‘Take a walk around my centre-half, gentlemen. Go on! Walk around him. He’s a colossus’
— Bill Shankly, July 1961
Even now, 63 years after the event, the words have lost none of their impact. Your mind wanders, imagining the enthusiasm that would have burst out of Liverpool’s legendary manager as he unveiled Ron Yeats, a £22,000 signing from Dundee United who changed the club’s course of history.
Some of the things Shankly said have been embellished through the decades but his evocative description of Yeats proved to be timeless: his broad shoulders and shock of black hair as evident in later years as they were during his glorious, powerful peak.
Shankly was almost in awe of Yeats when he first met him, having initially tried to sign him for Huddersfield — the sheer, hulking size of the Great Scot leaving his compatriot in no doubt he had found the crucial foundation stone from which he could begin building a ‘bastion of invincibility’.
‘Jesus, you must be seven feet tall, son?’ Shankly wondered. ‘No,’ Yates replied. ‘I’m only six feet tall.’ ‘Well,’ Shankly replied. ‘That’s near enough seven feet for me.’
Liverpool legend Ron Yeats, pictured with the league trophy in 1964, made a huge impact
Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was almost in awe of Yeats' height when he first met him
Yeats, who joined Liverpool from Dundee United, was the club's most important defensive purchase ever
Those stories were passed down through the generations, leaving each new era of Liverpool fans with the perception that Yeats was Anfield’s version of Thor — a superhero who could single-handedly see off an army of opposition strikers, swatting them away like pesky flies.
‘Ron Yeats just ran in straight lines and you had to make sure to get out of his way,’ Joe Royle, the Everton great, once explained about the thunder that would arrive into challenges. ‘Even when the ball was out of play, you just kept on moving to avoid him.’
Much has been written in recent years about the impact Jurgen Klopp’s £75million signing of Virgil van Dijk had in transforming Liverpool’s fortunes, but Shankly’s addition of Yeats, while they were still a Second Division side, was the most important defensive purchase they ever made.
Liverpool stormed into the First Division and, within four years, had blown a hole in a dam that led to a torrent of trophies. Yeats twice held up the League Championship trophy, in 1964 and 1966, but the silverware with which he is most closely associated is the 1965 FA Cup.
They used to say the Liver Birds on top of the building on the waterfront would need to fly away for Liverpool to win the FA Cup but that 2-1 triumph over Leeds, secured in extra time with an Ian St John header, was won thanks to heart and soul.
Memorably, when Yates walked up the 39 steps to be greeted by the Queen, who was dressed in Red, he forgot all royal convention and told Her Majesty that he was, quite simply, ‘knackered’. The smile as he received the trophy was the embodiment of total contentment.
‘It was an emotional time getting the Cup from the Queen,’ he would later recall. ‘In fact, I just wanted to throw it into the crowd, to the Liverpool supporters. We have won it now. Let’s share it between us. I do not go round with the medals on my chest — it is just there for me to say.’
Such high-achievements ensured he was treated with reverence, wherever he went in the city.
Yeats helped Liverpool to overcome Leeds in the FA Cup final in 1965
Sami Hyypia was amongst the players Yeats recommended as a scout for Liverpool
The Liverpool Echo used to run a sports personality of the year dinner and part of the ceremony in 2010 involved Kevin Keegan being presented with the Bill Shankly award.
Long after he had come off stage, Keegan sat on a table with Yeats, Ian Callaghan and Tommy Smith and the queue for autographs for these men snaked around the room. Many of those whose menus were being scribbled on would never have seen them play but all knew just what they represented.
‘A giant of a man and a giant of a player,’ Jamie Carragher observed on Saturday about Yeats, who passed away on Friday, aged 86, after a period of illness. ‘Everything at Liverpool starts with people like Big Ron.’
Carragher was one of the many charged with upholding the standards that were expected by Yeats, who was the son of an Aberdeen butcher. Rather surprisingly, given he captained Liverpool on 417 occasions (second only to Steven Gerrard) after being given the armband on Boxing Day 1961, he was only capped twice by Scotland.
‘Ron is one of the all-time greats of this club, without a shadow of a doubt,’ John Aldridge told Liverpool’s official website.
‘He was captain of this team when I first watched Liverpool in the mid-1960s and I was very fortunate to get to know the great man.’
Aldridge had a close relationship with Yeats, who would become a Liverpool scout after Sir Kenny Dalglish brought him back in 1986, his Anfield playing career having ended in 1971.
Management was not for him, after an unhappy spell over the Mersey with Tranmere Rovers, but looking to find the next generation of players felt like a vocation.
Yeats (top) is hoisted aloft by teammates (l-r) Geoff Strong, Wilf Stevenson and Peter Thompson
Yeats, pictured at a memorabilia show in 2011, was hugely popular with Liverpool supporters
‘He actually scouted me when I was at Oxford United, so I will be forever grateful to him,’ said Aldridge, who moved from the Manor Ground to Anfield in 1987.
‘As I walked through the main reception, the day I was getting introduced to the media, Ron was there to shake my hand.
‘I had actually broken my hand and I didn’t want the club to know about it but Big Ron gave me this handshake! I tell you what, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life!
‘I just crumbled and we had some good laughs about that over the years. He was an absolutely brilliant bloke.’
There was some happy symmetry with how his time at Liverpool ended. He retired in 2006, after the club had won the FA Cup in Cardiff with one of his finds — Sami Hyypia — in the team, and, as a keen golfer, was happy to spend as much time as he could walking around various courses.
Sadly, Alzheimer’s took its unforgiving hold on him in later years and he had been taken into care, but a sign of what ‘Rowdy’ — as he was known on the Kop — meant to Liverpool as a club, was the fact that all flags were lowered to half-mast in recognition of all he did.
‘I was 6 feet, 2½ inches and 14½ stone, so when I tackled someone they must have felt it,’ Yeats once told the fan website, www.lfchistory.net.
‘I wasn’t dirty as far as dirty is concerned. I used to make sure I was there or thereabouts. At that time we had these big centre forwards to play against.
‘I always knew if there was going to be a battle, I would win the battle. I wouldn’t come second. I was a tackler, a header of the ball and read the game well. I got the ball and gave it to someone who could pass it. I knew my limitations.’
That was Yeats: honest, self effacing and self-deprecating. To many others, however, he was a totem, crucial to everything that followed. Shankly called him his colossus. It is a description that will last for eternity