No Nonsense Page 11

  Standing before the squad, in a conference room at our training complex, was nerve-shredding. It was honestly the first time I realised how many black colleagues I had. They had read the papers, watched or listened to the news. What would they think of me? Would they find me guilty of racism by association? Would they still want to share a dressing room? Football issues were trivial by comparison.

  My apology was another surreal experience. It felt as if I was looking through a lace curtain. I was determined to lay my feelings bare, to explain myself as best I could, but everything was indistinct. I still wonder, to this day, how I got through it without breaking down. The moment of truth arrived when I stopped speaking.

  I heard the applause, and saw Andy Cole and Trevor Sinclair heading towards me. Trevor got to me first, and hugged me. It was a good job I was all cried out; otherwise the hard man would have wept like a baby. Acceptance for who I am, for all my faults and insecurities, felt good. I was still buzzing later that night, when I took a call from John Wardle, the City chairman.

  I had always admired his directness. He shared his fears about my self-control and the strain of dealing with the murder. He insisted I had to overcome my aggression, and suggested I spend a week at the Sporting Chance clinic near Liphook in Hampshire. It promised ‘physio for the mind, body and soul’ and he sealed the deal by offering to reduce my fine for the Thailand incident by £60,000, from six weeks’ wages to four.

  My immediate priority involved dealing with family matters. Home was a pressure cooker. I was living with Andrew, Nan, my Auntie Julie, Dad and his partner Kate. Each had their own trauma to deal with. Drew was closest to Mum, but I wanted nothing to do with her. It would be the best part of two years before I could bring myself to speak to her.

  Nan had been driven out of her house by photographers. The murder summoned nightmare memories of the violent death of Julie’s husband, Joe, in the toilet of the Bluebell pub. It would be seven years before Dad felt able to share the depth of his disgust with Mum’s side of the family.

  Something had to give, and it was me. Looking back, I think I slowly cracked up. I had behaved like an arsehole, and walked straight into the most socially significant case since the Stephen Lawrence murder. It was international news. I was aware it would probably be held against me for the rest of my life but events were entirely out of my control.

  I have made some horrendous decisions, but have generally taken responsibility for them. The closest members of my family couldn’t give me any support. I can’t remember my exact words, but I ranted about the unfairness of the burden they had placed on me. I was the lightning conductor. I was the one dragged before the cameras. I was the one being branded as a closet racist. It was easier for them. No one knew them.

  The energy flow changed, fundamentally. I became the head of the family. I loved my dad to bits. He’d been there to protect me as a kid, but our roles had been transformed. I ripped into him. He was well into his forties, going out drinking and generally fucking about. What the fuck was he up to? I could see I hurt him, but with hindsight it was a cathartic experience for both of us.

  I felt I had to free myself from anything that was holding me back. I still regret the selfishness of letting childhood friendships lapse in order to limit the negative connotations of my background, but the cull was necessary until I was able to better understand myself, and those around me. I didn’t sell out, but I stepped back.

  It was the perfect time to meet Peter Kay, a tall, gaunt man whose blond bouffant hair hovered above his high forehead. He was a former drug addict and recovering alcoholic, who had established Sporting Chance with Tony Adams, the former Arsenal captain, in a single room near Victoria station in September 2000.

  We did not exactly get off on the right foot. When he initially attempted to make contact, at the behest of John Wardle, I slammed the phone down on him twice. He introduced himself by name and, thinking of the comedian Peter Kay, I was convinced it was a wind up, conceived by the lads. It needed a call from John to persuade me otherwise. I was struck by Pete’s serenity when he picked me up from Southampton airport at the start of my first visit to the clinic. I was suspicious, reticent, uncertain. I cowered intellectually, and isolated myself, personally. For the next 48 hours I veered between blandness and banality, even making a point of eating alone, but he was scrupulously non-judgemental.

