This excerpt from Ed Glinert’s Manchester: The Biography on the death of one of the greatest footballers in Manchester history.
Denis Law is the only Scot who has ever been crowned European Footballer of the Year. He was a great showman and one of the deadliest goal poachers the game has ever produced. As George Best once explained, “if a pass from Denis Law failed to reach you, it was odds-on that you were not thinking fast enough to be in the right place for it.” Law was born in Aberdeen, into abject poverty, on the 24th of February 1940, the youngest of seven children. He went barefoot until he was 12, and turned down a place at the grammar school because it would have meant playing rugby (union, obviously).
Law once explained how growing up in Aberdeen he looked anything but a future professional sportsman. “Small, skinny and bespectacled with a dreadful squint, it is a wonder my fisherman father did not throw me straight into the North Sea.” In the early days, before he had an operation for a squint, he would play with one eye closed. When Andy Beattie, who became Scotland’s first ever manager in 1954, first saw Law, he said to his brother: “The boy’s a freak. Never did I see a less likely football prospect – weak, puny and bespectacled.”
While George Best was reluctantly settling in, in south Manchester, Denis Law was leaving Manchester City for Torino, in the summer of 1961, for a record £110,000 fee. Law went to Italy with Hibs’ Joe Baker. When their plane touched down, they were welcomed by thousands of cheering fans. Pre-season training included a stay at a luxury hotel in the Alps. Just before the season started, Inter Milan unsuccessfully claimed that Law had signed a pre-contract agreement to join them. Unconcerned, Law bagged four goals in his first six games. The downside was the cynical tactics of the Italian defenders, who targeted his legs with and without the ball. On the 7th of February 1962, tragedy almost struck. At four in the morning, Joe Baker drove Law and his party home in his brand-new Alfa Romeo Giulietta. Driving too fast along the Corso Cairoli, he misjudged a turn at a roundabout and clipped the kerb. The car flipped over and hit a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the founder of modern Italy, stopping just short of the River Po. Amazingly, Law suffered only minor injuries, but Baker went into a coma. On waking, Baker assumed he had killed Law. In his last game for Torino, against Napoli on the 25th of April, Law discovered that the Torino manager had asked the referee to send him off because he had ignored instructions about taking a throw-in. Despite a successful season goal-wise, Law wanted to go home, and now joined Manchester United for another record fee.
