“The problem is that once you’ve played in the first team and you go back in the reserves, it’s such a let-down,” he says of the aftermath of the 1983 car crash that had such an impact on his life. “It was soul-destroying, it really was. I went from the massive high of two years, of winning cups, to a feeling that I was back to square one. But I knew I wasn’t going to play regularly again. I knew it.”
How Brooke ended up having to face the prospect of his career being over at just 23 is one of the sadder episodes from the story of this Spurs side. As a player, he is one of the enigmas of that team. His appearances were limited by injuries and the presence of a world-class midfield that made it difficult for a fast-paced, attacking midfielder to establish himself. As it was, he was a fixture on the bench, but still has three trophy-winners’ medals that prove he was much more than a mere back-up.
Even so, he must have found it frustrating to find his own chances hindered by the presence of Glenn Hoddle and two World Cup winners? “No, not really,” he shrugs. “We were all too wrapped up with the job in hand. Ossie to me is the greatest player I’ve ever played with. He was the one I would sort of understudy for. When I made my debut in 1980, I played the next six games as Ossie was away on international duty. We beat Arsenal 2–0, and Shreevesie said afterwards, ‘We won that game in the first minute, when Brooksie got Alan Sunderland by the side and put in a really good tackle. After that, everyone was on their game.’ I was thinking, ‘I’m the dog’s bollocks now.’
“The following Wednesday, Keith Burkinshaw came up to me saying, ‘Brooksie, you’ve done well, but you’re not playing Saturday because Ossie’s better than you.’ What are you supposed to say? You can’t argue with that; Ossie was better than me. But that was Keith’s style. I could have ranted and raved, but I didn’t because Keith was so honest and straight. I walked away feeling absolutely gutted, but at least Keith told you how it was.”
Garry Brooke had been schooled in this no-nonsense approach from the moment he first stepped through the gates at White Hart Lane. He looks younger than his 48 years, and still bears the stocky build that made him such a powerful player. He is talking in a branch of an American-themed restaurant, built on the site of the former stadium of Enfield Town, a power in non-league circles when Brooke was winning medals at Spurs, but now fallen on fractured, hard times.
Fresh from an afternoon of coaching local schoolkids, Brooke is dressed in a tracksuit. Indeed, he’s rarely been out of football kit of some description since he was a kid. Born in Bethnal Green and raised in Walthamstow, he attracted the attention of a variety of big-club scouts from the age of just ten. He had trials at Spurs, Arsenal and Derby, then one of the country’s top sides, but when a decision had to be made, there was only one choice.
“I went for a trial at Spurs and a bloke called Ron Henry [from the Double team] was coach. He had this drill where you had to knock a ball with your left foot, get it back and pass it again with your left. The bloke did it to perfection and said, ‘If you think that was lucky’ . . . Bing, bong, he did it all again. So when I went home I said to Mum and Dad, ‘I never want to go to Arsenal again because of this fella.’ Just seeing him do that with his sweet left foot got me hooked. At Arsenal they never did any demonstrations. Ron did. And someone doing that is worth a million times more than someone saying this, that and the other.
“I got good advice. When I went for a two-week trial at Derby with a mate called Gary Welsh I had to tell Peter Shreeve. He said, ‘What do you expect me to say, ‘Good luck’?’ Pete can be a bit sarcastic. But when I came back he said, ‘If you’re going to Derby, the only bit of advice I can give you is that they are going to see you once every six weeks; every time you train with them you are going to have to be at your very best, because the other kids they are seeing are being watched by them every day, and they’ll know what makes them tick.’ Gary went to Derby but didn’t get taken on; I stayed at Spurs and did, so looking back it was a good piece of advice from Peter.”
The young Brooke was never a Tottenham fan as such, preferring to be inspired by the individual talents of the likes of George Best on his visits to White Hart Lane with his father, a man similarly non-aligned to a particular club. But once Garry became part of the Spurs family, the inclusive atmosphere soon made him a convert.