  Peter told me later that he sensed the weight of the world on my shoulders. I was monosyllabic, deliberately distant, wallowing in my own shit. He exuded an aura of friendship; any hint of doctor–patient frigidity and I would have remained tightly wound, non-committal. He had a mentor’s subtlety, an ability to listen and a refreshing awareness that he didn’t have all the answers. He encouraged me to read, to investigate, to contemplate but above all to share.

  The dam broke, and something sour and secretive flooded out. I found it liberating to be confronted by my weakness. I spent the third day unloading on him, after a sleepless night in which I tried to make sense of kaleidoscopic images of chaos, confusion and suffering. He coaxed me along, allowed me to go at my own pace. I had never related to anyone on such a deep, meaningful level.

  That evening I had dinner with athletes from all sports, both sexes, whose problems were created by alcohol, drugs, depression, gambling and, in my case, violence. No man, or woman for that matter, is an island. I learned I was not alone. I learned to laugh at myself. I learned to value vulnerability as a gift, rather than a curse. It wasn’t a crime to cry.

  Nothing, though, could prepare me adequately for Peter’s candour in the car the following day. He had been a stranger 72 hours earlier, but shared the formative secret of being raped at the age of eight by an older man. He explained, with a strange, affecting tenderness, his subsequent sense of guilt. His self-esteem was shattered, and he developed into a distant, introverted youth.

  He would sing to himself, or hum a favourite tune, whenever memory ambushed him, and became reliant on stimulants to deaden the pain. His first marriage foundered, and he lived in a squat, drinking two bottles of Scotch and ingesting three grams of cocaine a day. At the age of 31, he went into a coma for three weeks, following an operation to remove two-thirds of a diseased pancreas.

  He wept gently as he relived his near-death experience, and laughed when he realised the appropriateness of the venue for that night’s rehabilitative experience, an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in World’s End in west London. I observed rather than engaged; the feelings were familiar but the rituals were foreign. The celebration of fallibility was counter to everything I had been brought up to believe in.

  It was incredible. We talk about reality checks, but what is real? People spending money they don’t have, online or in the shops, to save face? They’re just deluding themselves into debt. Here were people who had the courage to say, ‘You know what? I can’t be arsed bullshitting because my life is so bad. I just want to talk.’ Their honesty was real.

  It is very rare to find someone who is prepared to be honest. Here’s a test: walk up to an acquaintance and ask, ‘All right, mate?’ I guarantee they’ll reply, ‘Yeah, fine’, in a reflex action designed to make both of you feel comfortable, socially. Perhaps I am wired differently, but I’d get on with someone who’d reply, ‘Do you know what? I feel like shit.’

  Convention tells us that everyone has a right to an opinion. They do, but equally I have the right not to listen to it. Don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours. That honesty brands me as abrasive, or confrontational. Football is notorious for people spouting superficial bollocks, pretending to like one another while they are desperate to stab one another in the back.

  I went to AA for a couple of years after that initial visit, which prompted me to lean over and whisper to Peter: ‘Fucking hell, am I an alcoholic? I can really relate to what these people are talking about.’ I understood their expressions of loneliness, isolation and frustration. They felt like shit, and shared the reasons. That started my process of renew
al.

  I let the voices and images of that evening seep into my subconscious for a couple of days. The stories of booze-fuelled mayhem and anguished remorse were too relevant to ignore. Stopping drinking was almost an act of putting one and one together and making two. In my case the equation was simple: alcohol plus emotion equalled aggression.

  The emotion was going to be an issue, because I was still coming to terms with that, but I could at least eliminate one element of the problem. Drinking was a recurring theme in my existential crisis. To use one of Peter’s favourite phrases, if you go to the barber’s every day, one day you are going to get a haircut.

  He left me with a deeper understanding of myself, and a promise that we would speak daily on the phone, if the need arose. ‘It doesn’t have to be you against the world,’ he told me. He held out his arms to hug me as we prepared to part. Not for the first time that week I amazed myself, by holding him close.

