’
11. ‘I spent the night in Middlesbrough hospital. It went on like that for two days and they had me training again on the third’
12. ‘This disease tests your kindness. It tests your patience. It tests your family. It tests everything except your love. But the more you love, the more your heart breaks’
13. ‘The brutal truth is that there aren’t enough people suffering from MND to make research a good investment for drug companies’
14. ‘If you got a bad concussion, stumbling around a bit, it was regarded as a joke and played afterwards on the videotape, so everyone could have a good laugh'
15. ‘My dad was always very supportive of the PFA, but I think they’ve failed families and football participants in general’
16. ‘People would cross the road to avoid you, even in Middlesbrough’
17. ‘I’ve been in board rooms full of people from Oxford and Cambridge and always had the advantage of them, because I was from Co Durham’
18. ‘I really care about finding the answer, but I don’t want to come across as a saint’
19. ‘I remember (down the pit) they used to call the daft lads the heedybaals. A bit late, but it all starts to make sense’
20. ‘It very much reminds me of the smoking debate. Everyone knows that it’s wrong, unwise, but no one seems to do much’
21. ‘The Concussion in Sport Group has controlled the narrative for 20 years, and it has come to this’
22. ‘How pathetic that 30 former footballers are to sue the Football Association over negligence. . . . ’
23. ‘If this was the shipyards, I’m talking about asbestos, the trade unions would be calling them out because of the risk to their health’
24. ‘We would have expected the Football Association to have been publicly hounded by the Professional Footballers’ Association. . . ’
25. ‘I truly believe that this is the beginning of the end. It’s exciting to think that we will soon have life-saving treatments to tackle this disease’
26. ‘Various failings over a prolonged period of time’
27. ‘Certainly there seems to be recent history between Head for Change and the PFA'
28. ‘We’ve had the agitations and the obsessions. Now he’s happy and safe. That’s such a relief to us all’
29. ‘The conversations they’re having in rugby they were having in boxing 100 years ago’
30. ‘It’s a space where we can say what we want without judgement. We don’t have to be good girls being brave’
31. ‘It’s so sad that football was his passion and is now the cause of his demise’
32. ‘There is a fundamental issue if players, unions and leagues feel that lawmakers are holding them back from what they collectively agree to protect the safety of players’
33. ‘Head for Change is doing what the wealthy Players’ Foundation refuses to do’
34. ‘There is a remarkable consistency of symptoms across all these contact sports, and it is very grim’
35. ‘We appreciate the invitation to take part in the book, however we would politely have to decline on this occasion’
36. ‘After years of political wrangling, England’s football authorities are close to agreeing a deal to establish a Dementia Care Fund to help former players’
37. ‘He wanted no one else from Ferryhill, from Spennymoor, from the whole world to suffer as he was suffering’
38. ‘Another cliché –sorry — we can only play the hand we’re dealt’
39. ‘We are a charity for everyone — all ages, genders, players at every level’
40. 'It’s hard to envisage our authorities allowing our sportsmen and women play what seems designed to hasten the onset of dementia’
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