“We were made to feel welcome. I knew Mark Falco from district football and we arrived within a week of each other. Basically we grew up together along with Chrissie Hughton – he was and is the world’s most charming man, a lovely bloke – and a few others. It was quite a close bunch. But Ron made it enjoyable. He was funny, down to earth – he said things you couldn’t get away with now. He would rip into people. Ron didn’t give a monkeys, he told it how it was and if you didn’t like it, he didn’t care. Name calling, swearing, not at kids necessarily but in conversation. I appreciated it because he was honest.”
That culture of blunt frankness stemmed from one man whose presence still loomed large over the club even during Garry’s early days. “We used to run away from Bill Nick. He was a lovely bloke, but you didn’t like to come across him. You’d bump into him and he’d say in a very suspicious tone, ‘Hello Brooksie. Do you remember that game at Forest and you should have crossed it?’ You’d say, ‘Not really Bill’ and he’d say, ‘Well I fucking do’ and he’d keep you there for an hour. He was the scout then and watched youth games, and he remembered everything.
“When I was at school and he was still Spurs manager he actually came to the school to ask if they would release me to play games during the week. And because it was him, they did it. He went to my first wedding as well; he was a great man.
“But the whole coaching team worked well. Shreevesie was the best coach I ever worked with, he’d make training enjoyable every single day. It was tough but it had to be – if you can’t take hard work and the mickey-taking you’ve got no chance, no matter how good you are.”
Steadily progressing under such uncompromising but experienced guidance, Garry graduated to the fringe of the first team. But before he could make the breakthrough, the club had a surprise in store. “In a reserves game against Southend we won 4-0 and I scored three. Keith called me into the office. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to get involved here for the first team’ until he said, ‘We want you to go on loan for six months to Sweden.’ I was dumbstruck. He explained that because I still lived at home and had everything done for me it would be good for me to go abroad and fend for myself. Paul Miller had done the same, and when he came back had got in the first team, but I thought it was the end of the world for me. I started to doubt myself – ‘Do they want me, do they think I’m good enough?’ Keith said to go home and have a think about it and within two weeks I was gone.
“Over there you are supposed to get a normal job as well, as you are, effectively, taking a footballer’s place away from a Swede – I wasn’t sure about the logic but that was how they worked it. My club was GAIS Goteborg, who played in the second division. We were sponsored by a ferry company. I’d been there a few months but no one had mentioned anything about the job I was supposed to have. That was fine by me, but one day I got told to go down to the ferry company at the docks. I walked out with this bloke to where all the ferries are; he gives me a big white coat and says, ‘When the cars come off you point them left or right to the car parks.’ I went, ‘Er, no! Sorry, I ain’t doing it. I’ve come over here to play football not be a car park attendant.’ And that was it. But a week later, Shreevsie turned up at my flat and sorted things out. At the stadium they had a sports centre and they signed me on as a tennis coach – for one day. The authorities just needed to check I was doing it for tax and employment purposes. They came and saw me and that was my non-footballing career in Sweden done.
“It all went well on the pitch, I loved living there and we just missed out on promotion. I played 21 games at centre forward and scored 14 goals, but I wanted to get back and get into the Spurs first team. And sure enough, October
1980 I was back in England and made sub, versus West Brom at home. We were 3-0 down and Keith said, ‘On you go.’ I said, ‘Thanks!’. We lost 3-2, but obviously playing regularly in Sweden had got me noticed. And there were other benefits. They sent me there to learn about life really – pay your bills, make you grow up a bit. It was a very good experience for me.”
Garry’s growing maturity had impressed Burkinshaw and Shreeve. As the double act that shaped the emerging Spurs team they were fundamental to Brooke’s own improvement. “Keith was like Ron but didn’t swear so much. Even now when we see Keith it’s like the headmaster coming in at school. We’re all on our best behaviour. He’ll look at us and say, ‘What are you lot fucking moaning about?’ But Keith and Peter were very different characters, and worked well together.
“I love Peter but he could muck you about. He lived like me in Walthamstow and I’d walk down to the Crooked Billet roundabout and get the bus to the ground. Some mornings Pete would drive up, stop and give me a lift. Other mornings he’d just drive past. He could be very sarcastic. But we were sort of ‘his’ boys. People who know him say, ‘He always speaks very highly of you.’ So I’ve got nothing but respect for him. And he could have a laugh. We had a player called George Mazzon, but Peter put it about that his name was Giorgio – he done that for the papers because he thought it sounded Italian. His name’s George; he’s not Italian at all. Shreevesie changed it because it made him sound a bit more glamorous.”
