#2Sides: My Autobiography (5 page)

I remember my Dad saying to me ‘Look what you’ve done for the club.’ And friends said: ‘Of course you deserve it. You’ve helped win things. You’ve been a part of winning teams. You’ve not missed a lot of games through injury before. You’ve not cheated anyone. The club knows that. Anyway, it’s part of the game, being injured, and the club understands that.’

But I couldn’t get on board with that; I was embarrassed. I’d think to myself: the manager must be sitting there thinking ‘Fucking hell, we are paying him all this money and look at him, sitting on his arse.’ Then I’d see the chief executive David Gill, and think: ‘He must be thinking the same thing.’ And I’d think the fans must be thinking the same thing. Going round and round in my head were the thoughts I thought people must be thinking about me. Even though they quite possibly didn’t think any of those things.

And eventually … well, I got lucky.

Just when I was getting really depressed, and thinking it was all over, the doctor at the club, Dr McAnally, found a clinic in Milton Keynes called the Blackberry Clinic. They specialise in doing scans so they can see how your back looks when it moves. There’s an injection they give you into a small area where the pain is and they use the scan to watch how your back moves under stress. They found that certain ligaments in my lower back were very weak and that was the reason for all these problems – the groin and hamstring and calf problems too. I’d been compensating for the back weakness by making all the forces going through my body go to the wrong place.

The cure was surprisingly simple: injections. They injected a sugar formula to stiffen the ligaments. No cortisone, no drugs; just a sugar to strengthen the ligaments that attach the bones together in my spine. It was almost like an immediate ‘Eureka!’ moment. My back suddenly felt secure again: I didn’t feel the instability; I didn’t feel like my back was about to break. So I had a course of injections – six injections over six weeks. The pain was unbelievable. But you know me! Being the man I am, I coped – no problem!

Actually it hurt like hell. But afterwards I was up and running, and it was the most fantastic feeling. I now appreciate things I used to take for granted – like being properly fit, playing at the highest level, and competing for titles and trophies. In 2010 I played a load of games, and the season after that I made the most appearances by any of our defenders – and we won the league. I still need painkillers occasionally and twice a year I have to have top-up injections. But the nightmare was over almost as suddenly as it began. I came back; I proved I could still play at the highest level; I proved the doubters wrong.

I felt great again.

My Mum and Dad’s story would make a film. They’d be walking together and passers-by would spit on Mum because she was walking with a black guy. Other times they’d be stopped by the police. Dad would be treated badly by the police and others on the estate.
For being with a white woman
. And Mum would get treated badly too. By the police.
For being with a black guy
.

It sounds like a story from apartheid South Africa, doesn’t it? But that was London in the 1970s. That’s the kind of shit my parents had to go through to have my brothers and me. Now I’m a Dad and my wife is white. And I don’t want our kids to have to go through the same crap.

When I was growing up in Peckham there was plenty of racism around but you never knew when you’d run into it, or how toxic it would be, or exactly how to react. My estate was a real mixture of people: Irish, English, African, Caribbean, Turkish. Mostly we all got on well and played together. But there was also an older set of guys we’d play with every now and again who were all white. They were mostly Millwall or Arsenal fans and you’d definitely hear racist comments from them sometimes. One time we were playing and these guys started making monkey noises at us.
Ubu babba, Ubu babba
… that kind of thing. We were much younger and smaller than them, so it really wasn’t a fight we could physically fight. But we had something in common as well. Football. They were good at football, and so were we. So we’d play against them. Or, to put it another way, we’d play
with
them. Football was a bringer-together. Football trumped everything else. We might not like these guys sometimes but we’d play together for hours at a time. And while we were playing we’d be knitted together. But you’d hear the odd racist comment, especially if we were winning. So then the question became: what are we going to do about this? Well, all we really could do was say, ‘fuck off.’ It wouldn’t go further. In my mind, I always had the ultimate back-up. If things got proper serious, I could’ve told my Dad and he’d have sorted them all out. But I never did, because I wanted to keep playing football against better players, with these guys. So we kept it in the background and never spoke about it.

Of course it was different if anyone off the estate ever said anything like that. That was a fight straight away. Looking back, it seemed a weird way to deal with that situation. But when I was younger my first reaction when someone said something racist was always to fight. When I got older, I’d exact revenge in a different way. I’d think: right, I have to win this game now. Or I’ve got to
score. I remember going for my first training session at Charlton. One of their kids called me a ‘black bastard’ and we got into a fight immediately. The response of their coach John Cartwright was brilliant. He stepped in, took my side, made the boy apologise and banned him for a few weeks. I hadn’t even signed for Charlton. I was impressed.

