9
GEORGE MAZZON
“FOOTBALL CAN’T LAST FOREVER. ENJOY IT WHILE IT LASTS”
If it is every football fan’s fantasy to play for a major club in a packed stadium, then George Mazzon can relate how it actually feels. His spell at Tottenham may have been brief, amounting to just seven senior appearances in a four-year period, but he was able to achieve what millions aspire to and only a privileged elite ever realise. This is a man who really did live the dream.
Few fans around at the time may remember his fleeting top-flight career, and younger supporters will probably ask “George who?” but he was a contemporary of Tottenham legends and held his own among such vaunted company. Not that the modest and likeable former defender is one to brag. Now 48, and a pugnacious-looking construction site manager for Bovis Lend Lease, with £60 million contracts and a 400-strong workforce depending on him, he concentrates on his job today and is in no rush to let people know about his former life of football stardom.
“In the industry I work in now, people know who I am and what I did, but I never tell them – they find out.” Sitting in his company’s offices in the heart of the City close to the Bank of England, George points to the partition window. “I’m surprised there aren’t a load of faces peering in now taking the mickey. I’ve been out of football for nearly 20 years and at this company since I left. I’ve never told anyone directly what I used to be and do. But I can guarantee that within two weeks of getting on to a site, somebody will have been on the internet, found a photo of me in a Tottenham shirt, printed it out and pinned it on the wall.
“From Spurs supporters, the reaction is ‘Wow!’ and a pat on the back. Where my office is next door, Scott the administrator is an avid Tottenham fan and he had my photo stuck on the wall behind his desk. But fans of other clubs don’t really give me any stick. They just want to talk about football. ‘What do you think of this player, George? What did you think of that game?’ They want my opinion. I don’t mind talking about it, though I think my knowledge of the game is terrible. But the banter is good-natured.
“I’ve never tried to gain from being an ex-pro. But in the industry I’m in, I can’t hide it. I’m now in a position where I have directors of companies recognising me and talking about games I played in – good and bad things. I can’t for the life of me remember them. And I can’t say to these people, ‘Yeah, I remember you – seat 15, row G, West Stand – you’re the one that called me that so-and-so!’”
Friendly and amenable, George is self-effacement personified. With his hard hat and work clothes, he is like any other worker on site: an ordinary bloke getting on with doing his job. The story of his sporting career, however, is far from ordinary.
To begin with, he came to the game from an unlikely background. Rather than being just another stereotypical street-playing urchin of football folklore, George Mazzon grew up in quiet and comfortable surroundings in the borderlands between Hertfordshire and London and was privately educated.
“I was born and raised in Waltham Cross and went to boarding school in Cuffley. The hotel Spurs stayed in for the cup final in 1981 was actually my old boarding school. It was called St Dominics, but is now the Ponsbourne Hotel; the golf course at the bottom of the hill is where I learned to play football. One of the bedrooms would have been the dormitory I slept in as a boarder.
“It was run by nuns, though I can’t say it was particularly strict. I had Italian parentage and being Catholics, naturally, I went to a Catholic school. My parents ran a grocery business. I had an older brother, Gianni, and two sisters followed, so it was hard for my mum and dad trying to develop a business and raise a family. They must have felt it was easier to find a school of a relatively good standard and not have the day-to-day worries of looking after children.”
That mention of his Italian lineage prompts a reminder of Garry Brooke’s comment that Mazzon was as English as anyone in the club, and that ‘Giorgio’ was just a whimsical invention of Peter Shreeve. George can now set the record straight once and for all.
“My Christian name really is Giorgio. My father is Italian, my mother is Swiss. But having been born in England and lived here all my life, I’ve always been called George. It was before the cup final in 1981 that I had one of my first interviews. A reporter asked what my name was, to which I said ‘George Mazzon’, only for Peter to jump in and say, ‘George? No, put a bit of sparkle behind it, it’s Giorgio!’ To which I said ‘OK’ because, after all, it is my name. Peter said, ‘Give it a bit of glamour. We’ve got an Osvaldo, a Ricardo, how about a Giorgio?’ To which Gary O’Reilly immediately piped up with, ‘And don’t forget Gario?’
