Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

by Alex Ferguson

  Then along came horse racing, another great passion, another outlet. Martin Edwards, the former chairman, had called me one day to say, ‘You should take a day off.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I replied.

  But I was at the stage where Cathy was saying, ‘You’re going to kill yourself.’ At home, after work, I would be on the phone until 9 o’clock at night and thinking about football every minute.

  I bought my first horse in 1996. On our 30th anniversary we went to Cheltenham, where I first met that fantastic man, John Mulhern, the Irish trainer, for lunch. That night I joined them in London for dinner. Inevitably I found myself saying to Cathy in the aftermath, ‘Do you fancy buying a horse? I think it’ll be a release for me.’

  ‘Where did you get that one from?’ she said. ‘Alex – the problem with you is that you’ll want to buy every bloody horse.’

  But it did open this release valve for me. Instead of stagnating in my office or burning time in endless telephone conversations, I could switch my thoughts to the Turf. It was a welcome distraction from the gruelling business of football – and that’s why I threw myself into it, to enable me to escape the obsession with my job. Winning two Grade 1 races with What A Friend has been a highlight. The Lexus Chase and the Aintree Bowl. The day before the Aintree race, we had been beaten by Bayern Munich in the Champions League. One minute my head was on the floor. The next day I was winning a Grade 1 race at Liverpool.

  My first horse, Queensland Star, was named after a ship my dad worked on and helped to build. Trainers have told me of owners who’ve never had a winner. I’ve had 60 or 70 and I now have shares in around 30 horses. I’m very keen on the Highclere Syndicate: Harry Herbert, who runs it, is a great personality and a fine salesman. You know exactly what’s happening with the horses, with information every day.

  Rock of Gibraltar was a wonderful horse; he became the first in the northern hemisphere to win seven consecutive Group 1 races, beating Mill Reef’s record. He ran in my colours under an agreement I had with the Coolmore racing operation in Ireland. My understanding was that I had a half share in the ownership of the horse; theirs was that I would be entitled to half the prize money. But it was resolved. The matter was closed when we reached a settlement agreeing that there had been a misunderstanding on both sides.

  Obviously there was a potential clash between my racing interests and the ownership of the club, and when a man stood up at the AGM and insisted I resign there was awkwardness for me. I have to say that at no point was I sidetracked from my duties as manager of Manchester United. I have an excellent family lawyer in Les Dalgarno and he managed the process on my behalf. It didn’t affect my love of racing and I am on good terms now with John Magnier, the leading figure at Coolmore.

  Racing taught me to switch off, along with reading books and buying wine. That side of my life developed really from 1997, when I hit that wall and realised I needed to do something else to divert my thoughts from football. Learning about wine also helped in that respect. I started buying with Frank Cohen, a big collector of contemporary art and a neighbour of mine. When Frank went abroad for a while, I started buying on my own.

  I could never call myself an expert but I’m not bad. I know the good years and the good wines. I can taste a wine and recognise some of its properties.

  My studies took me to Bordeaux and the champagne region, but generally it was through reading that I extended my knowledge, and through conversations with dealers and experts over lunch or dinner. It was exciting. I had dinner with wine writer and TV presenter Oz Clarke and the wine merchant John Armit. Corney & Barrow wine bars put on great lunches. These men would hold conversations about grapes and years that I couldn’t hope to follow, but I was always enthralled. I perhaps ought to have learned more about the grapes. That was the essence of it all. But soon I was developing a working knowledge.

  In the autumn of 2010 I was asked about retirement, and found myself saying, instinctively: ‘Retirement’s for young people, because they have other things they can do.’ At 70 years of age, with idleness, the system breaks down quickly. You have to have something in place when you retire. Right away, the next day, not after a three-month holiday.

  When you’re young, the 14-hour days are necessary, because you have to establish yourself, and the only way to do that is by working your balls off. By those means, you establish a work ethic for yourself. If you have family, it’s passed on to them. My mother and father conveyed the fruits of their labour to me and I have done so with my own children and beyond. With youth you have the capacity to establish all the stability of later life. With age you have to manage your energy. Keep fit. People should keep fit. Eat the right foods. I was never a great sleeper, but I could get my five to six hours, which was adequate for me. Some people wake up and lie in bed. I could never do that. I wake and jump up. I’m ready to go somewhere. I don’t lie there whiling my time away.

