Rio Ferdinand--Five Star--The Biography

During the 2002 World Cup, fans in Japan adapted the lyrics of Duran Duran's classic song ‘Rio' to show their appreciation of the man's superb performances during the tournament.

‘
T
aking care of business’ was the catchphrase used by many of the dodgier characters on the council estate where Rio Ferdinand was born and bred. The story of how he survived in that dangerous environment is as remarkable as his meteoric climb to the top of the football world.

For while this is primarily a book about one of the most exciting footballers on earth, I hope it also provides the reader with some answers about Rio’s precarious existence before and since he made it. It may not reveal all of Rio’s most secret or outrageous thoughts, but it is the first-ever account of his life and fantastic voyage from ghetto boy to World Cup hero.

Who is the man behind the public face? Whence comes his love of life’s luxuries, his extraordinary ambition to succeed? How is it possible for someone from such humble beginnings to cope with superstardom while still in his teens?

I have spoken to many people in London and across England who know him well. One of his best friends, Leon Simms, summed him up: ‘Rio’s the coolest dude around. He knows how to make people laugh but there’s a serious side to him. He gets what he wants.’

Rio’s friends agreed to talk because they all respected and adored him. I spent many hours interviewing people from his childhood to find out the real truth about his impoverished background and his relationship with the two most influential people in his life – his mother and father. Many were convinced that Rio would appreciate my intentions in bringing this book to a wide audience. Their decision to sanction my efforts deserves my heartfelt thanks. I sincerely hope the book reflects the warm feelings for Rio that stretch from the world of football right into the mean streets of south-east London.

Another vital source was Rio’s brilliant performances on football pitches across the globe. They tell us so much about his life that they provided the thread I needed to sew the narrative together. So here you have it: an extraordinary blend of two lives that collided to produce one of the most talented sportsmen of his generation.

Wensley Clarkson
September 2014

J
uly 2002 and everyone was waiting with bated breath for the post-World Cup transfer bonanza. Surely this would be the moment when numerous new young stars of world football achieved their dream moves after performing in the ultimate shop window of Japan and Korea.

But in the weeks following the end of the tournament, and with the countdown to the new season already under way, the exact opposite trend began emerging – clubs throughout Europe had suddenly turned into the ultimate caution brokers.

Gone were the days of vast profits and healthy club bank balances. In their place came mounting debts, combined with inflated salaries. Even the most ambitious clubs were starting to feel the pinch, leaving fans across Europe frustrated by the lack of transfer activity.

In Italy, clubs were swamped with vast debts. In France,
respected giants such as Marseille and Nice were close to folding and even Paris Saint-Germain, bankrolled by media giants Canal Plus, were fighting to stay afloat. Germany’s 36 professional clubs had been hit badly by a TV deal which collapsed. They were all being asked by their banks to provide guarantees to cover any projected future losses.

In Switzerland, three clubs were denied licences for the new season, while in Austria league champions FC Tirol were in the extraordinary position of having qualified for the Champions League while being relegated because they couldn’t provide sufficient evidence of solvency.

The 72 Nationwide League clubs in England’s lower divisions spent a total of around £3 million on transfers. In the summer of 2001 they’d splashed out £25 million. In the Premiership the figure dropped from more than £50 million in 2001 to £25 million during this close season.

And if there was little money going out, there was much less coming into the Football League via the transfer market. In the summer of 2001, clubs took in £47 million, mainly in the Premiership. This year the figure was under £20 million.

Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), said: ‘The shame is that in quantity terms there has never been so much money in the game but the trouble is the distribution is so unequal. The top clubs say they can’t give up any more money because they have to compete with the best in Europe. Many smaller clubs will be wondering if they can stay alive or will have to go part-time. But no club should spend money they don’t have.’

The PFA covered wages for around 12 Football League clubs last season and Taylor believes the public are unaware of the plight of those players who are not household names. ‘Nobody appreciates how vulnerable and insecure a footballer is on a 12-month contract at the lower end of the scale,’ he said.

