by Paul Rees
THE THREE DEGREES
Also by Paul Rees
Robert Plant: A Life
The Three
Degrees
Paul Rees
Constable · London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014
Copyright © Paul Rees, 2014
The right of Paul Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-47210-690-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-47210-691-9 (ebook)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed and bound in the UK
This one’s for Mom, Dad and ‘G’ – for bringing me up to be a
Baggie and with much love.
Contents
Prologue: The Final Whistle
1. Roots
2. Black Country
3. Smokin’ Joe
4. The Deadly Duo
5. Big Ron
6. Batman
7. Melting Pot
8. Perfect Storm
9. Tora! Tora! Tora!
10. Footsteps in the Snow
11. The Three Degrees
12. Gone to Dust
13. Too Much Too Young
14. Black Pearl
15. Ghost Town
16. Born Again
17. Swansong
Epilogue: Legacy
Acknowledgments
Sources:
Prologue: The Final Whistle
The last full day of Laurie Cunningham’s life began like most others had done in the red hot Madrid summer of 1989. He spent the morning of 14 July in the city negotiating the terms of a new contract with Pedro Garcia Jimenez, the incoming president of Rayo Vallecano, the most recent and tenth football club he’d played for during his career. The previous season Cunningham scored the goal that got Madrid’s third-biggest club promoted to Spain’s top division, La Liga. However, his one-year deal with them had run down on 30 June, and discussions about an extension had become complicated and drawn out.
Cunningham was made an overnight millionaire ten years earlier when he signed for Real Madrid as a prodigiously talented 23-year-old. Fresh from the English First Division, he was bought by Spain’s royal club to be their new star player and they had acceded to all his demands. He’d revelled in Madrid for a time. Standing out not just as a young black man in Real’s pure white strip, but because he was capable of outrageous feats of skill – regularly making fools of the toughest full-backs in Spanish football and swinging the ball in from corners with the outside of his foot. He did such things with apparent insouciance, as if it all came too easily to him. Real’s followers christened him the Black Pearl – the jewel in their crown.
This was before it all began to go wrong for him. A succession of injuries took their toll physically, and disciplinary issues soured his relationship with the club. Most damaging of all, a broken toe took away from him his greatest asset, an uncanny ability to glide past opponents and across the pitch with the grace of a dancer. Without that, he was a busted flush.
For as long as he could remember, Cunningham had clung to the belief that being exceptional at football would be his passport to making his mark on the world. After all, it had taken him from the grim backstreets of north London to great riches and celebrity in Spain. He believed that his fame would allow him to progress to becoming something more substantial than a successful sportsman. Through it, he hoped to evolve into all that he wanted to be: an artist, poet, designer, architect, philanthropist, or any of the other many things that occupied his thinking outside of the game he happened to excel at. But not now, not robbed of his powers and in this reduced state. He knew now that he would only ever be recalled – if at all – as the one thing he’d least desired to be: as just another footballer.
The tragic irony is that Laurie Cunningham had already by then made a greater impact on the world around him than he could have ever imagined, and as a footballer. This hadn’t been as a result of his feats in Madrid, but rather during the time he spent at a much less glamorous provincial football club in the heart of England’s industrial Midlands – West Bromwich Albion. It was while he was in Albion’s first team and alongside two other black players, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson, that he’d used his manifest talents as a weapon against the terrible racist abuse that had poured off the streets and down from the terraces in the Britain of the 1970s. This was a time when black footballers were scarce in the British game and the presence of three in one team was enough to inflame and incite prejudices amongst over-whelmingly white crowds. Together with Regis and Batson, Cunningham made up the front line in a war against ignorance within the sport and also the gathering forces of an extreme right-wing menace that was taking root in the country.
The three of them were focal points of an especially exciting West Bromwich Albion team, and the spearhead of a wider battle for the nation’s soul. They empowered a generation of disenfranchised black youths, bringing to it a sense of hope and inspiration. They were agents of change as well, and helped set in motion a domino effect that would allow a new order to assert itself in the British game and across the country as a whole. Yet the full scope of this was not yet apparent to Cunningham or to anyone else.
Soon enough, Real Madrid cut him loose and since then he’d led a peripatetic existence, drifting from one club to another in search of a place to settle and to be. Belatedly, Rayo Vallecano had appeared to offer him that, albeit in much more mundane circumstances. Based on the south-eastern fringes of the Spanish capital, Vallecano played their home games at the compact Campo de Futbol de Vallecas, which held 14,000 spectators on a good day. This was a far cry from the grandly magnificent Estadio Santiago Bernabeu where 85,000 baying Real Madrid fans had once been Cunningham’s adoring gallery. But then, he was not the player that he had been then. The longer Vallecano prevaricated over the offer of a new contract, the more starkly he was forced to confront this fact and the greater then his hurt.
