by Paul Rees
‘There were lots of instances where we went to grounds and bananas were thrown onto the pitch,’ says Gary Owen. ‘On one occasion, Cyrille picked one up, peeled it and ate it.
‘I remember being with him one time in South Africa. A company took a group of black and white players out there on a promotional trip. It was only then that I appreciated what black players in England had to face. The country was still under apartheid and we went into the black townships. At times, I felt uncomfortable being white. The roles being reversed, it hit home how difficult it was for the likes of Cyrille, Brendon and Laurie just to go about doing their everyday job, and the psychological pressures they must have been under.’
Regis turned twenty-two the month after the cup match at West Ham; still so young, but having travelled so far. A professional footballer for more than three years now, he’d borne the weight of all of that rage and hate like a Stoic and through it arrived at his own point of enlightenment.
‘I wasn’t daft enough to think it was 5,000 racists shouting abuse at me,’ he says. ‘A very small minority of them were racist, but it was a mob mentality. That thought of, “My mate’s singing it, so I’m singing it too.” Also, there was the idea that it might put a black player off his game. No, no. That wasn’t going to happen. We turned it around and internalised the anger.’
Chapter Fourteen: Black Pearl
Laurie Cunningham and Nicky Brown landed in Madrid in July 1979. The start of summer was so hot in the Spanish capital that for them it was like stepping into a furnace, and in more ways than one. They were installed in one of the oldest and plushest hotels in the city by the Real Madrid hierarchy and paraded at a series of glittering social events. These were attended by the cream of Madrid society. Among those turning out to greet Cunningham were Spain’s reigning monarch, King Juan Carlos, and the singer Julio Iglesias, once a goalkeeper for Real’s youth team. It was a relentless round of handshakes and small talk and Cunningham kept a smile fixed on his face, as good as ever at keeping guard of whatever tumult was going on behind his facade.
There were otherwise inauspicious beginnings to the couple’s new adventure. Brown’s fair skin made her particularly susceptible to the baking sun and both of them were stricken with upset stomachs. The lobby of their hotel crawled with paparrazi. People stared at them in restaurants and out on the street. In all their excitement at Real’s whirlwind courtship, nothing had prepared either of them for what it would actually mean for Cunningham to be the intended star player of the world’s most exposed football club. How wild and terrifying all the anticipation and expectation of him would be. How invasive and exhausting they would find the relentless attention and scrutiny. Or how jarring it would be to realise that their lives were now no longer their own. It soon became apparent to them that it wasn’t so much a case of his joining Real Madrid as belonging to them.
It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say that Real Madrid considered itself to be more deserving of exaltation than other football clubs from the very start, but it would be close. Founded as plain old Madrid Football Club on 6 March 1902, to begin with the newcomers were just one of a handful of challengers to the first powerhouse of the Spanish game, Athletic Bilbao. The upstarts of Madrid claimed their first honour defeating the Basque club in the final of the Copa del Rey in 1905. ‘Real’, the Spanish word for royal, wasn’t added as a prefix to Madrid FC’s name until 1920, when King Alfonso XIII bestowed his patronage on the club.
In 1929, Real Madrid was one of the ten founding members of the Spanish football league. This was christened La Liga, as if the organisers were assured of its pre-eminence from the outset. The club was made to wait for success in this competition as well, their future great rivals Barcelona winning the inaugural race for the championship. Madrid secured its first title in 1931 and won La Liga again the following year, establishing the duopoly that has largely presided over Spanish football ever since. These formative years prefigured the greatest period in the club’s history and also the most controversial. This was forged in the hothouse atmosphere of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, which wrenched apart an essentially loose confederation of nations and brought the Fascist dictator General Francisco Franco to power.
Franco held Spain in an iron grip until his death in 1975, and during this time Real Madrid came to dominate the game at home and in Europe. In the course of Franco’s reign, the club won fourteen La Liga titles and the European Cup on six occasions. In the 1950s, world-class players such as the Argentinian Alfredo Di Stefano, a scorer and maker of goals who struck like a flash of lightning, and the masterful Hungarian, Ferenc Puskas, were brought to Madrid. The two of them became the nucleus of one of the all-time great teams. It reached its apogee in the 1960 European Cup final at Scotland’s Hampden Park, with a sensational 7-3 victory over the bewildered Germans of Eintracht Frankfurt before a crowd of 127,000. Radiant in their pure white strips, Madrid put on an exhibition through that game that was audacious, magisterial and altogether breathtaking. It was a brand of football that appeared not to have originated in that era, but to have arrived from a point in the future where the game had come to attain the level of high art.
Yet Madrid’s glorious rise was inextricably linked to that of Franco’s, and the club was perceived to be both favoured by and sympathetic to the dictator. This ignored the fact that the capital had suffered terrible deprivations at the hands of Franco’s forces during the civil war and also that the club’s republican President of the time, Rafael Sanchez Guerra, was imprisoned at the end of the conflict. However, it was true that the man who was subsequently seen to have done most to elevate Real had fought on the Fascist side. A former Real player and manager, Santiago Bernabeu was elected President of the club in 1943. Upon his ascension, he telegrammed one of Franco’s most notorious enforcers, General Moscardo, and invited him to patronise the club.