“Growing up most people called me George and they do in my workplace now; very few people know what my real name is. I don’t try to hide it. ‘Giorgio’ didn’t stick after Peter’s intervention, though Ossie and Ricky would use the Italian version perhaps because it rolled off the Latin tongue a little easier for them.”
George played football whenever he could as a kid but, coming from a family with a distinctly non-footballing pedigree, he received little encouragement at home. “There was no football in my family. My father had greater interests in his business; He would ask, ‘Why is it that I can never get Giorgio to help me out on a Saturday afternoon?’ Outside of football I would work in the business, doing a bread round or whatever. He couldn’t understand why I was always busy on Saturdays – and later it was as if he never realised that I played football for a living. He didn’t take it on board – playing football to him was something you played over the park.
“My dad assumed I was going to go into the family business – it was called G Mazzon and Sons, after all. His expectation was that his sons were going to help his growing business. Unfortunately, my brother went into the British Army and I became a footballer, so his dream wasn’t fulfilled.
“His friends would say to him, ‘Your son plays for Spurs!’ and he would ask me, ‘Why do all these people keep talking about you and football?’ He just didn’t comprehend it. He never saw me play; my mum probably only saw me a couple of times, and even that was when I was under 15. They never saw me play for Tottenham.”
Putting this lack of parental interest alongside the restricted opportunities to play at school, it’s a wonder how George ever did make it to Tottenham in the first place – and when he did, he faced rejection at the first hurdle. “St Dominics was not a football school. I learned how to play there but I certainly wasn’t taught. At playtime we played football, but there was no tuition, no games teacher to steer me. The nearest thing I got to coaching was when I was 12. My brother started playing for a local Sunday team and I started the next year. It was an all-Catholic team that was based around St Joseph’s church at Waltham Cross. This was the era of a priest getting nine ten-year-olds in his Fiat 500 and driving us round to games. It was hysterical, really. But that’s where I learned because we were trained and told how to play.
“That’s how it all started for me. Gianni was a big influence; he was three years older and very talented at most sports and I followed suit. I became captain of the school team, played for the district, then Hertfordshire county at various age groups and I played against Garry Brooke in some of those games.”
Having been entranced by the 1970 FA Cup final, George was a Chelsea fan through his early teens, but went to White Hart Lane for his first experience of playing at a proper club. “I was 16 and turning out for Waltham New Town, and our manager managed to get me and our goalkeeper six training sessions at Tottenham. The pair of us went down for the midweek evening sessions run by Ron Henry in the indoor gyms at White Hart Lane.
“We never played a game – just trained. Peter Shreeve pulled us to one side, said we were very good but felt we weren’t quite the type of players they were looking for. I felt gutted, terrible. I was over the moon to have been training at a big club like Spurs. Despite not getting a game, I felt I was getting in with them. I had my heart set on becoming a pr
o. That was all I ever wanted to be.
“So the rejection was hurtful, painful. But I went to Hertford Town in the Isthmian League. I wasn’t motivated as such to prove people wrong; I just wanted to play. What my plan was I wasn’t certain. But the manager at Hertford knew Ralph Coates; he watched me, obviously thought I was good enough and got me another round of training sessions at Spurs. I went down, trained and this time actually started playing games – I played one, then another and before I knew it I was a member of the youth team.
“I had other options. When I was in the Spurs youth team and still playing for Hertford as well, I got a call from David Pleat who was then Luton manager. He suggested I come down for a trial. I actually played a non-first team game for Luton against an Arsenal side. We lost 1-0, and Pleat said afterwards he was very happy with the way I had played and thought I was a great prospect. However, he said I was a bit young and I should go away and play for Wealdstone, a club Luton had an association with, I presume, for a year and then he would take another look. I couldn’t help thinking ‘I’m already at Tottenham – why would I want to play for Wealdstone?’ When he said that, it hurt a lot more than when Peter Shreeve said I wasn’t good enough for Spurs at 16. But it didn’t mean anything as I ended up playing for Tottenham.
