The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  As this stand-off progressed, two particular disputes encapsulated all the fear and loathing of the time. A strike by refuse collectors led to local authorities running out of space to store waste and being forced to use local parks instead. Litter piled up on the streets. In London, Westminster Council co-opted Leicester Square as a default rubbish dump. The Evening Standard newspaper was soon reporting a plague of rats being attracted to the area. A separate action by the nation’s gravediggers carried with it the threat of still more gruesome consequences. The media cranked this up by running a spate of stories about the looming prospect of Britain’s dead going unburied.

  At West Brom, Ron Atkinson resolved to lighten the air by hosting a party for his team and their wives and girlfriends at his new house on the outskirts of Birmingham. This was a break with established tradition. None of the players could recall ever being invited to the home of a manager. On arriving, they were impressed by the grandeur of Atkinson’s pile relative to their own more modest dwellings. Each of them took in the expansive driveway and the big Jag parked out front, and the heated swimming pool round back, concluding that Atkinson had gone ‘posh’.

  The party was in full swing and running to the next morning when Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Tony Godden determined to have a race in the pool. Before going in, they had to break the ice that had encased it for weeks.

  ‘We asked Ron if he minded and he shot back, “I don’t give a shit; you’re the ones who are going to freeze,”’ recalls Godden. ‘The girls were waiting at the end of the pool with glasses of brandy to warm us up.’

  ‘I remember Laurie and Cyrille diving into the pool and I always said Tony Godden dived over it,’ says Atkinson. ‘It was frozen over again the next morning. I stood there thinking to myself that four hours ago I’d had three of my best players in it. Later the same night, I’d got a phone call from the police. Someone else who was at the party had been arrested for drunk driving.’

  Nicky Brown went to the party with Cunningham. Like him, she’d grown used to the social whirl that carried on at a football club, but she was also able to stand outside of it. From this perspective, there was more to be taken in than high jinks and the sometimes bawdy celebration of men in their prime of life. On that particular night she was able to behold all that Ron Atkinson had become, just as on others like it she faced up to starker realities.

  ‘Champagne Charlie with his gold bracelets, he was having a power rush,’ she says of Atkinson. ‘The club had bought him a big new house and his wife was wearing furs. He was in the newspapers all the time. Money and women are best friends, so all of a sudden he was surrounded with all this stuff. It takes a big person not to get carried away with it. You can’t blame the man for it.

  ‘Bert Millichip also threw a garden party for the team each summer. We all went into the pool at one of those as well. That was to prove that blacks don’t sink. That was said somewhere along the way. There was another party we were at around that time that I remember vividly. I was sat in a group with the chairman of another club and he hadn’t realised who I was. He told us that niggers would soon be taking over football and that he’d never allow one of them in his team.’

  There was just one game that West Brom could then be certain of going ahead and this was their return fixture with Liverpool. Set for 3 February at Anfield, it was drummed up as a straight shoot-out for the title, and for Atkinson and his men the timing of it could scarcely have been more inopportune. It had been three weeks since their last competitive match, and in the interim the club had been hit by a bout of cold and flu, which further debilitated them.

  At the best of times, going to Anfield represented a formidable challenge. In more recent seasons it had been made to seem impregnable. Like a well-fortified citadel, the sight of its walls rendered raiders impotent and powerless. Most visiting teams were overcome before a ball had even been kicked. Liverpool had gone fifteen home games without defeat so far that season, conceding just three goals. Spurs had left fortress Anfield on the wrong end of a 7-0 pummelling and Derby went down 5-0. Even in their pomp, it would have been a tough task for West Brom to grab a result there. In their current state of ill-preparedness, it seemed to be asking the impossible of them.

  Atkinson’s team had carried all before them for months, but the weeks of inactivity had blunted their edges. Recognising this, and being ruthless in pressing home an advantage, Liverpool went for the jugular. In the opening exchanges, they harried and pressured their visitors and were soon dominating them. With red shirts swarming around his team and shots raining in on their goal, Albion captain John Wile tried to rally his troops. ‘Come on lads,’ he roared, ‘circle the wagons!’

