It was 40 years ago last weekend that Dave Heywood made his eighth and final appearance for Wolves, in a defeat against Fulham at Molineux.
The left back’s debut, which remains one of the youngest in the club’s history at 17 years and 157 days, had arrived a few months earlier, against Wolves’ next opponents Manchester City.
Today, into this evening and the early hours of tomorrow, he will be serving as the Returning Officer for South Staffordshire District Council, one of the many duties which are part of his role as the local authority’s Chief Executive.
It would be a decent quiz question to ask how many former footballers have gone into local government after hanging up their boots?
Of course, Wolves’ legend and Vice-President, and indeed Heywood’s boyhood hero, John Richards, moved into similar circles after retirement, working as a sports and recreation manager with the City of Wolverhampton Council and head of leisure services with Cannock Chase Council.
Heywood, meanwhile, whose arrival as an apprentice at Molineux came just after Richards had ended his long playing association with Wolves, has progressed all the way through to the top role at South Staffordshire Council, one he has delivered, for the last eight years, with considerable success.
Walk into the council offices in Codsall, and it doesn’t feel like a council. Or at least, the stereotypical view of a council.
Since taking the helm in 2017, Heywood has worked closely with elected members and a diligent and creative group of management and staff to lead a number of initiatives including a groundbreaking and innovative project which has transformed the council space.
It has become a Community Hub, home to over 20 different organisations ranging from small private sector businesses to public sector partners and the voluntary sector including the local doctor’s surgery, South Staffordshire police force, a children’s nursery, and a library, to name but a few.
Not only does that help the Council bring in vital finances to help deliver such a vast range of services, it also encourages a level of connectivity and joint working between organisations which must surely boost efficiency for all those who benefit from their work.
“When I think back to when I was a footballer, never would I have thought I would end up as the Chief Executive of a local authority,” says Heywood.
“But I feel both very privileged to be doing this role, and to have an influence in the wellbeing and prosperity of the community of South Staffordshire.
“To see the transition of the council since I have become Chief Executive makes me very proud, but I am fortunate to have come into a very good council, with a really strong workforce.
“It has all been about creating a cultural environment that has enabled individuals to excel – and the council to excel – in providing services to residents of our local communities.
“Turning the council offices into a community hub was always a key part of the plan, not only in developing the values of the council in how we work and the way we work, but also providing a facility for the community which can offer so much more.
“As a council, we are relatively small but also complex in what we do, offering over 20 different services and functions from leisure to open space, planning, waste and recycling, housing and addressing issues such as homelessness.
“The difference that we can all make to the lives of local people is humbling, and that is why it is a privilege for me to hold a position of this nature and to be able to install the values which myself, councillors and the leadership team here believe in.”
Heywood occupying such a vital and influential position of a local authority, back in the area where he spent so much of his childhood, forms just part of his overall story, in which so much was packed into the short stint of his first team involvement at Wolves those four decades ago.
He believes some of the qualities of resilience and leadership which he has carried forward into his current employment emerged and were nurtured during his spell as a young player at Molineux, but alongside the extreme highs of enjoying his teenage kicks making his senior breakthrough, also came the disappointment of eventually being released, but more pertinently the heart problem which could have been dangerously serious.
Heywood was born in Sedgley before the family moved to Codsall when he was about nine, and football was always very high on the priority list.
His Dad would take him to watch Wolves at Molineux, and he also played for different junior teams including Bilbrook, Albrighton and South Staffs Wolves.
It was only at the age of 15 when he started to get more recognition, being selected for the county team and joining Willenhall Town’s youth team thanks to a recommendation from Richie Dams, the PE teacher at Codsall High School where Heywood was a pupil.
Willenhall’s manager was Geoff Blackwell, also a scout at Wolves, and he recommended Heywood to trial for the club’s Midlands Floodlit Youth League team, from which he emerged successful after a fairly rigorous recruitment process.
At that point, Shrewsbury Town came in with the offer of an apprenticeship, which effectively forced Wolves’ hand to come to a decision in offering a similar deal, and Heywood was given the opportunity of a two-year scholarship.
“I was never the cream of the crop playing junior football, I never really stood out,” he reflects.
“I was always that bit below those players who were getting picked up by the scouts and signing schoolboy forms, and when I got to 15, I thought I was going to have to give up the dream of becoming a professional.
“I was starting to think about what else I could do, but then things started to happen and there were conversations, and eventually I ended up at Wolves.
“To be offered that apprenticeship was quite surreal – to find yourself on the books of the team you supported as a boy was just incredible.”