Into this uncertain future stepped Rio Ferdinand – football’s £33-million wonderboy. Not even a catastrophic slump in the world’s football marketplace could stop him becoming the most expensive defender on the globe.

But how did he get there?

S
t Luke's Church on the Friary Estate, in Peckham, south-east London. The rusting fridges and mangled bikes formed a line around both the front and back entrances. Muggings, burglaries and violence were a feature of daily life. People rarely ventured out at night because they were terrified they might encounter one of the many gangs of youths who patrolled the area. At the only shop on the estate the owner had metal shutters over the windows, but they were regularly prised open.

Peckham had been branded an inner-city ghetto for years. It was full of lock-ups and crack factories, of joyless estates where the police dared not tread, where milk was delivered from armoured floats and postmen did their rounds in pairs. The air was thick with the noise and smell of diesel-fuelled HGVs in the seemingly never-ending traffic jams on the A2, the main road from London through Kent to the Channel ports.

More than 70 per cent of the inhabitants of the Friary Estate were from ethnic minorities – West Indian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Somali, West African. Bizarrely, the entire place was connected to neighbouring estates by badly lit walkways. Anonymous passers-by wandered from one estate to the other, mugging, robbing, raping and vandalising as they went, then escaped by one of 49 access points. To an outsider, the estate was a total no-go zone. By day and night it remained largely deserted. Random aggression was rife and few would ever ask a stranger into their home. Only the very foolish were desperate enough to negotiate their way through the maze.

Pregnant teenager Janice Lavender knew within days of arriving on the Friary Estate that any son of hers would need constant supervision if he was going to stay out of trouble. All boys needed watching, cajoling and hauling into line. Only responsible, caring parents stood a chance of seeing their kids survive this environment.

Residents often found flick-knives on the tarmac, discarded during a fight the previous night, or empty wallets taken in random muggings. Low-rise blocks like the one Janice was about to make her home were drab and crumbling, creating a menacing sprawl as they merged into other estates. Although built just ten years earlier in 1968, the Friary Estate had rapidly decayed and was deemed by many to be
the
classic example of inner-city deprivation.

Children as young as eight were regularly hauled off local buses and trains for ‘steaming' other passengers to steal their wallets. Some kids would press-gang weaker children into acts of spitefulness against even weaker children. Many of these kids were not yet 10 years old but boasted of carrying knives; others flashed their knuckledusters.

Janice Lavender moved into a block called Gisburn
House, a grim four-storey, red-brick council tenement building which overlooked some rusting cars and a couple of burned-out white Transit vans. Many of the occupants of Gisburn House were aimless young males, a large percentage of whom had fallen into a life of crime and drugs.

The flat on the estate which would become Rio Ferdinand's home for the first 18 years of his life was up four flights of narrow, dirty, urine-infested stairs. Its red-framed front door was secured behind black metal bars. The flat was small, with threadbare carpet, sparse furniture, scratched and battered, the walls badly in need of a new coat of paint. The cramped second bedroom contained just a bed. Lack of wardrobe space meant that clothes had to be hung from door frames. But for Rio it would become a place of comfort and safety, an escape from the fear that came with running the gauntlet through the estate.

But none of these conditions fazed Janice Lavender. She was one of 11 children whose Irish mother left home when she was young, and she was determined her own kids wouldn't suffer the same fate. ‘My dad did a wonderful job in bringing us up but I can never remember being spoiled,' she recalled.

Janice left home at 15 and took a job at Top Shop in Oxford Street, in London's West End, to help pay the rent on her bedsit. When she was just 17 she got pregnant after starting a relationship with St Lucia-born Julian Ferdinand, whose family had arrived in Britain from the Caribbean in 1958. Julian's mother, Angelina, worked as a nurse at St Bart's Hospital in London. One day Janice met a girl at Top Shop who told her about a river in Jamaica called the Rio Grande, which means ‘great river'. As Janice later explained: ‘I knew immediately that was the name I wanted for my baby.'

