Met up with Mike Buckley, a one-time Falmouth Packet colleague and fellow Falmouth Town supporter of six decades, at a recent Bickland Park match.
It was our first chat for a long, long time and, boy, did the memories flow.
For a while, in fact, we had both been members of the famous all-conquering Falmouth Packet All-Stars football team of the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
(In one of those games, I scored all six Packet goals, and the match report in the following week’s paper began with “Mike Truscott was in scintillating form . . . ” although, ahem, I forget now who actually wrote that.)
Another thing Mike and I shared – when we were even younger, in our early to mid-teens – was our love of days out to Plymouth to watch Argyle’s matches in the then Second Division (now Championship).
We would each travel up with a group of other lads, and Mike recalled the day when he and his pals waited outside the Home Park ground after a match to seek autographs of their heroes.
One of them was Mike Bickle, a former milkman who was snapped up by Plymouth from St Austell and went on to become their top scorer in four consecutive seasons, from 1966-70.
With such a golden goal touch, and in the lofty heights of the second tier of the English league system, you might have expected Mike Bickle to have been rolling in riches by then.
Except that that era was still a long way off from today’s rosy financial picture for professional footballers.
At very least, there was no Jag or Bentley for the ace marksman, according to the evidence recalled by Mike Buckley: “He very happily signed our match programmes for us and then went over to his car – which turned out to be a clapped-out banger of a Mini!
“It was so clapped out, in fact, that it wouldn’t start. So he called us over and asked if we could give him a push start. We were all only too delighted to do that, of course; we did get him going all right, and he gave us a thumbs-up out of his window as he finally drove off.”
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