Heywood, with barely a few CSE’s to his name, had actually returned to Sixth Form to start studying for O-levels, but three days after heading back, received the offer from Wolves. And the rest became history.
He was one of many coming through the youth ranks at the time to benefit from the formidable leadership of coach Frank Upton. A healthy dose of tough love, and one which clearly left its legacy.
“Frank was a really strict coach – discipline was his number one priority – and at the time we probably didn’t really appreciate what he was doing for us,” says Heywood.
“He was preparing us for adult life, for any potential rejection or disappointment, and the pressures of either making it or not making it.
“A disciplinarian, whose job was to keep us on the straight and narrow.
“I remember a time when he had us all back after training – I can’t remember if we’d been playing up or had performed badly in a game – but we had to scrub the changing rooms from top to bottom.
“At other times we had to clean the stands, all the stuff that doesn’t happen anymore, but now I understand why…it was all about discipline and preparation for what was to come.
“It was such a good upbringing, and an experience I wouldn’t have swapped for the world.”
Heywood can also recall his first meeting with then manager Graham Hawkins. And the surreal moment of reporting for his first pre-season training at Lilleshall, and doing the warm-up alongside heroes he had watched from the terraces, such as Paul Bradshaw, Peter Daniel, Geoff Palmer and Kenny Hibbitt. Heroes he had also watched lift the 1980 League Cup Final with his parents at Wembley.
Playing regularly in the Midland Intermediate League, and progressing through to the reserves with a debut at Bradford’s Valley Parade, Wolves’ senior side were relegated from the topflight during his first season as a trainee, prompting Tommy Docherty to come in as manager.
And it was in training a few months into his second year as an apprentice that Heywood started to sow the seeds for that debut at Maine Road. As he explains.
“I was quite lucky really, because in that second year we were due to go to college for the first time, but I couldn’t register because I was injured.
“The one day, when everyone else was away at college, Tommy and his son Mick, who was a coach, were leading a drill on the Redgra at Castlecroft, and it was me who was pinging the balls in.
“It was one of those sessions that could have gone horribly wrong, or it could have gone right, but fortunately, I had a decent left foot.
“And it went perfectly, as every pass was finding its range, putting the wingers in or having strikes on goal.
“I am sure that is what planted the seed with Tommy for the first team, and over the following weeks I was blended more into first team training, and was travelling with the team for games even though I wasn’t playing.
“Just being in and around it gave me that much-needed experience, and there was a game on Boxing Day at Shrewsbury where I was even more involved, being in the dressing room with the other players.
“And it was a couple of days after that when Tommy pulled me aside to say I needed to tell my Mum and Dad I’d be playing against Manchester City 24 hours later.”
There was no hiding away back then. Even at 17, Heywood’s inclusion in the team was made public before the game, and he posed for a picture with scout Blackwell for the Sporting Star.
Nerves set in as he was travelling up on the team coach, more so about whether he would be able to cope with the occasion and, having spotted his parents in the stand whilst warming up, the noise of a frenzied 22,000 Maine Road audience certainly took a bit of getting used to.
An early touch, playing the ball back to Tim Flowers after a sliced pass from John Pender, helped steady those nerves, but it was always going to prove a difficult afternoon for a lowly Wolves side against highflying City, including a certain Mick McCarthy, who eventually ran out comfortable 4-0 winners.
“I can still remember the noise which was incredible – I literally couldn’t hear the player who was next to me – and that was something I had to adapt to,” Heywood recalls.
“I also remember people had said the big difference getting to the first team was that you think you have time and space and will ping a ball and then someone will come out of nowhere to intercept.
“That happened a couple of times when I was knocking the ball down the line, and the pace of the game was something else.
“Every time you stepped up as a player, the difference in quality was always very noticeable, and that was the biggest step of all.
“But while it was a baptism of fire it was a fantastic environment in which to play football and a day I will never ever forget.”
Heywood kept his place for the following league games at home to Carlisle and Middlesbrough, before an FA Cup defeat at Huddersfield, where he recalls being given the runaround by Mark Lillis, conceding a penalty and giving away another of the goals.
He did then break back into the team later in the season to make another four first team appearances. And, forget winning six games in a row as the current Wolves crop have just achieved, one of Heywood’s appearances back then, a 1-0 victory at Carlisle, brought an end to a run of 21 without victory.
“The feeling in the dressing room that day was that it was a substantial result, as it gave us a chance of staying up,” Heywood recalls.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be, and by the time Wolves’ second successive relegation had been confirmed, Heywood had made his last appearance for the club.