On the estate Mum was magnificent. My next door neighbour called me a ‘black bastard’ and when I knocked on the door for her daughter to come out and play, I heard her say, ‘don’t let that nigger in the door.’ I went back to Mum and said, ‘what’s a nigger?’ I didn’t know. I was only young. Mum went straight round, kicked the door down and dragged the woman out and made her apologise to me.

Much later, I became aware of racism in professional football. I’d seen that picture of my hero John Barnes contemptuously back-heeling a banana some racist had thrown at him on the pitch. I knew players like Paul Ince, Brendon Batson and Viv Anderson were getting grief. I’d seen stadium racism first-hand too, when I went with a mate to see Millwall play Derby. Derby had four or five black players and they were all playing well. This geezer in front of us was going, ‘those fucking black bastards, send them back to where they’re fucking from.’ Then he turned around and noticed me. There was a policeman standing right next to me. I looked at the policeman and he looked through me like nothing had been said. Then the guy says: ‘not you, mate, just the ones on the pitch.’ I just got up and said to my friend: ‘I’m leaving, man. I can’t deal with this shit.’

I never heard anything like that at West Ham. There never seemed to be a problem with being black and playing for West Ham. In the 1970s they had Clyde Best and Ade Coker. Paul Ince had come through there, so had George Parris. West Ham always
had a few black players. I felt very comfortable at the club. And by the late 1990s and 2000s things seemed to have improved all over the country. You weren’t hearing racist comments at grounds in England any more. If incidents happened abroad with the national team or the Under 21s, as happened in Spain and Serbia and other places, the FA responded strongly. The media seemed okay on the subject, too. I thought our game, and our FA, were doing well and should be applauded. Organisations like Show Racism The Red Card and Kick It Out seemed to be doing a good job too, and I did events for them. I remember doing a campaign with Thierry Henry and telling people: ‘I’m not seeing racism in the stands,’ and ‘England has done a great job.’

Then, on 15th October 2011, Manchester United played Liverpool at Anfield. In the sixty-second minute, as Patrice Evra marked Luis Suárez at a corner, they started speaking to each other in Spanish. I was a couple of yards away and didn’t hear a thing. To quote from the later FA report, the conversation went like this:

It was a Frenchman and a Uruguayan talking in Spanish but the conversation and its aftermath was big news in England for months. After much strife, Suarez was found guilty by the FA of racial abuse, and was fined and banned for eight games. At the two clubs, football tribalism kicked in immediately. At Manchester United
we backed Pat, of course. We knew him as a serious, genuine guy who’d made a serious allegation. He’d never lied about anything before, why would he lie now? By contrast Liverpool players and their manager instinctively backed their man, saying Suarez was a great guy. The way Liverpool circled the wagons and later all wore Suarez T-shirts … it left a bad taste. They wanted to show solidarity to their teammate, but they were missing the bigger picture. They got right and wrong mixed up.

What worried me more in those first few days was the reaction further afield. I was shocked by how much sympathy there was for Suarez. Huge numbers of people in the media and social media were saying: ‘Poor Suarez, maybe there’s nothing racist about it. Maybe in Uruguay this is inoffensive. Poor lad, he’s culturally confused, and he’s getting punished for nothing.’ Nobody even talked about the pressure on Pat. How could it get turned around so that racism was being defended and drawing attention to racism was being attacked? How could that happen in our game in this day and age? I didn’t understand it. People paid lip service to the idea that racism was
a bad thing
. But they obviously didn’t have a clue what racism actually was, or how its victims felt. It was a real shock to discover racism had never actually gone away – it was just much better hidden than before. We’d been lulled into a false sense of security. It had been swept under the carpet all these years. Just one little paper-cut of an incident made it clear it was all still there, just below the surface.

I’d only been a few feet from that conversation between Patrice and Suarez. It never occurred to me that racism was just about to come a whole lot closer.

Six days after the Evra–Suarez incident I was sitting at home watching on TV as QPR played Chelsea in a league match. QPR were winning 1–0, and my brother Anton was having a great game in the QPR defence. About five minutes from the end, Anton and John Terry had an argument in the QPR penalty area. We then saw John jogging back into his own half before the television director cut to a close-up. You didn’t need to be a professional lip-reader to see that John Terry, captain of England, my defensive partner in the national team for the last six years, had just said: ‘you fucking black cunt.’ And he seemed to have said it in Anton’s direction. In less than a minute my phone began to go crazy. My mates, my family, practically everybody I knew were texting and calling to say: ‘Did you
see
that?’ Within minutes Twitter was going nuts and the clip was on YouTube.