  You’ve had your sleep – that’s why you woke up. I would be up at six, maybe quarter past six, and be in the training ground for seven. I was only a quarter of an hour away. That was my habit. The routine never changed.

  I came out of a wartime generation that said: you’re born, that’s you. You were safe. You had the library and the swimming baths and football. Your parents worked all the time, so either your granny looked in to make sure you were all right, or you reached an age where you looked after yourself. Your basic pattern was laid down that way. My mother used to say, ‘That’s the mince, that’s the tatties, all you need to do is put it on at half past four.’ It would all be ready to cook. You would light the fire for them coming in from work. My dad would get in about quarter to six with the table all set – that was your duty – and you would take the ashes down to the midden. Those were the chores when you came in from school, and we did our homework later, my brother and I, at seven o’clock at night.

  It was a simple regime, born of a lack of modern amenities.

  Now we have more fragile human beings. They’ve never been in the shipyards, never been in a pit; few have seen manual labour. We have a generation of fathers, my own sons included, who do better for their children than I did for them.

  They attend more family events than I did. Picnics, with the kids. I never organised a picnic in my life. I would say, ‘Go and play, boys.’ There was a school ground beside our house in Aberdeen and the lads would be out there with their pals every day. We didn’t have a video recorder until 1980. It was grainy, terrible. Progress brings CDs and DVDs and grandsons who can pull up their fantasy football team on your home computer.

  I didn’t do enough with my boys. Cathy did it, my wife did it, because she was a great mother. She would say, ‘When they get to sixteen, they’ll be daddy’s boys,’ which was true. As they grew older they were very close, and the three brothers were very close, which pleased me greatly, and Cathy would say: ‘I told you.’

  ‘But you produced them,’ I would tell her. ‘If I ever said a bad word about you to those three boys, they would kill me. You’re still the boss.’

  There’s no secret to success in this world. The key is graft. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, could just have been called Graft. Hard Graft. The examples there run all the way back to Carnegie and Rockefeller. There is a story about Rockefeller I love. The family were big churchgoers. One day his son said to him, as the contributions tray was coming round, and each worshipper was donating a dollar: ‘Dad, wouldn’t it be better if we gave them fifty dollars for the whole year?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the father, ‘but we’d lose three dollars, son. Interest.’

  He also taught his butler how to make a fire that would last an hour longer, how to construct it that way. And he was a billionaire.

  Rockefeller’s hard work instilled a frugal nature in him. He didn’t waste. There is a touch of that in me. Even today, if my grandchildren leave something on the plate, I take it. I was the same with my three sons. ‘Don’t leave anything on your pla
te,’ was a mantra. Now, if I went near Mark, Jason or Darren’s food, they would cut my hand off!

  You cannot beat hard work.

  Of course, graft and stress place an invisible strain on the body. So does age. From somewhere in that mix I developed heart trouble. In the gymnasium one morning, with the belt on, I saw my heart rate soar from 90 to 160. Summoning the weight trainer, Mike Clegg, I complained: ‘There must be something wrong with the belt.’

  We tried another. Same numbers. ‘You need to see the doc,’ Mike said. ‘That’s not right.’

  The doctor referred me to Derek Rowlands, who had looked after Graeme Souness. It was fibrillation. His advice was to try electric shock treatment to control the heart rate. Seven days later it was back to normal. In our next game, however, we lost, and my heart rate shot back up. I blame our players. A victory might have kept me inside normal parameters. The treatment had come with a 50–60 per cent success rate, but now I knew more action was required. The advice was to have a pacemaker fitted and take an aspirin every day.

  The insertion in April 2002 took half an hour. I watched it on a screen. I’ll always remember the blood spurting up. The device was changed in the autumn of 2010. They last eight years. That time I slept right through the changeover. Throughout these consultations, I was told I could still do what I liked in life: exercise, work, drink my wine.

