1 week Ago By Peter Cassidy
The 56-year-old was diagnosed with stage two dementia last January having undergone a scan following a request from John Stiles, son of the late England World Cup winner Nobby who died from the disease in 2020. But Windass, who spent three years at Pittodrie in the mid-90s, said he would have preferred not to have received his diagnosis. “There’s a lot of footballers that won’t do it (the scan) because they don’t want to know the outcome,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
“I wish I wouldn’t have gone in now, but it’s happened. It would be better not to know. “They said this is the diagnosis, it’s very mild.
You have nothing to worry about at this stage. It could be five to 10 years that it could develop to bigger stages, so it wasn’t the news that I wanted. I was scared, of course I was.
“The reason obviously that I didn’t come out and speak about it a year and a half ago was that my eldest son is a professional footballer (Josh plays for Sheffield Wednesday) and my youngest son (Jordan) was a professional footballer but plays amateur football now. “It’s not just football matches, it’s training every day, the repetition of heading balls everyday – I did it for 20 years. I don’t know if Josh does head it every day.
“He’s not a massive header of the ball anyway really but I said to him ‘Try not to head the ball’ but you have to in a game, of course you have. “He scored a goal at Wembley by heading the ball. You’ve got to head it, but can you minimise it in training?” Windass, who also played for Hull City, Bradford and Middlesbrough, scored 31 goals in 93 appearances for Aberdeen.
His son Josh Windass also spent two years in Scotland with a spell at Rangers between 2016 and 2018. Get all the latest news from around the country Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country.
