The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘Even as a kid, I’d got a really strong work ethic from my dad,’ he says. ‘I had a paper round and a milk round. On a Saturday, I used to stack shelves in a shop on Church Road in Harlesden. I also gave up an entire summer holiday from school to go and work with my mom for £10 a week. She was a seamstress, but she’d got a job in a lace-making factory. For the six weeks I was there, it was my responsibility to load up the bobbins on the machines.’

  At school, Regis used to join in with the other boys kicking a ball about in the playground. Yet he didn’t take an active interest in football until he was thirteen. His games teacher, a Mr Ward, encouraged him into the school team. At first, he played on the right wing, but with his pace and power was soon converted into a striker. Regis also gravitated to his local youth club team in Kilburn. He turned out for them alongside the future Arsenal player Steve Gatting and his elder brother Mike, who would later captain England at cricket.

  ‘Quite a few of the lads at school then started to play for a team called Ryder Brent Valley on a Sunday morning, so I joined them,’ says Regis. ‘This was in 1973 and the side was run by a wonderful man named Tom Dolan. People like Mr Dolan kept a lot of kids like me out of trouble, ferrying us around all over the place and encouraging us. He worked for a van rental company, so each week he used to get us a big yellow van and drive us out to Regent’s Park or wherever else we were playing. We’d get changed in the back of the van on the way and be falling about all over each other.’

  Nonetheless, the young Regis did step out of line on occasion. In 1974, during his final year at school, he received a police caution. He was caught breaking into a house in Harlesden intending to steal money from the gas meter. By then he was running with a group of older lads that was led by a pair of brothers, the Crawfords, who frequented the local reggae clubs. They turned Regis on to the music of Bob Marley, Dennis Brown and Augustus Pablo, as well as to the pleasures of drinking beer and smoking.

  ‘The Crawford brothers were twenty, twenty-one at the time and they had their own sound system,’ Regis recalls. ‘We’d go off in their car to all these different nightclubs that they were playing at. I fell in love with that heavy bass sound and became a reggae man. I was going out each night, listening to and learning from these guys, drinking Special Brew. They were great times.’

  In the summer of 1974, aged sixteen, Regis left school. His father had drummed into him the need to get a trade and he signed up for a three-year apprenticeship with a firm of electrical contractors, Higgins & Castle, who were based in Cricklewood, north-west London. His starting wage was 32p an hour. Working towards qualifying as an electrician, he laboured on building sites by day and took classes at the local technical college in the evenings.

  Each Sunday morning he continued to turn out for Ryder Brent Valley. At the time, he had no concept that it might lead him on to anything more permanent or grander. As much as anything else, he enjoyed football for the social side of the game and the chance to be with his mates. In any event, in one game, Ryder Brent Valley had been pitted against a junior side from Queen’s Park Rangers and he’d scored a hat-trick. Yet no one from the professional club had whisked him off for a trial.

  ‘I didn’t even get into the Middlesex county side, like a few of the other Brent Valley lads did,’ he says. ‘But then, I loved the camaraderie and the banter, winning and losing together, supporting each other. For me, it was all about the whole experience. I learned so many lessons about discipline, sacrifice and commitment. I also felt as though I was living the life, going out to work and playing football at the weekend.’

  A typical suburb of London, the small Surrey town of Molesey sits on the banks of the River Thames to the west of the city. By the 1970s it had become a haven for middle-class commuters. The town boasted a successful rowing club and also a non-league football team, Molesey FC. Formed in 1892 by a local doctor, by 1975 the club was playing in Division Two of the Athenian League, and also the Premier Midweek Floodlit League.

  Molesey’s chairman and manager, John Sullivan, was a brash figure who worked as an agent in the music business and drove a gold-painted Pontiac Firebird. Sullivan enlisted a friend of his to go out talent-spotting young players for the club at park pitches across London. One Sunday morning, Sullivan’s scout happened across Cyrille Regis playing in Regent’s Park for Ryder Brent Valley. Regis was invited down to Molesey for a trial, impressing Sullivan, who took him on at the club. He was given £5 a match, the first money he’d made from the game. His Molesey debut was against Tooting & Mitcham United on a Tuesday night in the Floodlit League.