  The initial episode did unsettle me, I admit. The previous year I had taken a health check and returned a heart rate of 48. Albert Morgan, our kit man, had said, ‘I always thought you hadn’t got a heart.’ My fitness was excellent. Yet 12 months later, there I was in need of a pacemaker. What it told me was that getting older comes with penalties. We are all susceptible. You think you are indestructible. I did. You know life’s door will slam in your face one day, but consider yourself unbreakable up to that day. All of a sudden, God’s drawing the reins in on you.

  In my younger days I would be up and down that touchline, kicking every ball, immersing myself in every nuance of the game. I mellowed with age. By the end I was tending to observe events more than getting caught up in the drama, though some games still had the power to suck me in. From time to time I would offer a reminder that I was still alive. That message would go to referees, my players, opponents.

  On health generally I would say: if you get the warning, heed it. Listen to your doctors. Get the check-ups. Pay attention to your weight and what you’re eating.

  I’m glad to say that the simple act of reading is a marvellous release from the hassles of work and life. If I were to take a guest into my library, they would see books on presidents, prime ministers, Nelson Mandela, Rockefeller, the art of oratory, Nixon and Kissinger, Brown, Blair, Mountbatten, Churchill, Clinton, South Africa and Scottish history. Gordon Brown’s book on the Scottish socialist politician James Maxton is in there. Then there would be all the volumes on Kennedy.

  Then I have my despots section. What interested me here were the extremes to which humanity will go. Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore; the dictators – Stalin and Hitler, and Lenin; World War II: Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees; Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor.

  On a lighter note I can pull out Edmund Hillary and David Niven. Then it’s back to the dark side with crime: the Krays and the American Mafia.

  I was so immersed in sport in my working life that I tended not to read many books about sport. But there are a few touchstones on the shelves. Reading When Pride Still Mattered, the David Maraniss biography of Vince Lombardi, the great Green Bay Packers coach, I was thinking: ‘That’s me he’s writing about, I’m just like Lombardi.’ The obsession. I could identify closely with one of Lombardi’s greatest sayings: ‘We didn’t lose the game, we just ran out of time.’

  eleven

  I WAS at home on a snowy January night in 2010 when my phone beeped with a text message. ‘I don’t know whether you remember me,’ it started, ‘but I need to call you.’ Ruud van Nistelrooy. Christ, what was this? I said to Cathy, ‘He left four years ago.’ Cathy’s reply: ‘What’s he wanting? Maybe he’d like to come back to United.’

  ‘No, don’t be silly,’ I told her.

  I had no idea what it might be. But I texted him back: OK. So he rang. First, the small talk. Had some injuries, fit now, not getting a game, blah blah. Then he came out with it. ‘I want to apologise for my behaviour in my last year at United.’

  I like people who can apologise. I’ve always admired that. In the modern culture of self-absorption, people forget there is such a word as sorry. Footballers are cocooned by the manager and the club, the media, agents, or pals who just tell then how flipping good they are. It’s refreshing to find one who can pick up a phone much later and say, ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry.’

  Ruud offered no explanation. Perhaps I should have taken that chance to say, ‘Why did it go that way?’

  Mulling over Ruud’s call to me, that winter night, I knew that two or three Premier League clubs were looking at him, but couldn’t see that being a reason for him wanting to speak to me. There would have been no need for him to repair his relationship with Manchester United in order for him to play for another club in England. Perhaps it was a guilt complex. It might have been playing on his mind for ages. Ruud was doubtless a more mature person by that stage.

  The first sign of trouble in our relationship had been that Ruud had started to mouth off all the time to Carlos Queiroz about Ronaldo. There were a few stand-up confrontations, but nothing unmanageable. Then Ruud switched his fire to Gary Neville. Gary was ready for that and won the battle. David Bellion was another who seemed to arouse anger in Ruud. There were quite a few altercations all the way through his final season with us, but it was mainly Van Nistelrooy on Ronaldo.

