Brian Clough never forgot. Not only those surgeons, doctors, nurses and NHS staff who helped save his life after he underwent a liver transplant in the Freeman Hospital but, also, the countless messages of support he received during his stay there.
"Up there on Tyneside, they couldn't have been kinder to me if I'd been their own father, son, brother or uncle," the legendary manager later wrote in his memoirs. "In fact, I think they were kinder to me than they are to one of their own."
Perhaps you can see why Clough once teased that he would walk back to the North East if he was ever asked - and the two-time European Cup winner came mightily close to doing just that in 1981.
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Newcastle United were stagnating in the Second Division at the time and a consortium of businessmen wanted to awaken the sleeping giant. So began the Newcastle Supporters Association's ambitious attempts to entice the 'phenomenon' that was Clough to St James' Park as member John Waugh explained.
"I've always felt from the very beginning that I met Brian that he had a big yearning to come back to the North East," Waugh told ChronicleLive ahead of Newcastle's season opener against Forest on Saturday. "He played for Sunderland but he was bred in Middlesbrough and the potential for him managing Newcastle was always a topic that he was happy to talk about. We got an inkling of an idea and we talked about it."
It may sound like fantasy but, crucially, the group had an in. Peter Ratcliffe was a commercial agent who used to arrange appearances for Clough in the North East such as shop openings.
The Nottingham Forest boss would regularly invite Ratcliffe and his friends, Waugh and the late Malcolm Dix, for a cup of tea after breakfast when he was staying over at the Holiday Inn up north. It was at this very venue that a proposal was eventually put to Clough.
"We had this focus of attempting to get him here," Waugh said. "He was very much a money man.
"He always made sure that Brian Clough got extremely well paid and we came up with this idea because he had said: 'I understand the political movements that you've got but you cannot decide what I would get.'
"Malcolm said to him, 'Yes, we can because we're proposing that you become managing director as well as the football manager.' He was absolutely stunned. I cannot remember another time when he didn't come back with a very quick answer. He really was stunned. He said, 'Are you seriously presenting that to me?'"
The offer carried real weight. These were some of the men, after all, who later helped change the course of the club's history with the Magpie Group when Sir John Hall became chairman in 1992.
Also, Clough loved a challenge and this was a comparable situation to the one he walked into at Nottingham Forest in 1975. Forest were struggling in the same division at the time before Clough later led his side to promotion and a plethora of trophies, including a First Division title in 1978 and, astonishingly, back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980.
Clough was suitably intrigued - not least by the idea of effectively naming his own salary - and told Waugh and co that he would 'definitely be looking very positively at that' before sitting down with his family to discuss it. Waugh maintained that Newcastle chairman Stan Seymour Jr was also privately open to Clough's arrival even if he, naturally, had to say otherwise in public with Arthur Cox already in place as manager.
Seymour recognised that landing Clough would be a seismic moment in the club's history - just as Kevin Keegan's arrival as a player was a year later. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that flagging attendances at St James' Park would have surged overnight given Clough's charisma and standing as the greatest manager in the country at the time.
However, Clough's wife, Barbara, was not keen on uprooting the family once more after Clough's previous spells managing Leeds, Brighton, Derby and Hartlepool, which left Waugh and the Newcastle Supporters Association in 'purgatory' .
"We waited a day, two days, three days, four days and we thought, 'Oh s---!'" he added. "It just killed it. He was reluctant to ring to tell us."
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