  Football seemed an irrelevance, but also central to my being. If that sounds confused, I was. I had become so used to abuse from opposing fans that there was something almost soothing about their renewed viciousness. I valued, more than ever, the escape valve of match day, when emotions were familiar and the private rituals of preparation made sense.

  Amazingly, given everything, I slotted back into City’s first team as if I’d spent my time off on a sunlounger. That gritty little bastard who refused to allow rejection by Everton to knock him off course was still alive and kicking. No one was going to write me off, and Peter remained an integral part of my self-help programme. Even the bad times were good.

  We played golf together at Worsley Park near Manchester in the autumn, and I was as conscious of the need to be on my best behaviour as any prospective son-in-law meeting his girlfriend’s dad. Sod’s law dictated we were playing behind two American women, who turned the game into a still-life painting. They held us up at every hole, and refused to allow us to play through.

  This was the acid test of my new-found tranquillity. My guru was alongside me. I was breathing deeply to dissipate the tension, but by the 15th I’d had enough. I turned to Peter: ‘I’ve got to level with you. I’m absolutely raging here. I’m dying to say something to these women and I don’t think I can bottle it up any longer . . .’

  He looked at me straight in the eye and replied: ‘Raging? I’m fucking fuming. I’ve wanted to hit balls at those two for the last couple of hours!’ We burst out laughing, aware of the absurdity of our internal struggle to be measured and considerate.

  We spent the rest of the round discussing emotion. I explained the concept of negativity as my spur, and Peter countered by accentuating the positive. He spoke of love being fuel of the highest octane. He promoted the freedom produced by openness and the joy of taking time to build relationships on firm foundations. He opened the door into a world of infinite possibility.

  That door slammed shut temporarily in December, during Michael’s trial. I didn’t attend court, because I would have been an obvious distraction and couldn’t see any benefit in my presence, but I pored over the evidence. It was distressing because of its familiarity and horrifying in its intensity.

  Anthony, a devout Christian who harboured ambitions to be a lawyer, spent the evening babysitting his two-year-old nephew Reuben with girlfriend Louise Thompson. He and his cousin Marcus Binns offered to walk her to a bus stop close to the Huyton Park pub. The court heard how Michael, dressed in a hoodie with his face obscured by a scarf, abused them, shouting: ‘Walk, nigger, walk.’

  He subsequently insisted to me that he didn’t say those obscene words, but he still climbed into a car with Paul Taylor and ambushed Anthony in the park, a short cut to an alternative bus stop. Louise and Marcus ran to find help while Michael became involved in a wrestling match on the ground he showed signs of losing. This prompted Taylor to strike the fatal blow with the mountaineering axe.

  He later told police he was aiming for his arm, rather than his head. Michael told the family they wanted to rough Anthony up, warn him against coming on to the estate. He could quite easily have been killed because the axe missed him by a fraction of an inch. As he told me later: ‘It came in from the side. I felt a gust of wind go past my head and the next minute he was lying on me.’

  I realise this is a moot point, since nothing can bring back a loving son, or heal the scars inflicted on a family who somehow found, in their hearts, the power of forgiveness, but why did Taylor use such a terrible weapon with such awful consequences? The simple answer is to condemn him as a manifestation of evil. The more challenging solution is to investigate his formative influences, and to examine his mutation from wild teenager to compulsive thief, and eventually, murderer.

  He knew nothing other than degrees of violence from his earliest days. He survived by native cunning, intimidation, and the brutal application of a gang culture. The impression of toughness, ruthlessness, was paramount. Michael’s suggestibility gave him the opportunity to spread the blame, but both deserved their punishments: minimum sentences of 23 years for my cousin and 17 years for my brother.

  They remain out of sight, out of mind, for everyone except the families fused by needless tragedy. Michael was a magnet for trouble during his first year in prison, in which he was disciplined for fighting, stealing, possessing illicit alcohol and making a model gun out of matchsticks. It has been a gradual process, but from being viewed as ‘high risk’ he is now making a positive contribution as a mentor to other inmates.

