By Mayukh Ghosh

Stanley Matthews is a great example of how multiple sports can play a significant role in someone being brilliant in a particular sport.

Matthews chaired by Lev Yashin and Ferenc Puskas

Stanley's father Jack Matthews was a decent boxer in his youth. He even laid claim to two unofficial featherweight titles. He might well have challenged for a national title had not the First World War interrupted life in Europe.
Jack fought on till 1921 but then decided to spend more time in his barber's shop. Before football monopolised Stanley's life, his job was to sweep and brush up the hair from coats. He also prepared customers for a shave by lathering their chins.
In 1964, BBC made a documentary on Stanley called 'Saturday Hero' and filmed him armed with shaving brush lathering up Billy Thompson.
Forty years earlier, Billy was the first customer the nine year old Stanley had made ready for his father's razor.
Stanley loved doing this job as a kid because this made him hear his father's tales from inside the boxing ring.

Jimmy Vallance, the Stoke City trainer who later became Stanley's father-in-law, was a keen golfer and he introduced Stanley to the sport while he was a teenager.
Stanley liked golf so much that he even broke Stoke City's rules to play golf on Thursdays and Fridays.

He liked cricket too. The story goes that the twelve year old wicket-keeper fluffed his chance to progress when he walked four miles for a schoolboy trial. As he approached the ground he saw all other boys in white flannels and, overwhelmed by shyness, fled the scene.

He was a decent sprinter as well. He regularly ;participated in the August Bank Holiday races. The first time his father took him there, he cried, overawed by the prospect of performing in front of so many people.
He did pretty well in the coming years. Won four of the seven races he took part in the next decade.

Stanley was not bad with a tennis racquet in hand either. Once, partnered by Jim Westland, he managed to beat Freddie Steele and Frank Soo in the final of a doubles tournament played among Stoke City players.
And when the England football team toured Europe in 1938, Matthews won a table tennis competition involving all players, beating Aston Villa's Frank Broom in the final.

And, to add to all these, he was quite a decent footballer, wasn't he?

He was born on this day ( 1st February ) in 1915.