His main passion in life, however, was (European) football. Specifically, playing Championship Manager 1999 [an old football management sim, with wonderfully terrible graphics]. He was _really_ good at it, and did very well in all the fantasy football sweepstakes that are popular -- one of his former students won the Premiership Fantasy Football league a few years ago, for example. [https://www.ox.ac.uk/event/joshua-bull-can-maths-tell-us-how...].
Now, I aged about 20 got the opportunity to go into this professor's office, to talk briefly about parameter space and stability and all that jazz in a set of reaction diffusion equations that I wrote down. I looked around. It was absolutely covered in framed letters. They're not "you're brilliant" or "here's your doctorate" letters. Every time Manchester United, Arsenal, Madrid or any other seriously good club has an opening for a manager, he had sent in his full academic CV – all 500 papers, ten books, the whole shebang. And he writes a covering letter explaining how he'd be perfect for the role -- 'coz he's really good at Championship Manager 1999. And the clubs inevitably write back, saying "Dear Professor X, Thank you very much for your application to be the next Manager of Manchester United. As you can imagine, we have had a lot of interest in this role, and are unable to enter into individual conversations with every applicant. If you do not hear from us again after $DATE, please assume that unfortunately your application has been unsuccessful". And that's it. That's what he frames and puts on his walls. Hundreds of rejection letters from premiership football clubs. That's the kind of brain that becomes a world-leading authority on reaction diffusion equations, and made loads of seminal contributions in the field. (I still love them).