Cunningham and his Spanish wife, Sylvia, had just recently celebrated the birth of a son, Sergio. Yet he seemed to be in the grip of a deep, dark psychological pain, so much so that his close family and friends feared for his state of mind and well-being. He’d been home to London on a visit the previous weekend and something then appeared to have died in his eyes. It was as if the fire that had once danced behind them had been extinguished. His mother, Mavis, had confided to friends her worries that her son had fallen in with a bad crowd in the Spanish capital. For all his reported wealth, she was concerned that he’d also apparently run into financial troubles.
Cunningham’s mother and others close to him back in England often told each other that he’d not been the same since he’d split with his childhood sweetheart, Nicky Brown. This was six years ago and around that time things had first started to unravel for him in Spain. Whenever she was fretting about her youngest son, which was most of the time these days, Mavis felt a cold dread creeping upon her.
Much of what happen
ed that fateful day in July remains a mystery to Mavis and to most everyone else. Cunningham left his meeting with Jiminez with his contract situation still unresolved and appears to have gone on to a horse-racing meet that evening at the picturesque La Zarzuela hippodrome, located five miles from the city centre and bordered by the verdant Monte El Pardo forest. He met up there with a young American named Mark Cafwell Latty, who was studying at the city university and with whom he’d recently become acquainted. To this day, no one from Cunningham’s immediate family or any of his closest friends has found out anything but the barest of details about Cafwell Latty. There is speculation that he was about to enter into a business deal with Cunningham to buy a restaurant, though how he was going to fund this as a student remains a mystery.
Cunningham lived in a gated community in Las Matas, a wealthy suburb of Madrid ten minutes’ drive from the racecourse. Yet rather than return home after the meet, he and Cafwell Latty went on to a nightclub. They remained there until the early hours of the next morning, a Saturday, moving on next to a pizza joint. It was past 6 a.m. when the two of them finished eating and set off again in Cunningham’s car, a silver-coloured Seat Ibiza. Cunningham had always been fastidious about wearing a seatbelt, insisting upon doing so even when backing his car out of the garage. However, for some reason he didn’t put one on for this, his final drive.
He headed into the city centre that morning on the main A6 road. A 370-mile highway running north-west from Madrid to the coastal town of Arteixo, the A6 was a notorious accident black spot that was characterised by sharp, fast bends. One of the most extreme of these was just outside of the city at Pozuelo de Alarcon and Cunningham sped into this at 6.45 a.m. As he came out of the bend, he was forced to swerve to avoid a car parked on the side of the road. Cunningham’s Seat crashed into the central reservation, overturning and buckling like a crushed tin can. He was flung ten metres from the vehicle, his head taking the brunt of the impact on the road. A passing municipal police patrol stopped at the scene and rushed Cunningham to hospital along with Cafwell Latty, who had remained in the car and suffered no more than minor injuries.
Laurie Cunningham never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital, having sustained severe head trauma. Brain matter was visible through an open wound to his head. He was thirty-three years old. Mark Cafwell Latty checked himself out of hospital that same day and seems to have then vanished without trace.
Later that Saturday morning, Cunningham’s elder brother, Keith, was walking to work in north London. He was stopped by his girlfriend pulling up behind him in their car and frantically beeping the horn. She told him Paul was dead, Paul being Laurie’s middle name and the one by which his family called him.
‘At first I thought she was talking about her brother, because his name’s also Paul and he’s a roofer,’ Keith recalls. ‘I thought he must have fallen off a roof. Then she said, “Your brother’s dead.” We went round to my mom and dad’s. I’d never seen my mom and dad cry until then. We all sat and cried. As we did it came on the TV – pictures of his car being lifted off the road by a crane.’
The phone didn’t stop ringing at the Cunningham household that terrible morning. One of the first to call was Bobby Fisher, who’d played with Cunningham at Leyton Orient in the mid-seventies. He remembers Mavis Cunningham being hysterical with grief.
Chapter One: Roots
Laurence Paul Cunningham was born in the north London district of Holloway on 8 March 1956. His parents, Elias and Mavis, had come to England from Jamaica the previous year. They brought with them Cunningham’s elder brother, Keith, who was just one year old at the time. Elias had been a racehorse jockey in Jamaica, but he and Mavis both took factory jobs in their adopted city, he moulding ashtrays and she as a machinist.
Holloway still bore the scars of the intensive bombing it had suffered from the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz and was among the capital’s most densely populated and multicultural areas. Its bustling streets buzzed with voices from the Caribbean, Cyprus and Ireland, and were rich with the smells of North African and Asian spices.
When the boys were still infants, the family moved a couple of miles down the road to settle in Finsbury Park. The brothers attended the same primary school, St Paul’s, until Keith was expelled for kicking a teacher. The two of them were otherwise inseparable. Together with a gang of friends, the young Cunninghams went off looking for adventure in the warren of streets around the area; they would steal apples from their neighbours’ gardens, pick blackberries from railway sidings and forage in the shells of houses that had been left to ruin after the war. Elias, although a genial man, was a distant father and not given to outward displays of affection. However, Laurie was the apple of his mother’s eye, and Mavis doted on him.