The consequences of that moment were confused, disastrously drawn-out and are still felt. The matter could and should have been sorted out cleanly and quickly in a way that would have allowed everyone – including John Terry – to emerge with dignity. Instead, it festered horribly for nearly a year and caused great harm.

For those who didn’t follow the formal proceedings case, these were the main points. The police, acting on an anonymous complaint from a member of the public, eventually charged John Terry with racially abusing Anton. John Terry denied the charges and at various times offered different explanations. After a five-day trial, in July 2012 – 9 months after the incident – he was acquitted. The magistrate found that John Terry had indeed said ‘you fucking black cunt’ but couldn’t say if he had done so with racist
intent. Two months later, in September 2012, an FA disciplinary committee took a different approach. It found him guilty of ‘using abusive and/or insulting words and/or behaviour’ and imposed a four-match ban and a £220,000 fine.

At this point, John was still maintaining his innocence. But two weeks later, he issued an apology of sorts ‘to everyone,’ saying that while he was ‘disappointed’ by the FA’s decision ‘with the benefit of hindsight my language was clearly not an appropriate reaction to the situation for someone in my position.’ But he never apologised to me or to Anton. And he has never hinted that he has ever had a moment of understanding over the damage his stupidity had inflicted on everyone. Meanwhile, amid all the uncertainty and bad feeling, my England career had been wrecked while John’s lurched on in a confused fashion until it, too, hit the buffers. At first, he carried on playing. Then he was stripped of the England captaincy. Then he played. Then he retired. As I’ll explain later, this too could have been avoided.

While the case was going on Anton’s lawyers told us we couldn’t speak about it publicly – and we didn’t. This I now feel was a mistake. If we had spoken out some of the distress and pain might have been avoided. The case damaged football and race relations in Britain. Anton, the innocent party in all this, had his career damaged and was subjected to death threats, bullets in the post, and unending racist abuse. My mum had her windows smashed and bullets put through her door, and ended up in hospital with a virus because of the stress. I felt that the legal and football authorities made mistakes all the way through. The criminal prosecution was misguided and FA dithering made things worse. Indeed, few people covered themselves in glory. Some of the elder statesmen among black British footballers were conspicuous by their absence in terms of speaking out publicly.
We disagreed with people who wanted to use the case to advance a political agenda, and we weren’t impressed when Kick It Out paid lip service to the idea of taking a strong stand and then went missing when it counted.

The FA was confused and indecisive. Caught between wanting to protect the England captain and realising they would have to punish him, they ended up sending mixed messages. Chelsea, who seemed to have no thought beyond wanting to keep their captain in action, added fuel to the fire. Ashley Cole, who’d been a good friend of mine and had known Anton since he was a kid, betrayed that friendship. The biggest idiot of all was John Terry who could have saved everyone a lot of pain by admitting immediately that he had used the words in the heat of the moment but was no racist. I think that’s probably what happened and what the truth is. We would have accepted that but he never gave us the chance.

There’s one point I’d like to stress. People think Anton took John Terry to court. That’s completely wrong. Anton actually urged the police and the Crown Prosection Service (CPS)
not
to prosecute. He knew a court case would generate more heat than light, create antagonism and make people take sides. But neither he nor I ever had a say in the matter. What happened was that a member of the public made an anonymous complaint, the police investigated and then the CPS decided to prosecute. Then the trial was delayed so John could play at Euro 2012.

Anton always made it clear he hadn’t heard the words on the pitch. It was John Terry’s lawyers who summoned Anton to court, not the other way round. That’s what people need to understand. I can’t stress it enough: Anton was not the instigator of any of this. He
never heard
the offending words and did nothing to justify the hostile treatment he received from the FA and John Terry’s lawyers. Their cross-examination of him in court almost amounted
to character assassination. Many people, especially Chelsea fans, seem to think that Anton ‘grassed’ on John Terry. Anton didn’t ‘grass’ on anyone!

I no longer talk to Ashley Cole or John Terry. With Ashley it all ended the day he decided to go to court. He didn’t even warn us: we had to hear from the lawyers. Anton rang me and my head nearly blew off. ‘What do you mean Ashley’s going to court? Is he going to speak or you?’

‘For John.’

‘
What?
Are you winding me up?’