Too often, though, the character lacked intensity: as thin as the comic book page from which he seemed to emerge.
“He was a bit of a Roy of the Rovers figure and as I got older I became frustrated and almost embarrassed because people knew my dad better than I did,” Rob says.
“Part of the joy of having a father is finding our own identity – there’s a little blueprint there and, if we’re lucky, we follow the good parts and discard the bad parts, but I didn’t have that.
“There’s a kid in me that wants to understand the simple things: how he smelled and how he looked, a little more about him, rather than his personality. That’s eternal frustration.”
Rob channeled that frustration into a book, The Ghost of White Hart Lane, in which he interviewed family members, former teammates, friends and acquaintances, trying to uncover the man behind the myth.
And little by little he found it.
Rob learned of the sadness and homesickness that came over John every winter in London. He heard about the time he drove home dangerously drunk and smashed through the gates of White Hart Lane with his car. Most tellingly, an uncle told Rob about the child John had fathered in Scotland and left behind before traveling south, playing for Spurs and meeting Sandra.
“Part of me has always been trying to live up to this one who was the absolute best, who was idolized not just by the community, but by hundreds of thousands of people,” Rob says.
“Finding out that he had flaws and weaknesses, that he struggled with self-confidence, his psychological condition and seasonal emotional defects, that he had made mistakes – if I had learned all that earlier, it would have made more sense to my existence.
“If we know our parents are fallible, it really makes us understand that we can make mistakes. We don’t have to know all the answers.”
John’s absence shaped Rob as definitively as his presence would have.
Rob is a still life photographer – “I’ve always been looking for those details and clues” – and may be training as a counsellor.
Following this performance, Rob will be in the target audience at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for the first performance of a play, called The Ghost of White Hart Lane, which he commissioned about his father’s existence.
The staging aims to share his father’s story with several generations of fans who take neither John’s existence nor his death into account.
“It’s something I talk to my own therapist about,” he says. “Seeing how the story was brought to life in the readings of the play reinforced the reasons why I wanted to get involved in the project.
“I think there’s something about trying to bring my father back to life.”
After two nights in Tottenham, the play will move north, taking the opposite journey to that John took in life, for a season at the Edinburgh Festival., external
There are some things that remain lost. Rob is still searching for a recording of John’s voice. One of the Tottenham shirts he wore in the match remains elusive.
But over the decades, he has learned so much more: knowledge and empathy for the father he never knew.