“At 18 I went straight from the youth team into a two-year professional contract at Spurs. By that time I had a job with a steel fabricating business in Enfield. I was earning £36 a week there. One of the first jobs I got was to buy all the metal for the balustrades at Wembley Stadium. So even then it was football-related. For my first Spurs contract I got, I think, £12,000 – substantially more than what I was on at my other job. I walked into Keith Burkinshaw’s office and he simply said, ‘The season’s finished, we’ve looked at you and we’re keen to offer you a contract, what do you think?’ I said, ‘It’s all I ever wanted.’ Keith asked me to take it away and think about it but I said no and signed it on the spot.
“The rest of that day I floated home. I caught the bus and it was just going through my head, ‘I’m a professional footballer, I’m a professional footballer with Tottenham Hotspur.’ I couldn’t wait to tell my mum. I skipped down the street. I thought my chance had gone two years before.
“Peter never said anything about rejecting me previously. I just got the usual normal motivation stuff that was used to get people to perform – ‘C’mon Mazzon, you bastard!’ Nothing was said. Whether he remembered it or not I have no idea, they must have had hundreds of boys coming through the system. Maybe it was good fortune; maybe the first time I’d been unlucky in that there were better players at those first training sessions, I don’t know, but playing games enabled me to settle and cement a position, to show them that I had some ability and what it takes.
“From there I progressed, along with people like Micky Hazard, Garry and Mark Falco, Kerry Dixon and Terry Gibson. It was a step up from non-league; the most noticeable thing was that everyone was of a good ability – they kicked with purpose. On a Sunday team there are always one or two who are sons of the manager or know someone and can get a game. You could tell by the scores. We’d win games 15-0 – that sort of thing doesn’t happen in the youth teams at professional clubs. There was more strength, speed and skill and purpose in what you did.
“There was finesse at Tottenham. It was instilled in us. All through the training process, Shreeve and Ron were guiding us. The one thing Peter wanted was a bit of class. Everything that you did, Peter would encourage you to do it with a bit of style and charisma. It was skill ‘plus’ – always do things with a little bit extra. You had that talent within you, but what the coaching was designed to do was make you think that little bit more. Make you more mentally active in controlling what you are doing.
“Take passing the ball. Anybody can do it but not everyone can do it with style. Jimmy Holmes was a natural left-footer. Every time he kicked the ball his body shape and stance was very natural. It just looked so sweet the way he made contact. For some reason, all left-footers look good and Shreevesie wanted that in all his players. ‘When you pass the ball,’ he’d say, ‘Push your arm out so it looks good, get your arm out as your foot swings through.’ There was method to it, it served a purpose but had to look right as well. Peter could observe your stance, your technique, and make you think about the game.
“Peter was a character. He wasn’t the fulcrum for everything but he was respected for his intelligence, very good in involving people, getting them to react and respond. He was a good man manager and knew how to get the best out of people. But also a fine coach and tactician.
“Training was hard but fair. You never went in to hurt anybody, there was no malice. You had to have the fitness and stamina. But we played with a will to impress and succeed. You wanted the ball – playing for Spurs has always been about wanting to play, but with a recognition that you can’t play if you don’t get the ball.
“The crux of it was that you had to work hard and get your attitude right, with a keenness to work and run off the ball. From that foundation you could develop your skills to play as a team and carry players; not everybody was going to be on top form or not make mistakes. But ultimately it was 11 guys out on a pitch who would live and die for each other.”
