It was in 1975 that Malcolm Macdonald ran 100 metres in 10.9 seconds. ‘It’s 10 metres in 100 seconds these days,’ we laugh, shuffling back to his North Tyneside home after a four-hour pub lunch.
Back and hip operations await. The VAT of being a footballer, he calls it. He could have been an Olympic sprinter.
‘After I ran that time on Superstars (1970s TV show), the athletics coach Ron Pickering said he could get me below 10.5 seconds, but I’d have to give up football,’ says Macdonald.
Not fancy it?
‘Goals beat golds,’ he says. With that, we share a hug and up the garden path he goes. There will never be anything not super about Supermac.
Former striker Malcolm Macdonald, nicknamed Supermac, is a Newcastle United legend
Macdonald scored 138 goals in just 258 games for the Magpies between 1971 and 1976
Fourteen-time England international Supermac pictured in action for Newcastle in 1974
This lunch has been months in the making. That VAT bill from Macdonald’s playing career landed last year. Since then, he has not been in his usual seat in the press box at St James’ Park. His big mate, the legendary Evening Chronicle writer John Gibson, sits alone now.
Right, Gibson and I agreed before Christmas, let’s get Supermac out. A few beers, a few more stories and no dictaphones. The call came last week that Macdonald, now 75, was feeling up to it. Wonderful.
There is just one problem — it is so close to Newcastle versus Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final and Macdonald played the last time they met at Wembley. There’s also his Roy of the Rovers debut against the Reds.
‘Would Malcolm be OK with a dictaphone and photographer after all?’ I ask Gibson.
‘OK with it? He’d insist! He still thinks he’s John Wayne! Tell your snapper to be there,’ says Gibson, and with that our date is set.
We are one beer in when we rewind the clock. Given the first half-hour was spent picking apart Newcastle’s chances of lifting the cup, some levity is needed. So, we go back to the start, the day Macdonald and Gibson met.
It was the summer of 1971, and the striker had just signed for Newcastle from Luton Town.
‘He was 21, never played in the First Division and he arrives at St James’ in a Rolls Royce, this Cockney kid,’ begins Gibson.
Was that Cockney or cocky? ‘Both!’ they bellow in unison. ‘I had a chauffeur,’ says Macdonald.
‘Aye, with a little peaky cap,’ adds Gibson.
‘I made him drive all around the car park before he pulled up in front of all of the journalists,’ says Macdonald. ‘He then walked the long way around the car and let me out.’
Gibson, 84, was among those reporters. ‘I said to a colleague, “He better be f***ing good!”.’ And was he? ‘No, he wasn’t good,’ says Gibson. ‘He was sensational.’
Macdonald (right) pictured reminiscing over a beer with journalist and old friend John Gibson
Gibson and Macdonald were recently joined at their local pub by Mail Sport’s Craig Hope
Even the press conference that followed was box office. My Daily Mail predecessor, Doug Weatherall, challenged the new boy.
‘Dougie was pushing me and asked if I had any targets,’ says Macdonald. ‘Yes, I said, 30 goals. I carry that target with me everywhere I go, I told him.’
The Mail headline the following day read: Supermouth!
‘Aye, but he had plenty to shout about,’ says Gibson. ‘He was born to be a superstar.’
I never saw Supermac live but I have heard the stories, read the books and watched the videos. Which three words, I ask the table, would best describe him as a player? I go first and, based on my anecdotal evidence, offer: ‘Fast. Fearless. Powerful.’
Gibson adds ‘big heart’ to the list. Macdonald nods along, waiting for his turn.
‘The words you used were brilliant,’ he begins. ‘But I would add four more. Don’t. Give. A. F***.
‘The reason I say that is, you’d be surprised how many coaches try to coach you away from goalscoring positions. “We want you to do more of this, more of that”. I used to listen and then say, “Stick your goals on the table” (Macdonald had 270 before retiring aged 29).
‘When I was 14, my sports master said to me, “What are you doing next Tuesday? I’ve got a task for you. Go to White Hart Lane and watch Jimmy Greaves for 90 minutes — do not watch the game.” I went. Tottenham won 2-0. Greaves scored both and touched the ball about four times. It was the perfect lesson for me. As a striker, I was utterly greedy, ruthless, single-minded.’
From three words to three goals and his Newcastle debut against Liverpool at St James’. If I could go back and see one match live, I tell them, this would be it. The hat-trick in a 3-2 win and Macdonald being carried off with his front teeth missing is the stuff of legend on Tyneside. My dad has always said that Supermac wasn’t the best player he saw for Newcastle, but he was the most exciting.
Macdonald was one of the 70s’ most colourful characters; good looking, flash car, sideburns
The striker also enjoyed prolific spells with Luton and Arsenal before an early retirement
‘That’s fair comment,’ says Macdonald.
‘Football is about excitement,’ says Gibson. ‘And the debut… wow. I have never sat in a ground at half-time when, rather than go for a Bovril, everyone stays in their place, buzzing about what they’ve just seen.
‘His second goal was awesome, just before half-time, top corner at the Gallowgate End. I didn’t go downstairs to the press room. I stayed in the stand and listened to the crowd. You didn’t have a little TV, you had to talk to people to confirm what you’d just seen. Just brilliant.’
Macdonald: ‘I then remember the most incredible sound. It started getting louder and louder… “Supermac, superstar, how many goals have you scored so far?”, and on it went.’
