By Mike Walters
Hindsight is a noble virtue, but Stan Bowles and a loaded gun was never a good idea.
Back in the day, when he appeared on the BBC’s Superstars programme - a decathlon where elite athletes from different sports competed against each other - Stan the Man was supposed to hit a target with live ammunition, but he shot the table.
Half a century later, Bowles still holds the record for the lowest number of points in the series where Kevin Keegan famously fell off his bike.
"They were disgusted with me right the way through," he said. "I wouldn't do any weights. I told them I had a bad back. I was like f****** Arthur Daley.
"I did the canoeing - the canoe overturned. In the shooting, I shot the table.
“You were supposed to lift the gun up, put it back down on the table, lift it up again and then fire. But when I put it down again it nearly blew the table in half.
“I'd been out with James Hunt the night before and I had a right hangover.”
Stan Bowles, who died on Saturday aged 75 after slipping towards the sunset under the blight of Alzheimer’s disease, was king of the mavericks. Sure, he would have failed a screen test for the role of Dirty Harry with a 44 Magnum, but with a ball at his feet he was a magician who danced with greatness.
At Queens Park Rangers, where fans voted him the club’s greatest-ever player, he came within a point of the title in 1975-76 in a fabulous team including Gerry Francis, Dave Thomas and Don Givens. And at Nottingham Forest, he only missed out on a European Cup winner’s medal in 1980 after falling out with Brian Clough - although he did win the UEFA Super Cup against Barcelona later that year.
“Cloughie must have had something, but I haven’t a clue what it was - I never saw it,” shrugged Bowles. “He couldn’t coach. Him and Peter Taylor just used to walk their dogs down by the Trent, where we trained in a park.”
At Loftus Road, Bowles would often breeze into the dressing room at 2.50pm, just in time to catch manager Dave Sexton’s team talk, after lingering long enough over a pre-match pint to see if his nag came home in the 2.45 race somewhere.
But goodness me, he could play. He was Lionel Messi with a Benson & Hedges fag in one hand, a lager top in the other and a copy of the Racing Post in his pocket. He was a snake-hipped bag of bones, his blue and white hoops always looked two sizes too big and a hangover never stopped him ghosting past unsuspecting defenders.
Bowles won only five England caps, a travesty of his talent, under three different managers - Joe Mercer, Sir Alf Ramsey and Don Revie. Like fellow free spirits Frank Worthington, Alan Hudson, Rodney Marsh and Tony Currie, all of them treated him with suspicion. Or, as Stan the Man said: “Some say I got them all the sack.”
Bowles wound down his career at Brentford, where he was also voted the greatest player in a fans’ poll, although he owed some of his popularity to warriors Terry Hurlock and Chris Kamara doing the hard yards for him in midfield.
True to form, supporters fondly recall him in the bookies at 2.45pm before a home win at Griffin Park in full playing kit and tracksuit top, collecting £200 when his preferred horse came home first - and stuffing the bundle of notes inside his jockstrap for safe keeping.
When the main stand caught fire in 1983 in a boiler room, he lived directly across the street in Braemar Road and it was Bowles’ wife who raised the alarm. Despite his chaotic lifestyle of booze, birds and bets, nobody on the west London football beat played with more fire in his belly than Stan the Man.