That element of rugged determination sits at odds with Shreeve’s ethos of looking good and the reputation for Spurs being perceived as being a ‘flash’ club. For George, the opposite was true. “I can remember playing derbies against Crystal Palace, Chelsea, Arsenal and our feeling would be ‘This lot are flash gits. They think they’re class; they think they’re better than us but we’ll show ’em’. We never recognised it in ourselves. Playing Arsenal our attitude was, ‘This is blood and guts; we’ve got to beat them.’ We felt all the other London clubs were flashy teams full of flashy characters while we were just, well, normal.”
Within that atmosphere of normality, Mazzon and his colleagues behaved like any other group of young men working together. They had their laughs, socialised and enjoyed themselves, but George points out that the players were aware of their responsibilities to their job.
“We used to give the staff the runaround: Johnny Wallis the kit man would be screaming at us all the time about cleaning the older pros’ boots. Johnny had been there since the year dot, and we were always digging him out, giving him gip for not having the orange squash ready for after training, but in a good-natured way. It was a close atmosphere where most, if not everybody, got on.
“Outside of the club, it was a bit different. I was friends with Kerry Dixon, for example, but when he wasn’t awarded a contract, we went our separate ways. Few of us actually lived local to each other; I lived near Cheshunt, Kerry was in Luton, and the others scattered all over. We didn’t really socialise outside of football. At White Hart Lane we would have a drink in the club bar and maybe go onto the Chanticleer restaurant that was on Paxton Road, perhaps the Coolbury Club on the High Road. After training we might go to a pub near Cheshunt; if it was a weekday I’d go out round Broxbourne and Hoddesdon and occasionally bump into Ossie or Ricky or Glenn and Ray Clemence because that’s where we lived. But we weren’t in each other’s pockets. When I was there, there was no drinking in and around the games or training. Outside of that there would be a few beers but nothing major by way of a drinking culture like at some clubs you heard about.
“I suppose I was a bit of a drinker and clubber, but I was sensible. There was the so-called rule you should never go out on Thursday night or 48 hours before a match. There’s nothing stopping you having a drink at home within that time so you would exercise your own judgement. I made the decision to make Thursday night the last night of the week for me and if I did go out, make sure I wasn’t going to do anything silly. Friday night I’d be in, preparing myself in the right way.
“Saturday night it depended on whether you’d had a tough game or not. If you’d been kicked around, picked up a knock or a few bruises, sometimes you’d be so stiff and knackered that you j
ust wanted to go home and put your feet up and watch Match of the Day. That left you with the early part of the week to socialise, but this was a time when very little was happening unless you went into central London.
“If we did go into town it would be Saturday, but dependent on how the game went. Were we in a good mood, or in a very good mood? That would determine how keen we were to party. After the 1981 celebrations, which went on very late at the Chanticleer, I drove home. I can’t remember how. But that was the thing you did in those days. Driving out of there at three in the morning, the street down to Edmonton was choc-a-bloc with people and police trying to keep the crowds back. I must have drunk myself silly. How on earth did I manage to get home?”
Like the rest of his team-mates of that era, George emphasises how strong the team spirit was at White Hart Lane, helped in no small part by strong individuals who stamped their personalities on the club.
“There were plenty of characters at Tottenham then. In my early days, Peter Taylor wasn’t a drinker or party animal as such, but a bit of a comedian. He’d burst into his Norman Wisdom impressions and entertain us. Terry Naylor was another joke teller; Paul Miller was a strong character in his own right, as was Graham Roberts. Paul was a smart dresser and would always be talking about what clothes to buy. Garth Crooks was similar but had a knack for bringing you back down to earth. He was smart, sensible and educated. Garth had a dry wit and a sarcastic side. If you were getting carried away about anything, success on the pitch for example, he would keep your feet on the ground and not let you get too big for your boots.
“He once said that us defenders were the ‘labourers’! But he scored goals so we could let him get away with it. Of course I had no idea he was going to go on to be a presenter, but you always felt he had an opinion, a statement to make about most things. He looked at things in a different light, an individual character different to everyone else. He was always very opinionated but his view was respected because he communicated it well and intelligently. Working in the media is ideal for him.
The Boys From White Hart Lane Page 20