Garry Brooke made his full debut in December 1980, making an immediate impact with two goals in a 4-4 draw with Southampton.
“It was a very strange week. We’d had a reserve game at Southampton that was Kevin Keegan’s comeback and there were 9,000 there. Keith turned up to say that Ossie would be missing on the Saturday because he was going back to South America and he said out of the midfield players whoever played the best that night would play on Saturday. Keegan scored after 20 seconds, and I thought, ‘This is going to be fun.’ But we won 5-4 and I’d scored three by half time, so I made my debut on the Saturday.
“Next game we had Norwich away. On the coach back Steve Perryman sat at the front as always, close to Keith. Terry Yorath – great man, Yozza – calls me over and says, ‘Brooksie, you were our best player today so you should be playing next game. Go down and speak to Keith, tell him you should play.’ This went on for about 20 minutes so in the end I was thinking, ‘I’m the big geezer now, I’m going to have some of this.’ As I’m walking down to the front, Steve’s gone, ‘Brooksie – piss off.’ Can you imagine if I had gone through with it? Keith would have ripped me to shreds,” Garry laughs at the memory of his innocence.
It was an illustration of Perryman’s gift for captaincy. “He had obviously been listening. But that was Steve being smart. He was protecting me from making an idiot of myself. To me, he ran the club. We all knew Keith was in charge, but if anybody had a problem, you went to Stevie. He would talk you through the game – ‘Brooksie, five yards to your right, so-and-so’s on you.’ He could be a horrible bastard as well: he would cut you down to pieces if you weren’t doing it. But you had respect for that, it was an old-school thing. He played a vital part in bringing on my game. He was the last great captain we’ve had. No disrespect to those who have come after him, but I don’t think we’ve had anyone who could match him.”
Another factor in Brooke’s development was that he emerged from a competitive peer group. “I’ll never meet another Paul Miller. He has been like he is since the age of 16, he was never a kid, he was like a 50-year-old then. A lot of people don’t know how to take him, he can overwhelm you a bit. But he was always like that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Paul in a pair of jeans. He is and was a really strong person, but you had to be at that time, because if you weren’t, you could have gone under.
“When Tony Galvin came down, we said he looked like a tramp out of university. Me, Mark [Falco] and Paul murdered him and he hated us. But now we’re the only ones he talks to. You had to play with Tony to appreciate how good he was. He was mad as a March hare. We were playing a five-a-side once, with loads of little passes. Tony went mad and said, ‘Just get the ball to me – this is rubbish this is.’ We were playing by the A10 at Cheshunt and he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this’ and booted the ball onto the road into a car. A lunatic!
“Micky Hazard used to get clobbered. He was the worst dresser in the world and he’d get told every day. Him and Tony always said that as soon as they finished with football they’d both be back up north – but they still live down here now, and they’ll always be here.
“It’s the strong bond we still have. Steve organised a do for Keith at a restaurant a couple of years back, there were about 35 players there. It was brilliant because I saw people I haven’t seen for a while. We hadn’t seen Garth for years. We’ve all put on weight, but he got annihilated for his extra pounds.
“We used to call Mark Falco ‘Gripper’. At the time Grange Hill was on with that character Gripper Stebson. Mark’s a big fella who can handle himself, and when he turned pro he went overnight from being a great bloke to the biggest c**t in the world,” laughs Garry. “One day you’re working with him, the next day he’s saying, ‘Get my fucking boots.’ And he was serious.
“They call me Buddha because of that twat. We went on tour to Israel. Ossie and Ricky are really religious and were right into it, I’m not. So we’re standing outside some church or temple or whatever and there are two great big statues of Buddha next to it. Mark’s gone, ‘Look, it’s Brooksie!’ and that stuck. They still call me Buddha now, the bastards.”
