'Happy 60th birthday Bully. And thanks for the memories': Wolves fans recall Steve Bull memories

Wolves weren’t anywhere near winning any major honours, they weren’t even occupying the top division.

But everything felt, well, just different.

“If you were there, you really don’t need it explaining,” says Charles Ross.  “And if you weren’t – it’s beyond explanation.”

And that pretty much sums it up.

The Steve Bull story? Well, that has always been there for all to see.

Of how he progressed from working in a bed factory, builders’ yard and warehouse, to playing and scoring for England, and appearing at a World Cup. The backstreet international.

Of how he and an unshakeable Band of Gold and Black Brothers rebuilt one of football’s most treasured institutions, dragging Wolves back from the dangerous brink of near extinction and embarking on an exhilarating journey to respectability.

Of how he rejected several offers to move on to far greater and more lucrative opportunities, to loyally and selflessly devote his career to Molineux.

‘Hark now Hear the South Bank sing, a new king’s born today.’   Or, more accurately, six decades ago tomorrow.

Bully is turning 60, and next year it will be 40 years since he and Andy Thompson trundled up the A41 in an orange Ford Cortina to help transform the life of a football club and its thousands of passionate supporters.

The facts speak for themselves.

A total of 561 appearances for Wolves, and 306 goals, a landmark which will surely never be broken.  Back-to-back 50-goal seasons, 18 hat tricks. Thirteen senior international caps for England, four goals.

But enough of the numbers.

Because even those, wildly spectacular as they are, will never fully complete the story.

The tale of a powerful crew-cutted bustling striker who had a fierce and relentless attitude to scoring all sorts of goals cannot be told via statistics alone.

To pinch the famous Maya Angelou quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Wolves supporters who were there, will never forget how Steve Bull made them feel. Never.  

“After some really difficult years, when Bully came along, we finally had someone to get behind.

“As much as anything else, he was one of us.

“There were no airs and graces, you’d see him down the pub and have a pint with him, in fact most of the team would drink in the Goalpost.

“None of that ‘we’re too good for you’ nonsense. They would all muck in and have a laugh with you, Bully as much as anyone.”

Russ Evers is a well-known and lifelong Wolves fan and long-serving co-organiser of the popular Hatherton Wolves Supporters Club.

Even now, all these years on, the memories return to his consciousness like it was just yesterday.  And that’s the thing about Bully.  Even the most hardened veterans of the South Bank are prone to go a little gooey and misty-eyed when recalling those days when he reigned supreme.

When Evers wrote a book to mark 30 years of Hatherton Wolves back in 2017, a total of 306 copies were printed, one for every Bully goal.

Like many others, although perhaps not too many others given the crowds when the fearless goal-grabber first arrived, Evers had been there from the start.

When ‘Bully and Thommo’ arrived from West Bromwich Albion for a combined fee of around £64,000, boss Graham Turner hailed ‘two bright young players with a lot of potential who will prove a wise investment’. Didn’t they just.

“I remember Bully’s first couple of matches where he had some chances and was blasting them all over the place,” Evers continues.

“I was at Cardiff in the Freight Rover when he got his first Wolves goal, and then again at Hartlepool for his second after he rounded the keeper.

“That is when I realised that this bloke had got something, and yet it was just the start of something very special.

“Then at the end of the regular season, he got his first hat trick in the home game against Hartlepool when everyone invaded the pitch and someone nicked his boots.

“Bully was that good, he would probably have been able to score without them.”

Wolves missed out in the first ever play-offs in that first half season, but Bull, and the team, were most definitely on the charge.

Back-to-back lower league titles followed, not to mention a Sherpa Van Trophy final victory against Wembley in front of over 80,000.  It was a proper team effort, including so many other legends such as Andy Mutch, Robbie Dennison, Thompson, Floyd Streete, Keith Downing and many more.  But Bully was at the forefront.

‘We’ll drink-a-drink-a-drink to Stevie the King the King the King.’

And once again, how did he make fans feel?

With Bully it was about more, far more, than just the goals – or even the results,” says Ross, who, between 1993 and 2012, oh-so-diligently edited 141 issues of the A Load of Bull fanzine which took the legendary goalscorer’s name, and had been launched by Dave Worton in 1989.

“He lived out our own dreams, and played as we liked to imagine we would play if only we were blessed with his ability and, most of all, his attitude.