  West Brom held out for twenty-one frantic minutes before being breached. Once again, it was the devilish Kenny Dalglish who put them to the sword. David Fairclough, the Liverpool ‘super-sub’, added a second not long after half-time. Game over, it seemed.

  On the end of a beating, West Brom appeared toothless. Cunningham was subdued and out of sorts. Regis cut an even more frustrated figure. More than anyone, he needed to have built up a head of steam. Forced into a standing start, he was misfiring badly. Had he faced a straight battle of strength against a brutish defender, as was the case most weeks, he might even then have prevailed. Instead, he ran into the exception to the rule. A majestic-looking Scot with the glare of a hawk, Alan Hansen relied on speed, skill and his football brain to best opponents. This he did almost as a matter of course. He had Regis in shackles from the start to the end of the game, cutting off West Brom’s most direct route to goal.

  ‘There are two types of defender, the hard men and the more intelligent footballers,’ says Regis. ‘I could handle the ones who wanted to kick me. The horrible ones were the guys who could read the game and knew when and how to step in front of you. And Alan Hansen was the very best of these.’

  Shorn of the fulcrum of their attack, West Brom reeled like a boxer trapped on the ropes. But with the clock running down, Ally Brown poached them a goal back and hope sprang again. Scrapping to the bitter end, almost unbelievably they carved out a second chance right on the verge of the final whistle. It fell to Cunningham. It was the sort of climactic moment that brought him to life: the ball at his feet and salvation in his gift. Before and after, this was when he could be relied upon to pull off an act of magic. A feat that would lift voices, make hearts soar and suck the air out of a stadium. But not now, not when he was required to do so most of all.

  Now Cunningham’s nerve failed him and the chance went begging, and for Albion, with it the game. There would be darker days and nights ahead for Cunningham. In the longest and loneliest of these, did his thoughts race back to the crucial point in this one game and keep picking at it like a scab? In those few fateful seconds at Anfield was he able to determine the cold, hard truth that would haunt him to his ruin? That he had got as far as the line marking out true greatness, but been unable to cross over it.

  The game was well enough summed up in contemporary newspaper reports. Writing in the Daily Mail, Ray Matts concluded: ‘This clash between English football’s royal family and the exciting new aristocrats took on a cup atmosphere with a 52,000 full house and thousands locked outside . . . But some [of the West Brom] players, notably Cyrille Regis, appeared to be over-awed by the occasion.’ However, a bigger picture revealed itself in the immediate aftermath of the contest. Slumped on the blood-red coloured benches of the ‘away’ dressing room, the West Brom players sat together in dead silence. Deflated, it was as if all belief had seeped out of them.

  In this single but most shattering loss they had felt their dream of ruling English football being crushed. For all the miles, mud and matches they had battled through, it had taken just ninety minutes for that hope to be extinguished. That these were ninety minutes that ill-luck had deprived them of proper preparation for made the fact all the harder to bear. Normally, the next week would have brought another game and with it the chance to wor
k a defeat out of their system. However, the ‘big freeze’ was unrelenting, and instead the bitter aftertaste of disappointment hung around like a bed smell. Like an open wound, it became infected with a sense of fatalism and self-doubt.

  There were other setbacks, minor in comparison, but these might also have suggested to them that their wondrous moment had gone. Cunningham had been called up to the full England squad for the first time, for a European Championship qualifier against Northern Ireland on 7 February. The last West Brom player to represent the national team had been Tony Brown, who won his first and last cap against Wales in 1971. To have one of their own crowned at the highest level would also bestow recognition on the achievements of the club as a whole. But for the time being at least, this was still not forthcoming. In the event, Cunningham never made it onto the Wembley pitch. For this game and too many others in the future, Peter Barnes from Manchester City was preferred in his place. Barnes was a skilful if fleeting winger, but he hadn’t an ounce of Cunningham’s inspirational ability.

