Comment: Wolves legend Sir Jack remembered with fitting tribute

It was typical of the great man – he never asked for fuss or recognition of his considerable and selfless acts, both in helping and financing Wolverhampton Wanderers and a host of charitable projects.

Well yesterday we saw first-hand just how much he did help this great city and its football club.

Fans turned out to see a 10ft statue of the great man unveiled outside his beloved Molineux – and the emotional tributes made to Sir Jack were oh-so fitting.

Club chaplain Rev David Wright put into modern context just what Sir Jack did when he said: “Nuno had a dream to build a football team. Sir Jack had another dream – to rebuild a football club.”

Wolves were a shell of a club when Sir Jack took over. They played in a crumbling, decrepit stadium, had no training ground and barely had any facilities to speak of.

Sir Jack personally financed the glorious rebuilding of Molineux, producing what was at the time one of the finest football grounds in the country. It was the house Sir Jack built.

The whole football club was lifted from its knees. He didn’t want nor crave any thanks or praise, he just wanted to see his football team returned to the glories he had lived through in the 1950s.

The infrastructure, it turned out, was the easy part. The good football team took a little longer, but it was worth the wait in 2003 when his dream was finally realised – and it was of course entirely appropriate that the ‘thumbs up’ pose he created on that famous day in Cardiff has now been set in bronze and will stand outside Molineux for time immemorial, by the stand that bears his name.

While there would be a Wolverhampton Wanderers without Sir Jack, the club as we know it now would have taken a very different guise without him.

"A lot of everything he laid in place lives on today," Laurie Dalrymple said yesterday.

"A lot of everything he laid in place lives on today. If you wind the clock back two years to the key characteristics and attributes Fosun wanted, they wanted a club with a very strong fanbase anchored into its community and with a solid infrastructure and facilities.

"He built and laid all of these foundations.

“It was Sir Jack’s lifelong mission to see his hometown club in the top flight of English football. How proud he would be to see us back there today.

“He’ll become a part of our matchday routines every time his beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers play. Today, we say thank you.”

Dalrymple also poignantly made reference to Baroness Rachael Heyhoe Flint, Sir Jack’s great friend, who we also lost recently. They will undoubtedly have been up there watching it with a proud smile.

As well as the considerable physical improvements Sir Jack made to Wolves, he also restored both pride and ambition into the club.

The 1990s were a rollercoaster of big spending and spectacular failure but boy was it fun being a Wolves fan again after the living morgue that was the mid 1980s, where apathy was rife. It was anything but dull under Sir Jack. olves were a big deal again.

Son Jonathan, who like his father enjoyed turbulent times at Wolves in the 1990s but can now look back with pride at the building blocks they put in place, thanked fans for their love and support.

“Perhaps in the future when you walk past the statue of my father you can give him the thumbs up,” he said. They certainly will.

Football has moved on a great deal even since Sir Jack’s day. The ebullient ‘local fan-turned millionaire buying the club’ tale doesn’t really happen anymore. Overseas ownership models where there’s money to be made in the cash playground of the Premier League, are far more commonplace, like of course with Fosun at Wolves.

And that’s perhaps why we’ll never see the likes of Sir Jack again.

Sure there’ll be enthusiastic, eccentric billionaires who fancy their shot at building a club from nothing.

But none of them will have the heart, the dedication and the undiluted passion of Sir Jack. He was a fan in the truest sense of the word – he cared, he gave a damn, he bled gold and black.

That's another facet that set him apart – he understood supporters because he was one of them. Born a stone's throw from Molineux, his love for Wolves was unwavering and pure. It was in his soul.

Charismatic, generous, friendly, emotional and with a wholesome, almost childlike love of his town and his football club, Sir Jack was one of a kind and is sorely missed.

It was a pleasure to hear memories of the great man from so many people who loved him at yesterday's ceremony. Social media was a different story, with more than a few quibbles regarding the likeless of the statue. You can imagine Sir Jack having a good chuckle about all the fuss.

There isn’t a gesture in the world that’s fitting enough for a man who gave so, so much to Wolverhampton Wanderers.

But a permanent statue outside the place which made him so happy is a pretty decent one. Thumbs up for Sir Jack.