November 1978 will be mainly remembered in history for
the mass suicide, or murder, of 913 people in Jonestown, Guyana. Since then there have been rumours of CIA involvement in the tragedy. Some even believe CIA agents posing as members of the People's Temple cult were gathering information in Guyana. But what is known for sure is that on 18 November cult leader Jim Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. He then told guards to shoot anyone who refused or tried to escape. Among the dead were more than 270 children.

It was into this uncertain world that Janice's baby boy was born at King's College Hospital, Camberwell, south London, on 7 November 1978. He was almost named Gavin but his mother Janice and father Julian both preferred Rio, so Gavin became his middle name. The young parents never married, and for Janice: ‘It was a big shock to come home with Rio. That tiny two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor was freezing. And back in those days it was quite a thing that Rio's dad was black and I was white.'

The racist bigots of the National Front were still active at that time and there was a lot of animosity shown to Janice and her tiny, milky-coffee-coloured baby. ‘There was one particular person who would call us names – but as a woman with a baby, what do you do? There was me, this white woman, with a black child. I was so proud of him and I wanted him to look perfect every minute.'

Janice and her sister Carol adored walking around Peckham with Rio and Carol's son Ben in a double baby buggy. Janice explained: ‘Ben is white with ginger hair – people's faces were a picture. Rio soon became a local celebrity even back then.'

The teenage mum was shown the ropes of estate life by single parents Sharon McEwan from Grenada and Dallas Gopie from Guyana. Janice remembered: ‘At the end of a
week when we didn't have much food or money left we'd pool together and feed the kids with something – rice, chicken, anything that was cheap.'

Janice and Dallas often took their sons Rio and Lawrence on outings to local parks and museums. ‘You don't have to have money to support your children,' said Dallas. ‘You just need to give them your time and your love, and Janice was very good at that.' And Janice was always saying to her friend, ‘My Rio is going places. You mark my words.'

As soon as she could return to her job as a credit controller at Top Shop, Janice got little Rio into a nearby nursery school. She was determined to be a good role model to her son. ‘I wanted my kids to know there's a big world out there with lots of things to do – but you have to work hard to get there. It was about Rio seeing that you have to work hard to make a better life for yourself.'

Janice eventually became a childminder so that she could keep earning a living but spend more time with Rio. Any spare cash soon went on sending her sports-mad son on after-school activities and even occasional holidays. There was a sports shop in Peckham called Mark One, where Janice would take Rio. ‘The lady knew my situation and used to take us through to the cheap section we could afford. I always said to Rio, “It's not what you've got, it's what you do with it.”' Rio's first holiday was when he was five and the family went to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and stayed in a friend's chalet. ‘We didn't have any money but still had lots of fun on the beach,' he recalled.

When Rio was about six years old, his mum Janice took him to see mighty Liverpool take on Millwall at the Den, just a few minutes away from the Friary Estate. ‘It was the most wicked thing in my life,' is how Rio remembered it.
‘The crowd was noisy. The players seemed like gods out there. I was drawn right into it.' Rio elevated Liverpool's John Barnes to the status of superhero as his goal helped the Reds scrape through 2–1.

That trip to the Den sparked Rio's obsession with football and he was soon kicking a ball around on the two concrete playgrounds at his junior school, Camelot Primary, in Peckham. There wasn't enough money available for a grass pitch. Rio's old headmistress, Joye Manyan, recalled: ‘He was a tall lad and would play football whenever he was allowed to. He scored goals back then, too.' Keith Tewkesbury, facilities manager at Camelot Primary, had similar memories: ‘Rio was always kicking a ball about and sometimes he would be out in the playground on his own just practising.'

In class, Rio proved to have a lively sense of humour and a good grasp of maths. ‘I remember seeing him take care of a complicated question about fractions when he was just six. His mental arithmetic was good,' added Mrs Manyan, who described Rio's mum Janice as ‘a very determined lady. She knew what she wanted for her children and didn't let anything get in her way. She could have made excuses, but she never did. She was a proud, decent woman.'