  The very same week, Brian Clough made Trevor Francis Britain’s first million-pound footballer when signing him for Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City. This dwarfed the sum Atkinson had shelled out for David Mills just a month earlier to set the previous transfer record, and Clough had got his hands on a much more influential player. For the Albion manager, it was as though he’d been betting on a poker hand of Kings and then discovered his rivals were holding Aces.

  After their reversal at Liverpool, another three weeks drifted by before Atkinson’s team were again called into action. This was for a home game against Leeds. They controlled it for long periods, but lost. The result dropped them to fifth in the League, with Liverpool now growing distant on the horizon and the title slipping through their fingers like melting snow.

  February passed into March, snow and ice turning to rain. Atkinson continued to scheme for ways of keeping his club in the public gaze and it was then that he alighted upon the Three Degrees. An all-girl singing group from Philadelphia, they had formed in 1963 and been signed to the Steel City’s foremost soul and R&B label, Philadelphia International Records. A couple of prodigious black music impresarios presided over International, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. They had meant for the Three Degrees to be their version of the Supremes, Berry Gordy’s flagship act at Motown.

  The Three Degrees line-up had revolved through the years, but in 1976 it settled on its most familiar incarnation. This was of Helen Scott, Valerie Holiday and their statuesque focal point, Sheila Ferguson. The group was now working with famed disco producer Giorgio Moroder, and enjoying a string of UK hits. The previous year, Prince Charles had declared them his favourite pop act and they had performed at the heir to the British throne’s thirtieth birthday party in a blaze of publicity. At the point of Atkinson’s interest in them peaking, the Three Degrees were touring the UK and due in Birmingham for a date at a club called the Big Night Out. Using Cunningham, Regis and Batson as bait, he invited them to the Hawthorns and arranged a photocall to record the occasion.

  ‘I just remember hearing through our press agent that there were three black guys playing for West Bromwich Albion,’ recalls Valerie Holiday. ‘I was in love with soccer at the time, so I knew of them as a team. We were going to be in the immediate area opening a shopping mall, so it seemed like a fun thing to go and do. And of course, we were very flattered to be asked.’

  Warming up the local press for the visit, Atkinson told them he’d got his own version of the Three Degrees. The real thing arrived at the Hawthorns on a damp, overcast afternoon during the first week of March. They were shown around the dressing rooms and introduced to the three footballers who’d now become their namesakes. The six of them were made to look as if they had swapped white fur coats and striped West Brom shirts and then led onto the pitch to face a phalanx of reporters and photographers.

  ‘For us, it was a case of trying to get to know the guys while the pictures were being taken,’ says Helen Scott. ‘I thought the three of them seemed a little shy. But it was awkward for all of us, because we didn’t know what all these press guys wanted from us.’

  The resulting photographs were splashed over the pages of the Evening Mail and the Express & Star on 10 March. In these, the players and pop stars are draped over each other and smiling for the cameras. Caught out of their natural environment, Regis and Batson both seem stilted and uncomfortable in striking a pose. Cunningham on the other hand wears a look of insouciant cool, as if this was how he composed himself every day of the week. ‘West Bromwich Albion’s Three Degrees meet the three sizzling singers,’ gushed the accompanying copy. In total, the story now has the tone of an ancient relic dug up from an altogether different and less enlightened era.

  ‘If you think about it now that seems such a racist thing to have done,’ concurs Martin Swain of the Express & Star. ‘Look at the photograph: they’ve got the three of them dressed up like New York pimps. But it was of its time. There’s a harmless, non-malevolent air to it too.’

  ‘I suppose there was a perverse sense that the “Three Degrees” was used as a term of endearment,’ notes Derrick Campbell. ‘But in the black community, we saw it as an act of ridicule.’