  The level Molesey competed at was significantly higher than anything Regis had been used to, but he took to it with apparent ease and became a regular in their first team. Sullivan would pick him up from home in Stonebridge on a Saturday morning, or meet him from work on a Tuesday evening, and speed them off across London to a game or to training.

  ‘John was always going on about what was happening in the music business and who he was looking after, but I didn’t listen too much as I was half-asleep most of the time,’ Regis recalls. ‘It was a long way from north-west London to Molesey and it was tough for me. During the week, I’d be getting home at one or two o’clock in the morning and having to be at work for 6 a.m. to do an eight-hour shift. I’d be battered and bruised too, because playing as a striker you’d have these big defenders whacking into the back of you all the time.’

  Regis spent just a single season at Molesey, scoring twenty-seven goals. The club won their section of the Floodlit League that year with a record points haul and also reached the Fifth Round of the FA Vase for the first time. By then, the performances of Molesey’s centre-forward had attracted the attention of another club based to the west of London, but a further step up the non-league ladder.

  Hayes FC played in the Isthmian League, the strongest in the south of England. They had just signed a goalkeeper from Molesey named Ian Bath. It was Bath who recommended Regis to the Hayes manager, Bobby Ross. A no-nonsense Scot, Ross was a former professional footballer who’d played for Heart of Midlothian in Edinburgh, Brentford and also Cambridge United, where he’d briefly been a team-mate of Brendon Batson’s.

  ‘Ian and I went to see Cyrille playing for Molesey the next Saturday,’ says Ross. ‘He was easy to spot when the teams came out because he had his socks rolled down around his ankles and wasn’t wearing shin-pads. With my professional eye, having played five hundred or six hundred games by that time, I could tell straight off that he had outstanding ability. He was quick, won balls in the air and was obviously capable of hurting teams.

  ‘We waited around for him after the game and I told him I was interested in signing him for Hayes. We were in a better league than Molesey and I believed I could get him to go on and do what I’d done. Right away, I let him know I thought he could be good enough to get into the pro game.’

  Hayes’ chairman, Derek Goodhall, was a wealthy builder and the club paid decent wages for a non-league side at that level of the game. Ross clinched the deal by offering to more than double the money Regis was getting at Molesey. Together with his apprenticeship wages, he would now be pocketing the princely sum of £38 a week.

  Once he began working with Regis, the Hayes manager determined that he’d got a unique footballer on his hands. After training, Ross would keep Regis out on the pitch and give him one-to-one coaching. He hammered cross after cross at him to power into an empty goal until his head ached, cajoling and urging him on as if he might will him to greatness. Ross insisted to his reluctant new recruit that he wore shin-pads. He told him that if he didn’t, he’d get his legs broken, since defenders in the professional game would set out to hurt him. It was the only issue Ross had to force, since he found Regis to be an otherwise exemplary member of the team. He was reliable, attentive, always on time and blessed with an easy manner that charmed everyone at the club.

  Regis made his first appearance for his new club against Wycombe Wanderers before
a 300-strong crowd. Just as he’d done at Molesey, he seemed to grow in stature among better players. That 1975–76 season, he charged through opposition defences like a battering ram and plundered goals. He was fast and strong, near impossible to knock off the ball and just as hard to ruffle. However much centre-halves kicked at him and whatever insults were tossed at him from on or off the pitch, Regis carried on regardless. He seemed unbending and unbreakable. His team-mates nicknamed him Smokin’ Joe, after the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier, since it was well known that Frazier would never go down during a fight.

  ‘Cyrille wasn’t one of those guys that worried about colour, he didn’t take it at all personally,’ says Ross. ‘But you couldn’t do so, because it’s a fact that you get lunatics near football pitches. The lads could have a laugh with him too. One night we were having a darts competition to raise money for the club and the boys asked Cyrille if he was bringing along his blowpipe. He took it the way it was intended, as a joke.’

