Roy of the Rovers Hughes were brought out of retirement to play for Melchester in 1985, along with longtime fans of the strip Martin Kemp and Steve Norman, of the pop group Spandau Ballet. Geoff Boycott served for several years as Melchester's chairman, and Sir Alf Ramsey had briefly taken over as manager of Melchester in 1982, while Roy lay in his coma. Players such as Malcolm Macdonald and Trevor Francis would sometimes line up alongside Roy in England matches, despite the fact that the clubs they played for in real life were never featured in the strip. The concept of TV pundits and
Roy of the Rovers (comic) Over the years, there were also occasional non-football strips, such as "Racey's Rocket" (1984–85), which was about stock-car racing, and "Johnny Cougar", the story of the "redskin wrestler" which had previously run in "Tiger", but these strips never seemed to fit into the football-themed comic and were invariably quickly dropped. Another spin-off was "The Son of Racey" (1989–90), which gave schoolboy Roy Race Jr his first prominent role in the comic just before he joined Rovers as an apprentice. In addition to the players mentioned above who migrated from their own strips to the main "RotR" strip, there were also