A Sporting Venue

Aside from the thousands of footbal l matches that have been played at White Hart Lane over the years, Andy Greeves looks at a number of other sport ing events that have been staged here.

- Andy Greeves

It was an ex-baseball player that paved the way for us to make the move from our Northumberland Park ground to our current home at White Hart Lane in 1899. Then-chairman Charles D Roberts – reputedly once a pitcher with the Brooklyn Dodgers – along with club captain Bobby Buckle, agreed an initial 21-year lease of the site with land owners Charrington’s. With that contract in place, so our 118-year history here began!

Soon after moving to the Lane, we drew upon the services of John Over, a groundsman at the Edmonton Cricket Club, to turn the site of a former garden nursery into a football pitch! Over was no stranger to creating surfaces for major sporting events, having prepared the wicket for the first cricket test match to be played in England against Australia in 1880.

With chairman Roberts’ background, it came as little surprise to see baseball as well as football being played here in our early years at the Lane. He entered us for the British Baseball League in 1906 with a number of matches staged at the Lane over the following years.

We beat Nondescripts by 16 runs to three to win the national title in our first season in the competition – a success we followed up two years later. Reports at the time suggested as many as 4,500 spectators watched the 1906 final – an early indication of the popularity of American sports in the UK.

On the topic of baseball, Babe Ruth -one of the sport’s biggest names - once visited White Hart Lane for our 2-2 draw with Derby County on February 9, 1935. Ruth, who died in New York in 1948 aged 48, still holds the Major League Baseball (MLB) records for slugging percentage (.6897) and on-base plus slugging (1.164).