I wouldn’t sleep a lot the night before.”But Dave Whelan will admit to one small concern – whether he will be able to take up those 30 seats for Barbados when the final whistle blows.BiographyDave WhelanBorn: 24 November 1936 in Bradford.Lives: Parbold, Lancashire.Family: wife Pat, daughter Jane, son Paul and four grandchildren.Club: chairman of Wigan Athletic Owner of JJB Sports. Britain’s 155th richest man last year with family wealth of £250m.Investment: £50m including RL club. Bought football club 10 years ago; built JJB Stadium to replace Springfield Park.Biggest signing: Jason Roberts from West Bromwich for £1.4m.Playing career: Blackburn Rovers 1956-60: 78 apps, three goals Crewe Alexandra 1962-66: 115 apps, 0 goals. A right-back, broke his leg playing for Blackburn in the 1960 FA Cup final defeat by Wolves..
It is a sun-kissed southern California afternoon in April – perhaps not the toastiest month of year to go for a swim with Lynne Cox, but not exactly the cruellest either For her, of course, the assignment is a doddle. The beaches of northern Orange County, between the surfing waves of Huntington Beach and the hulking cranes of Long Beach harbour, may be where she trains on a regular basis. But her true medium, the peculiarly exquisite form of watery hell she has made her very own, is several drastic ticks of the thermometer colder than anything she or I could ever encounter here. She crossed the notoriously intemperate Strait of Magellan, on the tip of South America, before she was 20. She negotiated the treacherous currents of Cold War geopolitics as well as near-freezing temperatures to swim the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia in the mid-1980s.
Three years ago, she capped even these achievements by doing what no human being ought to be capable of doing in a swimsuit: she swam just over a mile in the glacial ice soup of Antarctica – an experience she describes as a “great dream”.As I gun down the final stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway to our appointment, I wonder just how much gentle humouring I’m letting myself in for As it turns out, I have nothing to worry about. Cox is not remotely the fiercely competitive sort of athlete who will shoot me dead with a single withering glance She is friendly, open and devoid of pretence. The sand you kick up by sliding your feet will keep them away.”As we arrive at Surfside Beach, though, Mother Nature turns downright capricious The stiff ocean breeze turns into a 40mph howl The sun vanishes behind a bank of cloud. For a while at least, I think this is going to be fun.”Slide your feet along the sand to avoid the stingrays,” she warns with motherly concern.
“If you get stung your foot will blow up to the size of a football. It has taken him three months to settle to our game compared to Sweden. Now he is coming through strong, and Paul said he will be on the bench against Reading. I thought I had made a mistake and that Paul would have a go at me for spending the money.”We are so lucky to have him as manager.
We have had five or six over the 10 years, and when Paul came for the interview he was so upfront and so honest he impressed me. “I got 29 quid for playing in that 1960 Cup final, and £3 of that was from the Milk Marketing Board for drinking their product. Now they are talking of offering Steven Gerrard £90,000 a week to stay at Liverpool. Unbelievable, isn’t it?”Good luck to them if they are daft enough to pay it, but it’s not the way the game should be run I don’t think I could push myself to pay stupid money.