  ‘I’ve been in that situation myself and we’re expected to laugh off things like that blowpipe joke,’ counters civil rights activist Derrick Campbell. ‘If you don’t, you’re seen as having a chip on your shoulder. I’m sure that if Cyrille had reacted, the response would’ve been, “What’s his problem?”’

  In a short time, Ross grew used to seeing Football League scouts peppering the small main stand at Hayes. Representatives from Chelsea, Millwall and Watford each enquired about taking his statuesque number 9 on trial. But Ross rebuffed them, telling his chairman to wait until a club came along that was prepared to pay good money for Regis and then they would all benefit. ‘I told Derek that we should all watch and enjoy Cyrille in the meantime,’ he says, ‘because I knew that he wouldn’t be with us for long.’

  By the end of that season, Regis had helped himself to twenty-five goals for Hayes and won the club’s Player of the Year award. The last month of the campaign, Ronnie Allen, a scout from from West Bromwich Albion, came to see him playing against Dagenham. Allen had a particular affinity for strikers, having scored 234 goals in 458 appearances for West Brom between 1950 and 1961. He had gone into management after retiring as a player, becoming one of the first British managers to coach overseas during stints with Athletic Bilbao in Spain and Sporting Lisbon in Portugal.

  Allen was a quiet, aloof-seeming man, but he was stirred by Regis. He came back to watch him on three further occasions. He then told his employers at West Brom that if they wouldn’t commit to buying him, he’d pay for Regis out of his own money. Allen was given the go-ahead to make an offer to Hayes for their prize asset: a down-payment of £5,000 with a further £5,000 due when and if Regis made twenty appearances for the Albion first team. It was enough to buy Hayes a new set of floodlights.

  ‘I had told Cyrille that he was being watched, because if you’re good enough, then you’ve got to be able to do it when the pressure is on,’ says Ross. ‘When we got the bid from West Brom, I drove him up there to speak to them. We met with the chairman, Bert Millichip, Ronnie Allen and also Johnny Giles.

  ‘Their offer to Cyrille was £60 a week, plus travelling expenses. As we were sat there in the chairman’s office negotiating the deal, a ceiling light started to flicker. I said, “Mr Chairman, one thing I know for a fact that Cyrille is able to do for you is fix that light.”’

  Returning to London with Ross, Regis said he needed time to think the offer over. He’d just recently passed his final exams to qualify as an electrician and had the promise of a steady wage. To take this great leap into the unknown, he’d have to leave his home and all that was familiar to him, and he was barely being offered more money to do so.

  ‘Being from London, I didn’t even know anything about West Bromwich Albion,’ he says. ‘So I went and asked my dad what he thought I should do. He told me that I’d got something to fall back on now and that if it didn’t work out, I could always go back to being an electrician.’

  Taking his father’s advice, Regis signed his first contract as a professional footballer with the Baggies in May 1977. Local newspapers in the West Midlands didn’t deem the club’s latest acquisition significant enough to be reported on and focused instead on the imminent departure of Giles. Regis had three more months at home before he was due to move to the Midlands. He spent this time doing the same thing he’d done for the previous three years: getting up at the crack of dawn and going to work on a building site.

  Arriving at Birmingham’s New Street station that July, Regis was met off the train by Ron Jukes, a part-time coach at West Bromwich Albion. Jukes drove him to Smethwick, where the club had arranged digs for him with a Jamaican family, the Groces. The household was presided over by Murtella Groce, a warm-hearted matriarch who became a surrogate mother to Regis during the two years he lodged at her home in Maple Court.

  ‘I paid her £15 a week rent and that was the first time I’d had my own room,’ he says. ‘Up until then, I’d always had to share with my brother. It was a real home from home for me. Mrs Groce made great food and she loved me. She also had a grandson living with her named John, who was two years younger than me, and we buddied up.

  ‘The West Brom training ground was just around the corner from the Groce house on Spring Road and I used to walk there each morning. But to begin with I was bored. We finished training by 12.30 p.m. and I’d been used to getting up at six in the morning and working a full day.’

