Goodbye To A Rare Gem

On top of the thousands of other words already written, David Instone pays his own tribute to the extraordinary Steve Plant, a father-of-four and fund-raising legend whose funeral was very much a capacity-crowd occasion. 

Traditional it wasn’t. Any black clothing on view was largely accompanied, on request, by dashes or swathes of gold. There were no hymns and the only prayer was one written by his wife, Andrea, whose outfit of choice was a Wolves shirt from the Astropay era. 

The entrance music – a nod to the unrelated Robert Plant – was Stairway To Heaven. We exited to AC/DC’s Highway To Hell and, macabre though it may seem to those not in the loop, Living In A Box was played mid-way through. Steve Plant decided long ago that normal conventions weren’t for him.

We heard during a moving, humorous service that he didn’t bear fools gladly and had a short fuse. Making his mind up came easy, though. There were no grey areas or time wasted on seeing both sides of an argument.

And what a remarkable force for good he was; one who acted in honour of his late dad by raising a truly amazing £250,000 for charity through his selfless pull-everyone-along-with-him efforts. Not bad for a lad who grew up on a council estate in Wordsley, ‘surrounded by wonderful parents, great neighbours and pop bottles’.

“We’d return them to get a few bob and then climb a fence to steal them back and return them all over again,” confessed his brother Simon in his address. The spirit of enterprise surfaced long before Steve left grammar school and enrolled as an apprentice plumber.

‘Full to overflowing’ was how Pastor Jill Berry described Stourbridge Crematorium for the funeral almost a month after his sudden death at 63 during the weekend of the Villa v Wolves game.

Two points are worth making here. She might not have been able to see many of the hundred or so attendees watching and listening from outside but was presumably aware that the date and venue of this emotional send-off were kept very much to family and close friends only. This was one of those mass Wolves farewells that could comfortably have filled St Peter’s in Wolverhampton city centre.

Matt Murray and Carl Ikeme were present, so too Paul Butler, who travelled down from Manchester to pay his repects to ‘a friend, a gentleman and true Wolves legend’.

Matt also relayed to the family the sincere best wishes Maidstone manager George Elokobi expressed by phone, the popular defender having used his recent ‘audience with’ night at the Mount Hotel in Tettenhall Wood to deliver a powerful eulogy to the man who had been due to sit at one of the tables.

Who knows how many, like George, would love to have attended on Friday had schedules and space allowed? 

We are talking after all about someone who became a hero even to those other massive achievers and champion fund-raisers in the Molineux family. They, too, were in awe of Stephen John Plant, the applause for whom in the 63rd minute of the game against Liverpool was the ultimate tribute. I had to settle that day for listening to BBC Radio 5Live while driving back from another game and commentator John Murray’s words summing up the interlude brought a tear to the steeliest eyes.

Ok, so a recap on his life and loves…..Plant was already an avid collector of worn Wolves and England shirts by the time the terminal cancer diagnosis given to his father in 2009 sent his hobby into overdrive.

Eager to make the twilight months more bearable by giving them fresh purpose, he bought him a laptop, pledged to make daily additions to his new memorabilia website and purchased an Elokobi shirt off ebay. In no time and to the detriment to the family budget and his house’s floorboards, he had prized garments hanging everywhere, including one snapped up ‘blind’ for £300 from someone in Canada. Whenever he was described as driven and passionate, this is the sort of behaviour those around him were referring to. Dad was hooked on the collection’s growth, thrilled by the sizeable donations to Birmingham Children’s Hospital and lived unexpectedly for three more years. 

Much less well-known was Steve’s habit of buying cages and using them to house birds, especially canaries. He was a multi winner of prizes and became an aviary board member. Yes…..a lot of us were surprised by that disclosure.

I had known him, chiefly as a friendly face and voice outside the training ground or Molineux, for some 35 years. He flew with the masses to Newcastle in 1990, was one of those who welcomed me on to the Hatherton Wolves coach on a pre-season trip to Northern Ireland later in the same year and drove Steve Bull’s parents to watch some of the striker’s England games. Some great boxes ticked.

When, decades later, I mentioned specific incidents in late-1980s games that had his crew-cut hero as the star turn, he would reply: “Sorry, mate….I’d had a drink before that one.” He lived a full life, all right, complete with one or two scrapes.

His Molineux experience had begun with the goalless visit of Manchester United in August, 1969 and, in his eyes, everything was black and white as well as gold and black. His opinions were always strong and heartfelt and not everyone at his beloved club was impressed by his bluntness. Even his critics in the corridors of power should go back, though, and read his Facebook assessment following the defeat at Villa four weekends ago. It was brilliant. Full of insight, containing bits of humour, elements of tribal baiting and, above all, hugely readable. In the same way that he succeeded with flying colours in so much of what he turned his hand to, he absolutely nailed it. A worthy self-penned epitaph if ever there was one.

I was honoured to be asked to help with the text for his first book, They Wore The Shirt, and listened intently as he outlined his plans to a hand-chosen committee of helpers in a Billy Wright Stand executive box. It would be wrong to say I was immediately bowled over by the concept but he just swept everyone along with his enthusiasm,  single-minded determination, sincerity and crystal-clear vision. And never has a publication had such love poured into it.

Brilliantly designed by Simon Pagett – one of those present two days ago in a Wolves scarf – and sent off to some distant cheaper press in Eastern Europe thanks to the print-trade contacts of the Wolves Former Players Association’s Richard Green, it quickly sold out. Of course it did. So too the follow-up, The Pack Is Back.

The launch nights at Molineux were spectacular, although the main man was reluctant to step where the spotlight was brightest. Not that he had much choice when he received the Rachael Heyhoe Flint award for services to the community in 2018 and had to go on stage in front of a 1,000-strong turn-out. 

There were also tribute evenings to various players, which further underpinned the strong friendships he developed in the dressing room, and charity golf days at Enville – not a sport he would automatically have been marked down as a follower of.

Then there was the marathon penalty shoot-out at Molineux in 2017, another venture (launched after an idea by his good mate, Danny O’Neil) which had some insisting it couldn’t be done but raised big sums for Cure Leukaemia around the time of Carl Ikeme’s nightmare with the disease.

As much as no-one would describe Steve as retiring, he didn’t want such occasions to be about him and would no doubt have let others do as much of the on-mic talking as possible had he been able to be at the launch of his latest book, Old Gold and Black, which has come out since his passing-away. And, by the way, such is the level of interest that copies of that one are already hard to get hold of as well….no surprise there.

We also urge our readers to take a good look at the obituary written by Paul Berry at Steve Plant: A Tribute | Wolves Former Players Association (wolvesfpa.com) and, to capture the man’s self-effacing nature, we take a closing quote from there. Speaking about his Rachae Heyhoe award, he said: “I’ve done some daft stuff over the years and made decisions I am not particularly proud of, but it’s a memory I will take to the grave. I know it shouldn’t have been me up on that stage but it felt like I really was representing thousands of Wolves fans who I had grown up with for a good 50 years.”