  Anthony lives on, in spirit, through his foundation, which has the complementary aims of celebrating diversity, promoting personal integrity and developing racial harmony through education, sport and the arts. His mother, a college lecturer, remains a beacon of hope and tolerance. Two weeks after Anthony’s death, Gee Walker launched a basketball tournament in his memory.

  The trophy is inscribed with the words: ‘Don’t feel ashamed of your race. Feel guilty only if you stand by and do nothing to unite and bring change to the human race.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  BOOK CLUB

  Les Chapman is an institution, and I can confirm generations of Manchester City players believe he should be housed, securely, in one. He is one of those classic football characters, a court jester who provides regular infusions of light relief in a game that takes itself way too seriously. He is kit man, cabaret artist and stand-up comedian.

  Chappy made 670 appearances in the Football League over 22 seasons, and managed Stockport County and Preston North End before spending another 22 years on City’s backroom staff, where his zany humour gave him neutrality and kept the dressing room ticking over. He’s now a club ambassador. You don’t have to be mad to have such a career, but it helps.

  He developed half a dozen personas, including a Lancastrian version of Adolf Hitler. Chappy would strut around the training ground in full uniform, screaming at the top of his voice while his stick-on moustache was being dislodged by a stream of spittle. That performance was postponed, for obvious and understandable reasons, when we signed Eyal Berkovic, but Michael Tarnat and Didi Hamann, our resident Germans, loved it.

  Chappy was even in character when he applied for the kit man’s job. He based Billy Swift on his uncle Stephen, a patient with mental health issues he used to visit as a child. He turned up at the old Platt Lane training ground in an ill-fitting polka dot suit from Oxfam, which was offset by flat cap, short, gravy-stained tie, and plastic trainers.

  He squinted through National Health horn-rimmed glasses, and was so slack-jawed he could drool to order, but it was such a surreal place when I was an aspiring pro that he wasn’t especially conspicuous. We often trained to the accompaniment of religious maniacs and winos bombarding us with empty cans of Tennent’s Super.

  Chappy’s logic, on this particular morning, was pretty sound. Footballers love a wind-up, and he intended to use his act to prove he had the requisite personality. He wandered around, apparently aimlessly, before positioning himself on the touchline. His cunning
plan had one flaw: when he began rambling about losing his pet dog they called security.

  He was escorted to the gate, stammering loudly, before switching out of character. Somehow, he persuaded them to let him stay for the job interview, which consisted of a single question from Joe Royle, the then manager. ‘Were you that mad fella on the side of the pitch?’ he asked. Everyone fell about laughing, and the rest, they say, is history.

  I loved him. He was warm, intelligent and sufficiently well versed in the insecurities of the game to realise he carried no threat to the players. The contrast between his eccentric public antics and his solicitous private asides is significant, because it reveals football’s strange schizophrenia. You can show off, but you’d better not show too much.

  Chappy’s best-known character is William MacSwift, a wild-eyed, tartan-trewed Scot with wig and tam-o’-shanter hat. MacSwift was developed at Preston, where, as the late John McGrath’s right-hand man, Chappy would often dress as a punk rocker on away trips. His speciality was leaping unexpectedly out of the bushes, in full costume.

  One day, when he had been promoted to Preston manager, he decided to go a fateful stage further, and, after leading the players on a lap of the local park, dropped off the back of the group. He dived into the undergrowth, stripped off completely, smeared mud over his body and plaited his hair with twigs. Chappy emerged, screaming, only to find his timing was awry.

  Instead of his first-team squad, he was confronted by a pair of senior citizens, innocently walking their Labrador.

  Successive City managers adored him. Kevin Keegan loved his capacity to accept dares, for suitable reward. Five hundred quid from a whip-round among the players was usually enough for him to put on a boilersuit and leap into an ice bath from the roof of a one-storey hut. He would snort pepper and drink a vile concoction of oils and vinegars from the salad bar to get him through to payday.