  Still, the association endured. The following month the pop group were the club’s guests at the Hawthorns for a League match against Everton. That night, Regis, Cunningham and other Albion players accompanied them to Holy City Zoo, the popular Birmingham club that was owned by the Aston Villa striker Andy Gray. Regis turned up in his second-hand car, his newest friends in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Batson declined to join them.

  ‘I’d got embarrassed by it to be honest,’ he says now. ‘It was just so contrived. It was a form of affection and it wasn’t done in a derisory way, but it got too much. I was a married man as well. It also went on too long and there was resentment in the dressing room at the focus on us. That wasn’t the case with everybody, but with certain of the more senior players.’

  At Holy City Zoo, the partying ran deep into the night and moved on from there to Cunningham’s place. En route, Regis was tailing the Three Degrees’ black Daimler when he lost control of his car on a deserted side street and pranged it. This kind of mishap had become a regular occurrence. By Regis’s own estimation, around this period he was stopped and breathalysed on at least thirteen occasions. ‘The police would let me off when they recognised who I was,’ he wrote in his autobiography.

  He wasn’t unduly troubled by this latest scrape. Just as he did on the football pitch, he picked himself up and got on with it. He’d also shrugged off whatever discomfort he’d felt at the earlier photocall. That night, he sensed a kindred spirit in Sheila Ferguson and the two of them zeroed in on each other.

  ‘I know the two of them dated a couple of times after that,’ says Helen Scott. ‘I’m not sure anything came of it, but they remained friends. There was a club in London that we knew of and which was a bit more private. Later on Cyrille came by there to see us whenever we were in town, but not so much Laurie.’

  The rock guitarist Eric Clapton was another to be found hanging around the West Brom team at this time. He’d begun turning up in the players’ lounges at their London games and even took out a full-page advert in the club’s centenary brochure to proclaim himself their ‘Number One Fan’. Less than three years before, Clapton had made his infamous drunken tirade against immigration in Birmingham. Extolling the virtues of a team with three black footballers in it was perhaps a convenient way for him to repair his damaged reputation.

  ‘Clapton gave us all gold-plated discs of one his albums,’ recalls Regis. ‘Slow Down, was it? No, Slowhand. I’ve still got it around somewhere, or at least my ex-wife has.’

  The team was presented with the chance to bounce back in the League via an away match against the side they found easiest to suppress, Coventry. They did so 3-1, with David Mills making an encouraging full debut – one of his few noteworthy games in a Baggies shirt – and scoring the
decisive goal. However, Ron Atkinson was pragmatic enough to know that Liverpool’s lead over them was in all likelihood unassailable and that the FA and UEFA Cups now offered him the best odds of getting a tangible reward from that season.

  West Brom flew out to Belgrade, then the capital of communist Yugoslavia, on 6 March for the first leg of their UEFA Cup quarter-final. Established in 1945 by a group of Serbian resistance fighters, Red Star Belgrade was the country’s most successful club and had won their national title twelve times. They had first competed in continental competition in the 1957–58 season, reaching the quarter-finals of the European Cup where they were pitched against Manchester United. On 6 February 1958, the plane carrying United back from their away leg of the tie crashed on the runway at Munich airport, killing eight of Matt Busby’s ‘Babes’.

  An uproarious crowd of 95,300 filled Red Star’s vast concrete bowl of a stadium for the game with West Brom. For once, Atkinson set his team up not to concede a goal, and for more than eighty minutes they frustrated their hosts in a match characterised by niggling fouls and stoppages. But four minutes from time they gave away a cheap free kick on the edge of their own box and Red Star’s prolific blond striker Dusan Savic, converted it. It meant that the Albion squad returned home frustrated, but with a by no means insurmountable deficit to overcome.

  Next up was an FA Cup Fourth Round clash with Southampton at the Hawthorns, and again the margins were slender. In a tight, tense game, the visitors escaped with a 1-1 draw. The replay went ahead at Southampton’s compact Dell ground just two nights later and finished with the teams sharing two goals again. But extra time caught up with weary West Brom legs and a late strike saw them off 2-1. It was now all or nothing in Europe.