Most afternoons after school, Rio went for another kick-about with kids and their mums in the nearby park, just yards from a procession of drug dealers plying their goods to local youths. No one hung around in the evening because the area was renowned for street robberies.

Sometimes, if it was still light, Rio would turn a piece of balding grass in front of Gisburn House into his own imaginary Wembley Stadium. ‘I'd charge around the place with an imaginary voice saying in my ear, “And it's another great pass from Ferdinand under the Twin Towers …”'

When Rio was just seven years old he was transfixed by the England football team's progress in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. And when it came to the side's controversial quarter-final clash with Argentina, he still rates Maradona's second goal after his ‘Hand of God' effort as the best goal ever.

The Argentinian's jinking run past Peter Reid, Gary Stevens, Terry Butcher and Terry Fenwick, before slotting the ball behind Peter Shilton, made such an impression on the youngster that he went straight back outside to the playground with his pals and tried to recreate the same magic. ‘That was the first World Cup I remember. You have got to admire Maradona's skill. I'd have liked to have played against him to see how good he was in the flesh, but you can't have everything.'

On the cracked and dirty concrete playground behind his home, Rio's obsession with Maradona often ended in disappointment. ‘Most of my mates were older than me and used to get first pick of who they wanted to be in the playground so there were may times when I didn't get to be Maradona. I can remember being Craig Johnson of Liverpool – which was OK because he was a good player – and also Des Walker because people thought I looked like him, but not being Maradona really cheesed me off.'

It was around this time that Rio first started thinking seriously about being a professional footballer. Often he and his mates would sit down after a kick-around and talk about who they'd most like to be. ‘We used to wish we could do the things they could and then try them out. I'd sit there daydreaming about it all.'

Rio formed a close attachment to his granny Angelina Ferdinand, who lived in a two-bedroomed terraced house just a few minutes' walk from the Friary Estate. She recalled:
‘I made Rio Caribbean delicacies and told him stories about my childhood in St Lucia. Rio had a real sweet tooth and I loved making him biscuits as well.' He listened wide-eyed to his granny's stories, which included one tale about how a huge storm ripped the roof off her house in St Lucia when she was a little girl. Rio often kicked a football about on the green outside Angelina's home with her husband Raymond, and one time he narrowly missed thumping a ball through her front window.

But football wasn't so popular with Rio's dad, Julian, who, although he never married Janice, remained very close to his son and was a strong influence throughout his early childhood. (Rio's younger brother Anton was born when Rio was six.) Julian encouraged Rio to take up gymnastics at school. Julian also believed his son had great potential as an athlete. On 23 October 1987 Rio – then aged almost nine – was awarded a British Amateur Gymnastics Association Class Two certificate.

Rio also did ballet at school, but when he was nine and a half he and his dad were called in and told he would have to cut down on the dancing and gymnastics because he was growing so quickly some of his ligaments couldn't cope with the sort of movements required. ‘If they tried to stretch him it would do him harm,' Julian explained, adding that Rio was heartbroken to have to quit gymnastics and was upset for weeks. ‘So we took him out of ballet school and got him to do what he wanted because he was the kind of kid who could achieve what he wanted.' That meant playing even more football.

When Rio was at junior school, Janice was a very active parent and encouraged him to go and see his teacher whenever there were problems with classmates. Sometimes those insults had definite racial undertones, which seemed
a sad reflection of the prejudices of the parents. But Rio rarely complained to his teacher. He was a smart, savvy, streetwise kid from an early age and had seen first hand what happened to kids who got lippy with other kids – they got a beating. He'd always walked away from confrontational situations without raising a fist, but that didn't mean he wasn't deeply offended by the bigoted attitudes of others.

Occasionally Rio would sit down with local white kids and try to change their racist views, but most of them simply looked blankly at him because they were too ignorant to know any better. Janice told him there was nothing wrong with being a different colour, a different religion. Rio knew his mum was right and he always kept her words of advice in the back of his mind.