And yet, in a development far more worrying than results alone, the day after that game against Fulham, he had been sent to see a cardiologist after Docherty grew concerned about his levels of tiredness.
Heywood had been struggling to shake off the effects of a nasty bout of flu a few weeks before, and was also still playing reserve and youth football, so the volume of fixtures wasn’t conducive to maintaining high energy levels.
The initial diagnosis was of an ‘athlete’s heart’, a condition which sometimes affects people who train at high intensity and for prolonged periods, and so, after a lengthy spell out undergoing various tests, he was given the green light to return to action.
The reality, however, which would emerge later, was actually worse.
Having continued his career in non-league after leaving Wolves, playing for Kettering, Burton Albion, Halesowen Town and Worcester City, Heywood was eventually diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a far more serious and often undetected condition when the heart muscle becomes thickened.
Fortunately for Heywood, the abnormality is at the tip of his heart rather than in the middle, therefore not affecting the flow of blood, but is still sufficiently serious enough to have necessitated hanging up his boots, even having to sadly turn down requests to turn out for Wolves Allstars.
“That first ever visit to the consultant, who told me, 24 hours after I had been playing in the Wolves first team, that I had a problem with my heart, was a difficult moment, especially with my Mum and Dad there, watching on,” he explains.
“Now, as a parent myself, I can understand how they must have felt to hear those words.
“But to then later get the more accurate diagnosis, I actually look at myself as being really lucky I am still here because it could certainly have been a whole lot worse.
“It certainly gives me a sense of perspective, and a resilience that has helped me in my career, because I have that constant reminder from a health point of view about making sure I look after myself.
“I walk every single day, usually about 5km in the morning, and do exercise where I can as well as watching what I eat, generally trying to live as healthy a lifestyle as possible.”
Heywood had actually been handed a two-and-a-half year contract at Wolves around the time of his initial diagnosis, and was Young Player of the Year in that 1984/85 season, but would sadly never play for the club again.
There was one glimmer of hope in the early days of Graham Turner when the team’s usual left back was injured, but the manager switched future Hall of Famer Andy Thompson into that position instead.
“That decision worked out o-k, didn’t it?” Heywood says with a chuckle.
He did bump into the squad on an end-of-season trip with Kettering to Magaluf when they were preparing for the Sherpa Van Trophy Final at Wembley, but any thoughts of ‘what might have been’ were brief, and quickly consigned to the memory bank.
He is still in touch with a few faces from those Molineux days, and once a year, he joins Richard Smith and Roger Preece in visiting Darren Wright in Cornwall, to enjoy a spot of sun and reflection of a bygone era.
Ultimately, Heywood’s new career path was launched whilst at Kettering when he responded to a newspaper advert for a coaching scheme run by Dudley Council, which led, 18 months later, to a role as Sports Development Officer within the leisure services department.
The buzz of being involved in events and working with elected members within the public sector was one which Heywood took to immediately, and further progression saw him arrive at South Staffordshire Council as Head of Leisure Services in 1998, then moving into a director’s position and deputy Chief Executive before graduating to his current and far-reaching role.
Coming full circle and back to the area in which he grew up has been a particular joy, but so too is his work, which has seen the Local Authority win several awards, including Council of the Year in 2022.
Personal accolades have also been numerous, but the one that means the most is when he was nominated for Chief Executive of the Year in 2023, purely and simply because he was put forward, without his knowledge, by colleagues.
It is such a varied portfolio. One minute he and staff can be working with communities on bespoke programmes making a positive impact at local level. And the next, making use of entrepreneurial skills or working on major growth projects such as the partnership which was established with the City of Wolverhampton Council and Staffordshire County Council on the i54 development.
“There is a pressure involved, obviously a very different pressure to football, but I think anyone in any sort of senior management role, whatever the industry, accepts there will be pressure and responsibility,” says Heywood.
“It is important to have resilience and the right mechanisms in place, and for me I think a lot of that goes back to my upbringing and my time in football, preparing me for what was ahead.
“When I look back at everything I have learned, I have taken the good, the bad and the ugly and put it all together in how I have tried to be as a leader and a manager.
“Every day here is different, but always an exciting challenge, and one which I really enjoy.”
Just like those times back at Wolves, when so much was packed into a short space of time, signing with the club in the First Division, and leaving with them about to launch a revival from the Fourth.
And a debut at Manchester City which, whilst ending in disappointment in terms of the result, was part of those vital life lessons which have served Heywood well in the many challenges to follow.
