Growing up when your dad is a living legend isn't all its's sometimes cracked up to be.

Nick Morrison meets the son of one of the North-East's most celebrated footabll heroes.

WHEN Bill Shankly tossed him the ball and gave him the chance to show what he could do, 14-year-old Jack was quivering with nerves. Although he had only gone to along to lend his cousin moral support, when you've long harboured dreams of becoming a professional footballer, and follow in your dad's illustrious footsteps, the opportunity to impress the great Liverpool manager was too good to miss.

As Shankly and Jack's dad looked on, Jack weaved through the cones with the ball at his feet. Unfortunately, he hit every single one. The disconsolate schoolboy returned to the watching manager.

"Shankly said to me, 'You're a runner, son, you're not a footballer'. I just filled up; my dad looked down and he was quite full. He knew I would never make it, but he hadn't wanted to say that to me. We just played headers the rest of the morning," Jack recalls.

If Jackie Milburn was dismayed that his son hadn't inherited his talent, it never showed, nor did he try to pull strings to get him into the game. While he took every opportunity to have a kick-about with Jack, he never pushed him into practising.

For, if Jackie was a legend on the pitch - his 238 goals in 492 appearances for Newcastle is still a record and he helped the club to three FA Cups in five years - off the field he was a quiet and modest man. For him, football may have been a passion, but he never forgot it also represented an escape from a life in the factories or shipyards.

And modesty is a trait his son has inherited. He says he is reluctant to talk about his father, and only now, 15 years after Jackie's death, has he decided to put his childhood memories into print.

He was only four when his dad left Newcastle, in 1957, to play for Linfield in Northern Ireland, and three and a half years later the family returned to England so Jackie could move into management. After an apprenticeship at Southern League club Yiewsley, Jackie was surprisingly asked to take over at Ipswich. The club had been successful under Alf Ramsey, who was leaving to become England manager, but it was to be one the unhappiest periods of Jackie's life.

Arriving to find the club had no scouting policy, no youth policy and no money in the kitty, Jackie was also horrified to discover that not only was the hoped-for help from Ramsey unforthcoming, but the new England supremo was positively antagonistic towards his successor.

"Alf had been appointed England manager, but he hung on until the end of the season and he barred my father from the team talks. He thought he was going under the guidance of the great man, but he got no help whatsoever, and when he asked for the players' files he got one set of records of a player who wasn't even in the first team," Jack says.

"He found it tough, but at the time we didn't know anything about it; even my mother didn't have a clue, but we found out later there was never a bottle of gin far from his side. If they had a heavy defeat, he would sit in a darkened room and just have a couple of gins."

Although Jackie was never a heavy drinker - Jack recalls that three halves of lager would render his dad virtually insensible - the pressures of management took their toll.

"His temperament changed. We used to go for days out, three kids in the back of the car, which must have been very stressful, and nine times out of ten the car would just do a U-turn and we'd go home. He was never nasty, but he just wanted to sit on his own.

"On one occasion, I was having an ice cream in the back of the car and my sister was pushing me, and he just turned around and flicked the ice cream and it went all over my face. I'll never forget the look in his eyes: it wasn't him, it was just blank eyes looking back at me."

After two seasons at Ipswich, and failing to avoid relegation, Jackie decided he'd had enough and resigned, taking his family from East Anglia back to the North-East. He still dreamed of becoming involved at Newcastle, but the call never came. Instead, he got a job in a scrapyard in Gateshead.

"He was not over-proud to do that, he was just glad to have an income to pay his mortgage and look after his wife and three kids," Jack says. But within a few months, he was writing a column for The Sun, which was to earn him a living for the next 23 years, although he carried on doing publicity work for the scrapyard.

But the move back to the North-East proved difficult for Jack. He might have expected that, as the son of a footballing hero, he would have been the source of fascination. Instead, he was the boy everyone wanted to fight.

"I had to defend myself as a youngster - somebody always wanted to have a pop. I was very proud of him, but it was just fight after fight after fight. I hated coming back to the North-East, and having an East Anglian accent probably didn't help either."

He says he became very withdrawn as a result, and perhaps his modesty also has its roots in this period: "You are frightened to talk about it, because people think you're a big head," he says.

Although Newcastle never wanted his services - and even had to be badgered into holding the testimonial which would give Jackie financial security - Jack says his dad was not bitter. Newcastle refused to invite him to the 1974 FA Cup final, although he had been a guest of Sunderland's the previous year, but Jackie's passion for the club remained undimmed.

And it is this, as much as his exploits on the pitch, which has ensured Jackie has never lost his place in the hearts of Newcastle supporters, and of football-lovers everywhere. On his death, in 1988, huge crowds lined the streets for his funeral parade, all the way from Ashington to the centre of Newcastle. Statues to Jackie stand outside the Woodhall Museum in Ashington and St James' Park, although Jack says the only one that looks like his dad is the one now sitting in the back garden of sculptor Tom Malley.

But Jackie himself could never quite believe how well-loved he was. When he went to footballing functions, he was always surprised that the queues to see Jackie Milburn stretched much further than those for younger players who were fresher in the memory.

Still recognised as probably the greatest player to pull on a black and white shirt, his second goal in the 1951 FA Cup final is regarded as one of the best ever scored at Wembley. But perhaps the greatest of all Jackie Milburn's accolades is the one from his son Jack. "He was a great dad, he really was," he says.

* Jackie Milburn: a Man of Two Halves (Mainstream Publishing £14.99)