If the Tottenham of that era sounds like a place with a sense of playground mischief, Brooke does little to counter the notion. As a former member of the Crazy Gang at Wimbledon, where Brooke spent a spell at the end of his career, he is well placed to compare the two environments. So were the Dons all they were cracked up to be? “No, crap. They never got up to the tricks that we did at Tottenham.”
“There was a real hierarchy at Tottenham in terms of the piss-taking. The boys were always doing something. We used to have cold-water fights just to wind Steve up because he hated cold water. He’d go spare. Someone like Archie, he’d do it on purpose, throwing water at Steve. Stevie was like the sensible head boy at times, but he had a laugh. Ossie was a case – two glasses of wine and he was paralytic. When he first came over, the first word Stevie got him to say was ‘bollocks’. Everything Ossie then said was ‘bollocks’. It was a wind-up culture, but a real pleasure to go to work. Especially once you got in the first team squad. There were downsides, but it wasn’t work, it was going to do what you love to do all day long.
“The day the Argentinians arrived, it was about 70 degrees and they are both standing there going ‘Brrr’ like it’s freezing. ‘Shut up,’ we said, ‘it’s summer!’ But because we were so young, we didn’t really speak to them. You didn’t just charge into the first team changing room then – you didn’t knock exactly, but you would have got stick from people like John Pratt and Terry Naylor if you went charging in there. You’d get ripped to shreds.
“Terry and Peter Taylor pulled a caper outside the ground once. There’s a bus stop opposite next to what was Tony’s Café. Word went round to get in there because Spud [Taylor] and Nutter [Naylor] were going to pull a scam. Nutter was in the bus stop; we had seen Spud walk across the road, but what we didn’t know is that Nutter had dropped his wallet on the floor. Spud had picked it up and done a runner, pretending he’d nicked it. Nutter could never catch Spud in a million years but, in the middle of the High Road, he chased after him and dived on top of him. All the old dears were going, ‘Stop thief!’ at Peter. ‘He nicked it. It was him. Get him!’ The traffic came to a standstill.
“Parksie [Tony Parks] was another one. He was a bastard to Colin White, the old groundsman. He used to have a little dumper truck and Tony, being mad, used to drive it up and down. One day, Colin put all these breeze blocks in one corner, it had taken him all day, and T
ony got the truck and just mowed them all down. Colin went, ‘You bastard, I’ll do you’. So what he did was this. We used to have this silly game where we’d get these polystyrene blocks that were the same size and shape as a normal breeze block. We’d put them into a line and then see how far we could boot them. The next day Colin called me, Mark and Micky to one side. What he’d done was paint one of the actual breeze blocks to look like one of these polystyrene ones. Tone booted that and broke his fucking toe.
“We used to go back in the afternoons and play hide and seek round the ground, real kids’ games. Peter Southey – we used to have a great laugh with him. He died very young, a tragedy because he would have been a great player and he was a lovely lad. I miss him now. When we started our second year of being an apprentice, he rang me up to say all nervously, ‘Garry, what have we got to wear for the first day of training?’ It was July. He said ‘Suited and booted, yeah?’ So he came in all dressed up while everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts. First game of the season, we wound him up again and while everyone was in a suit he came in flip-flops. He was so gullible.
“The apprentices really got it in the neck. We had an Irish lad called Tommy Heffernan, though he never actually played a first team game, and another called Joe Simmonds. We used to get all the kit, and Joe used to look after the kit for Tommy. All the kits were numbered, so what we did was get Tommy’s socks and soak them. He unrolled his kit and went mad, saying, ‘Joe, you bastard, I’ll get you!’ Tommy got hold of him, took him up onto the West Stand and hung him from the flag post.
“Something was always going on. It didn’t matter if it was in training, a game, wherever. We went to Swansea when they came up. They came out onto the tunnel, this big monster of a team. Maxie looked round and went, ‘This is a fucking shithole – my back garden is bigger than this.’ Guess what – they kicked lumps out of us. In the second half, Keith held my number up to substitute me. He said, ‘Not your sort of game, Brooksie?’ And I went ‘Nah, not really!’ They murdered us, all because of Maxie.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 11