  West Brom initially viewed Regis as a low-cost gamble. The club had only given him a one-year contract. It was intended that he’d be groomed in the reserves, before a decision was taken on whether to retain him or not. It was Regis’ good fortune that Ronnie Allen, who’d been so instrumental in signing him, was appointed the club’s new manager that summer. Allen wasn’t popular with the club’s fraternities of defenders and midfield players, who felt neglected by him, but he devoted himself to developing Albion’s strikers and the young Regis especially.

  The week after his arrival from London, the new manager threw Regis into a training game between the reserves and West Brom’s first team. To the senior players, this was an opportunity to check out the competition in the ‘stiffs’, as the reserves were derided, and assert their authority over them. The first team captain, John Wile, lined up against Regis. A towering and singularly uncompromising defender, Wile prided himself on the fact that he and his fellow centre-half, Alistair Robertson, could be bullied by nobody.

  ‘Cyrille was raw as raw could be and the ball was bouncing off his knees and shins,’ Robertson recalls. ‘Then they got a corner. Now, nobody beat John Wile to the ball in the air, ever. You just used to say, “Your ball, John,” and that was that. But all you heard on this occasion was a thud and the ball was in the back of the net. And John was laid flat out on the floor.

  ‘Next time they got a corner, Cyrille did the same thing again and he must have got up a good foot above John. I said to Wiley, “I think we need to slow this one down a bit, don’t you?” So then I went in and whacked Cyrille. And he just turned and stared at me, never said a word.’

  ‘We were all of us watching this, mouths agape,’ says Derek Statham. ‘After the game the lads were going to each other, “What the fuck was that? Who the hell is this guy?”’

  By the end of the match, Regis had scored a hat-trick of headers. The next day, the first team departed for their annual pre-season tour, but he remained behind in Smethwick. For now at least, he was still a stiff.

  Chapter Four: The Deadly Duo

  When Cyrille Regis announced himself at West Bromwich Albion, Laurie Cunningham was the one player absent from pre-season training. He was off on international duty. It was in the course of this that Cunningham became unwittingly embroiled in an incident that signified how far it was that he’d then travelled, and also all that he hadn’t been able to leave behind. If one were to scratch further at this surface, it would expose as well the conflicts and complexities that ran like fissures throughout his short life.

  Following his
successful debut, Cunningham had been selected to join up with the England U21 squad for a tour of Scandinavia. It was anticipated to be a low-key trip, but it was marred by an altercation that centred on him. After the final game in the Finnish capital of Oslo, a number of the young England players went out to enjoy a night on the town, Cunningham among them. The party ended up at a nightclub, where a bouncer refused Cunningham entry at the door. He was told that the club operated a colour bar. The next morning, the story was picked up by several British newspapers, each of which reported the basic details but without additional comment.

  ‘I was so happy when I read that story,’ claims Eustace ‘Huggy’ Isaie. ‘It made me think, “Yeah, that brought you back down to earth, you prat.” You’re living in that high society world and on good wages, flying here and there, and all of a sudden someone’s telling you that you can’t come in because you’re the wrong colour. To me, that was a reminder to Laurie that he was black.’

  ‘I actually think Laurie had got a little bit lost by then,’ says Bobby Fisher. ‘I didn’t have the same bond with him that we’d had together at Orient. In fact, since he’d left the club, I’d kept more in contact with Nicky. Laurie was great at being able to cut off certain ties, to go from having been quite close to someone to separating from them. Perhaps it was a defence mechanism he used so that he was able to move on, but in my opinion he’d also started to buy in to all the other nonsense that was going on around him at the time.

  ‘To us, all that stuff had always been a joke. Going out to champagne bars and things like that, it’d be very easy to adopt that whole middle-class attitude of thinking you had to sit there looking and acting like everyone else and speaking properly. We’d always fought against that, not wanting to be the norm. We’d rebelled a little bit by going so over the top with it. It felt to me as though Laurie and I had lost that connection between us and he wasn’t the same grounded guy that I’d known previously.