This week, Peter White tracks down JOHN WADDINGTON

HE BEGAN his football career at the top level with Liverpool, spent an English summer opening the bowling with West Indies Cricket legend Michael Holding and is currently working on getting a suspiciously-high golf handicap down from 18.

Not a bad sporting pedigree is it?

But for all that, John Waddington probably treasures his time playing for Blackburn Rovers as dearly as anything.

You see, the sports-mad all-rounder still loves what he regards as 'his club' - the team he has followed since boyhood in Darwen, and still does.

Now living in Pleasington, close enough to the golf club where he is a member to work on reducing that handicap, John's successes have not been confined to the sports field, far from it.

In the middle of last year he and his partner sold their flourishing business to leave him 'between jobs' so to speak.

But he can afford to be in that position and still dabbles a little in the greetings card and stationery trade which made him his fortune after the fame of football.

And I do mean fortune. The business, begun while Waddington was still a player at Ewood, had a turnover of £16 million and included some 70 shops and a cash and carry when he sold up.

His present situation, which allows him to travel the world to watch Test matches - Cape Town, Perth and Antigua in the past year for example - has been attained through hard work and the ability to set goals and achieve them.

Much of his football career was similar, and he really should have made more than the 158 (plus 10 as sub) senior appearances he achieved with the Rovers. A remarkably versatile player, who could play virtually any role required, he also scored 20 goals even though he was primarily regarded as a central defender.

And a Third Division championship medal was reward for his part in the 1974-75 campaign.

But loyalty had led him initially to Anfield, where illness hampered his efforts to make a mark and he was eventually released to move "home" to Ewood.

"I have always watched Rovers and they wanted to sign me, but it was Liverpool who invited me for trials and put me in their junior teams. I felt obliged to show them some loyalty in return," he said.

"Illness caused me a problem at Liverpool and set me back when I had got into the first team squad.

"But when Ken Furphy signed me for Rovers it fulfilled an ambition to play for the club.

"I remember, during my time with Blackburn, opening my first shop in New Chapel Street, Mill Hill. It sold, cards, sweets etc and was a tobacconists. I also started wholesaling cards and I remember I was at the shop when Howard Kendall took over.

"He was ringing round the players and called me there."

After Ewood, Waddington played for Bury and had a couple of seasons with Great Harwood in non-League football. But he saw his future outside the game once his playing days were over.

"I saw the business as an opportunity to make money rather than staying in football, and coaching had never really attracted me anyway. "Having met someone in Liverpool, where I did a lot of business, we set up a partnership, opening more shops and then a cash and carry by the racecourse at Aintree."

He was certainly on to a winner and is now reaping the rewards.

But he has remained true to his roots and, among the travelling Rovers fans at Aston Villa and Chelsea for the recent Premiership games, you could have picked out a certain John Waddington.

He can also be found occasionally during what passes for the summer at Rishton Cricket Club where he had the privilege of taking the new ball with one of the world's greatest fast bowlers Michael Holding, who was their professional in 1981.

Now aged 47, however, the sporting pace has slackened a little and he settles for being a spectator, except for one major target - improving what he describes as a "footballer's handicap" of 18.

No doubt he will achieve it.

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