  At the end of the previous season, 2004–05, we had reached the final of the FA Cup, against Arsenal. Van Nistelrooy had a horrible game. The previous Wednesday his agent, Rodger Linse, had sought out David Gill and asked for a move. ‘Ruud wants to leave.’

  David pointed out that we had a Cup final on the Saturday, and that perhaps this wasn’t the best moment for our main centre-forward to ask to leave. David asked why he wanted to go. Rodger Linse’s reply was that Van Nistelrooy thought the team had stagnated and didn’t believe we could win the Champions League. His view was that we couldn’t win the European Cup with young players – the likes of Rooney and Ronaldo.

  After the Cup final, David called Rodger and asked him to get Ruud in for a meeting with me. Our position was strong because Real Madrid were not going to pay £35 million for him. That was obvious. And it was the reason, I believe, why Ruud was asking to leave. Had Real Madrid been willing to come up with £35 million, there would have been no need for him to push for a move. He was hoping to bargain with the club to find a fee United would find acceptable. Silly idea.

  So we had our meeting. His stance was that he wasn’t prepared to wait for Ronaldo and Rooney to mature. ‘But they’re great players,’ I told him. ‘You should be leading these young players. Helping them.’ Ruud still said he didn’t want to wait.

  ‘Look, we’re going to sign players in the summer to bring us back to our usual level,’ I said. ‘We don’t like losing finals, we don’t like losing the League. When you build teams you have to be patient. Not just me, but the players, too. This is going to be a good team.’ He accepted my argument and we shook hands.

  In that season we had signed Vidić and Evra in the January transfer window. Indirectly, those two acquisitions were to ignite the biggest flashpoint in all the time Ruud was with us. In the Carling Cup I had been playing Louis Saha all the way through. When we reached the final I said to Ruud, ‘Look, it’s not fair if I don’t play Saha. I know you like to play in finals. Hopefully I can get you a bit of the game.’ I did say that, no doubt about it.

  We were on cruise control against Wigan and I saw an ideal opportunity to give Evra and Vidić a taste of the game. They were my final substitutions. I turned to Ruud and s
aid: ‘I’m going to give these two lads a part of the game.’ They were going to get a touch, a smell of winning something with Manchester United. ‘You —,’ said Van Nistelrooy. I’ll always remember that. Could not believe it. Carlos Queiroz turned on him. It became fractious in the dug-out. The other players were telling him: ‘Behave yourself.’

  But that was the end of him. I knew we would never get him back. He’d burned his boats. After that incident, his behaviour became worse and worse.

  In the final week of that campaign we needed to win the last game of the season, against Charlton. With Saha’s injuries we were walking on eggshells with him. However, I didn’t feel I could select Ruud.

  Carlos went to Ruud’s room and said, ‘We’re not taking you, go home. The way you’ve behaved all week – we’re not having it.’

  Ronaldo had recently lost his father. During that week, Ruud had taken a kick at Ronaldo on the training ground and said: ‘What are you going to do? Complain to your daddy?’ He meant Carlos, not Cristiano’s dad. He probably wasn’t thinking. So then Ronaldo was upset, and wanting to have a go at Van Nistelrooy, and Carlos was upset by the insult. Carlos had looked after Ronaldo, as you would expect. He’s a coach with Portuguese origins, from the same country. Here was a young man with a dying father. If he couldn’t ask for help from Carlos, who could he seek it from?

  The whole episode was very sad. Why Ruud changed, I don’t know. I can’t say for sure whether it was his way of getting himself out of Old Trafford. It didn’t do him any favours or bring him any credit in the sense of respect from the other players.

  It was a pity because his numbers were sensational. He was one of our club’s greatest goal-scorers. Problems first surfaced after his second season, when he was up for a new contract, in accordance with his original deal. He asked for a clause that would allow him to leave for Real Madrid, specifically, in the event of Real offering a specified sum. A buy-out clause. I pondered this one for a long time. My feeling was that, without that concession, Van Nistelrooy would not have signed his name. Conversely, to concede that ground would give him a controlling hand. We ran the risk of losing him the following season.