‘If anything happened to him I got the blame for it – and he was very accident prone,’ remembers Keith Cunningham. ‘We were always playing cricket back then, not football, and Laurie would be wicketkeeper. One time, someone swung the bat right round and hit him in the face, mashing his nose. I had to take him home and Mom had a right go at me for it. He’d fling his clothes all over the bedroom we shared and yet I’d be the one who’d have to tidy it up. I was definitely the black sheep, but we stuck together and it was me who taught him to do things like swim.’
Entering their teens, the two brothers joined the 22nd London Company Boys’ Brigade and it was through this that they first started to play football. The company was run by a Mr Cottingham, who worked in the probation service. A significant influence in the Cunningham brothers’ early lives, he would take the boys into Regent’s Park with a ball and coach them in the basics of the game. Both Cunninghams soon graduated to the Boys’ Brigade football team.
‘Mr Cottingham was like a father figure to us,’ says Keith. ‘He always had time for us and would give us advice. He was a white guy, but he and his wife had an adopted black daughter, Phillipa. She pretty much became our half-sister.’
Aside from such selfless individuals as Mr Cottingham, there was not much else to encourage or inspire young black kids in the Britain of the early 1970s. The world that was projected back at them through the media was almost exclusively white-looking and most often hostile-seeming. Two of the most popular programmes on TV at that time were sitcoms – Till Death Us Do Part and Love Thy Neighbour. The lead character in the former, Alf Garnett, was a ranting working-class bigot given to spouting such supposedly hilarious rhetoric as, ‘He understood yer coon did Shakespeare.’ The latter show derived comic conflict from a white couple in leafy Twickenham coming to terms with having a black couple as their next-door neighbours. Eddie Booth, the white male character, habitually referred to his black counterpart, Bill Reynolds, as ‘nig-nog’ or ‘Sambo’.
The Reynolds’ were nonetheless among the very few black faces to be seen on British television at the time. More commonly, white actors would ‘black up’ to play ethnic characters in sitcoms such as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, which was set in India during the Second World War, or the Saturday night variety staple, The Black and White Minstrel Show. Both of these programmes were screened by the national broadcaster, the BBC. The BBC’s commercial rival ITV was marginally more inclusive. In 1973, it employed the first black news reporter, Trevor McDonald, and the next year introduced a black family to the cast of one of its signature soaps, Crossroads.
The economic tide was also then turning in the country as the era of post-war boom reached an end and both inflation and unemployment began an inexorable rise. Once the soaring cost of living began to bite, those at the sharpest end looked for someone to blame. The growing immigrant communities drawn from the Commonwealth became a target for their anger and frustrations. This influx from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent had begun in the immediate post-war years and at the invitation of the British government. Britain’s manufacturing industries had seen their workers decimated by the war, and also due to the fact that the indigenous population had begun to aspir
e to more skilled and better-paid professions. The new immigrants had filled the nation’s factories and foundries, but now were seen as having stolen ‘our’ jobs.
In their corner of north London, Keith and Laurie Cunningham grew up accustomed to having insults hurled at them by white neighbours. On the streets around their home, a pressure-cooker atmosphere was pervasive. One of the brothers’ closest friends, Eustace ‘Huggy’ Isaie, recalls there always being ‘a feeling of tension. I can remember being out on the street with white kids and their mothers opening up the front window and shouting at them, “How many times have I told you not to play with those black boys?”
‘Skinheads used to chase our big brothers and we’d get beaten up all the time. You’d call up the Old Bill for assistance and eight times out of ten they’d turn up and be more interested in nicking you for something.’
The louder and more rebellious of the brothers, Keith was at first thought to be the most promising footballer of the pair. He had trials for the district team and encouraged his brother to follow in his footsteps, but Keith was hot-headed and lacked discipline. It was rare indeed during a game that Keith didn’t get involved in an argument with the referee or an opponent. By the time he was sixteen, he was invariably spending each night drinking and clubbing with his mates. Much the quieter and more reserved, Laurie enjoyed drawing and was learning to play the organ. He also spent hours kicking a ball against a wall, and while his brother was running wild Laurie was beginning to get noticed playing for both the Boys’ Brigade and his school team.
In 1973, he was picked up by a scout from London’s top First Division team, Arsenal, and signed apprentice forms with the club. Arsenal’s Highbury Stadium was a stone’s throw from the Cunningham family home in north London, but Laurie had a relaxed attitude to timekeeping and often as not arrived late to training sessions. The Arsenal manager of the time, Bertie Mee, had served in the army and ran the club to the same strict disciplinary code he’d encountered in the forces. Erratic free spirits like Cunningham weren’t tolerated at Arsenal for long, and the club released him less than a year after he’d joined them. Nevertheless, his unrefined talent had impressed the Arsenal coaching staff enough for them to recommend him to the manager of another London club, George Petchey at Second Division Orient.