The goal count reached three in the second half before he lost four teeth chasing a fourth goal when Ray Clemence smashed into him.
‘I couldn’t have wished for anymore as a journalist,’ says Gibson. ‘Carried off on his shield — we were just praying he was still alive!’
There is still the 1974 FA Cup final against Liverpool to talk about, but let’s not spoil our fish and chips, fresh from the nearby North Sea. Rather, let’s enjoy a memory of the semi-final, a 2-0 win over Burnley at Hillsborough in which Macdonald scored twice.
I defy anyone who watches those goals and hears Brian Moore’s commentary not to feel the hairs on their neck stand up. It was goalless after an hour when Macdonald went clear, with Burnley defender Colin Waldron on his back.
Moore’s words… ‘Macdonald is away… Waldron is pulling him down… Still Macdonald… Straight at the goalkeeper… Still Macdonald… And he’s scored… Supermac has scored!’.
He added another on the counter, nutmegging the goalkeeper.
‘Afterwards, I asked the referee, Gordon Hill, “Why the hell didn’t you blow for a foul for the first goal?”. He said, “As a referee, it’s my job to know the players. And if there was anyone who was going to keep going with a sniff of a goal, it was you. So, I let you go. But thank God you scored, otherwise I would have looked a right idiot!”.’
The idiots come the Wembley final were Newcastle.
‘We came off at half-time at 0-0,’ says Macdonald. I said to Frank Clark, “There is no way we can play as badly as that in the second half”. And it was true, we were worse!’
Liverpool won 3-0.
Macdonald played for Newcastle in the 1974 FA Cup final, which Liverpool won 3-0 at Wembley
Macdonald: ‘The only thing good about us were the dog-tooth jackets we wore beforehand!’
Macdonald had many strike partners on the pitch, but his sidekick off it was Gibson. ‘You see players today in a nightclub behind a red rope and security,’ says Macdonald. ‘We just used to walk in and be amongst the Geordies.’
Gibson: ‘Supermac was like a pop star, the George Best of the North-East.’
There was, and still is, a weekly Supermac column ghosted by Gibson. I have known them both for 20 years, but I never knew the story they now share.
‘I met him one Saturday during the summer to do the column,’ says Gibson. ‘My little boy, Nicholas, had just died. He was 11 weeks old. We were in the hotel just down from St James’. Malcolm told the waiter, “Whenever that bottle of wine is finished, don’t ask if we want another one, just replenish it in the bucket”.
‘He knew how low I was. We did the column, put the stuff away and just sat and talked. We met at one o’clock and left at 10. He supported me through the whole day, and picked up the tab. I have never, ever forgotten that.’
He takes Macdonald by the arm. ‘To have a friend… the lift I got from that. That is what you call friendship.’
What follows is also friendship, in its own way.
‘Actually,’ says Macdonald, ‘I’d just got a credit card, they were new on the market, and all I wanted to do was to use it!’
We are laughing again.
I produce a photograph. There is Macdonald in a pub with Best, Bobby Moore, Alan Ball, Rodney Marsh, Frank Lampard Snr and the entertainer Kenny Lynch. I have always wanted to know the story of that night.
‘It was the opening of Bobby’s pub, Mooro’s, in Stratford,’ says Macdonald. ‘But it got so heaving that we had to leave. We went somewhere else for a drink.
‘I recall having a fabulous time with Bestie. It was the first time I had been able to sit down and properly talk with him. What a wonderful, warm man. He was always interested in you.’
The interest in Macdonald remains. Two brothers approach our table and ask for a picture. Later, as a gentleman leaves the pub, he shouts back: ‘Best striker in the world, he was.’
Rodney Marsh, comedian Kenny Lynch, Frank Lampard Sr, Alan Ball, George Best, Macdonald and Bobby Moore pictured (left to right) at the opening of ‘Mooro’s’ pub in Stratford
Newcastle will face Liverpool at Wembley again on Sunday – this time in the Carabao Cup final
Sunday’s final was one of many topics of discussion during a fun and lively liquid lunch
It takes our conversation back to the current day. Alexander Isak is Newcastle’s star centre-forward now, but there is talk of the Swede leaving in the summer. Gibson saw Newcastle sell Macdonald to Arsenal for £333,333 in 1976. They were relegated two years later.
‘If you sell unique players, you can’t replace them,’ he says. ‘That is the same for Malcolm or Isak. One of the only times I’ve been happy to see Newcastle lose was when Arsenal beat us 5-3 and Supermac scored a hat-trick. I sat in the press box and thought, “Serves you right”. If they let Isak go, they’re asking for trouble. You don’t get another Supermac the next day. You don’t get another Isak the next day.’
Macdonald: ‘I remember that hat-trick. Alan Ball came in before the game with a newspaper article and pinned it on the wall. It was Gordon Lee, the Newcastle manager who’d wanted me gone, slaughtering me. “He’s over-rated. He won’t score goals at Arsenal. He’s too greedy and it spoils the team”. Bally made everyone read it and then did the team-talk himself, no need for the manager. “That’s what they’re saying about our team-mate. Let’s stuff it up them!” And we did!’
Stuffed is how we feel now. Afternoon has made way for evening and it’s time for home. Once, Macdonald would have made the short dash to his front door in less than the time it takes to pull a pint. The upside of it taking a little longer is that we have time for one more story.
‘Have I ever told you about my time on Superstars?’ he begins.
Supermac will always be a superstar.