The stain of Real’s association with the regime was made indelible by a single game. This was the deciding fixture of a two-legged semi-final of the Copa del Rey – renamed the Copa del Generalisimo under Franco – in 1943. Real’s opponents were Barcelona and they were trailing the Catalan side 3-1 from the first match. Before kick-off in the return leg in Madrid, Barcelona’s players were visited in their dressing room by one of Franco’s officials and reminded that they were only being allowed to participate in the competition through the good graces of the regime. The contest itself unfolded as a farce and Madrid ran out 11-1 winners.
Thereafter, a view has prevailed across Spain and also outside of it that Madrid is the pampered club of the establishment and Barcelona the embodiment of bold resistance. A simplistic aspect, which fails to take account of the many grey areas between two poles of black and white. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that an acute sense of superiority and entitlement was encouraged and has thrived at the club. This dictates that there is no good or glory in coming second best. At Real Madrid, winning is all.
In 1944, Santiago Bernabeu began building the club a stadium to match the lofty image it had of itself at one of the city’s most upmarket addresses, on the Paseo de la Castellana. Opened three years later on 14 December 1947, and eventually given his name, the Bernabeu was to become a football cathedral. Inside this vast concrete and steel coliseum, such gods of the game as Di Stefano, Puskas, Gento and Kopa revelled in the benediction of an adoring congregation that swelled to 125,000 in number during the next decade. To star at the Bernabeu was to stand on the shoulders of giants.
The Real Madrid team that Cunningham was being added to had won La Liga in three of the past four seasons. It was a dogged, obdurate side largely made up of home-grown players, such as the studious-looking midfielder Vicente del Bosque, who’d later manage Spain to triumph in the 2010 World Cup, and Jose Camacho, a thick-set defender who approached each game as if it were to the death. Their coach was a dour but shrewd Serbian, Vujadin Boskov, who’d cast the team in his own image. One might admire their work ethic, but there was nothing about Boskov’s
Madrid to capture the imagination or make hearts race. They had also failed to replicate their domestic success in the cauldron of continental competition, and had crashed out of the previous season’s European Cup to the Swiss side Grasshopper Zurich, which was tantamount to a humiliation.
‘They were known as the Madrid of the Garcias, which is the equivalent of being called the Manchester United Smiths,’ says Guardian newspaper journalist Sid Lowe, an experienced commentator on Spanish football. ‘There was a keen sense that this was a team that had been built on old-fashioned values and that it was a little bit rudimentary and not particularly glamorous. Although to a certain extent some of the players in it were pushing boundaries – Del Bosque’s father had been in a Franco prison camp and he was very left-wing in his outlook. That was very different to the general perspective in Spain at the time.
‘But overall they were a grey-seeming team. Laurie Cunningham was bought to add to it that spark of excitement and flair. He was very definitely meant to be the glamour figure.’
At its core, Real Madrid was a deeply conservative institution – just as Spain itself was at that juncture. The beginnings of a cultural revolution were being felt at the fringes, but the country as a whole was still coming out of the shadows and blinking into the light after Franco’s death. The old general might have gone, but the residue of his far-right politics continued to hold sway in many areas and at all levels of Spanish life. The influence of the Catholic Church was also powerful and persuasive. Spaniards were compelled to uphold the values of unquestioning faith, hard work and marriage. Real Madrid expected its players to be dutiful and preferred them to be married.
It was never likely that Laurie Cunningham and Nicky Brown were not going to feel like interlopers in such an environment. They were a mixed-race couple when such a thing was almost unheard of in Spain. He was fast seduced by the city of Madri, by its flamboyant architecture and its vibrant nightlife, the clubs where one could dance till dawn as if in defiance of all other strictures. However, he was no more given to timely and obedient servitude than he had been at Orient or West Brom, and she had just as little intention of falling meekly into line. Inevitably, trouble lay ahead for both of them.
‘I was expected to dress in a certain way by the people at Real Madrid,’ says Brown. ‘All of the other wives got done up to the nines. They wore A-line skirts and strings of pearls. I was told to wear a bra. As a woman, you were supposed to be seen and not heard. If you did speak up and say something that might be construed as socially or politically strong or opinionated, it was translated as “I love kittens.” You were meant to associate with the other players and people who were as well-off as you were. It was all about maintaining appearances and we were seen as being renegades just by being ourselves.
‘There wasn’t a black face at the club and all of a sudden there was Laurie, his family and our friends running around the players’ lounge. They didn’t have soul brothers in Madrid, and Laurie’s brother couldn’t help but appear menacing. Keith dressed the way he did in Tottenham: a long black leather coat and dark glasses. He was like Samuel L. Jackson at his most dangerous-looking. They didn’t get the concept of us being a mixed-race couple, because Spanish married Spanish. So there was a lot of curiosity going on and presumption. But also they didn’t know what it was like to have a good party and so we were invited everywhere and asked to bring along all of our friends. To make the hosts look interesting.’
‘The new constitution was only established the previous year and it was a transformation that was founded on collectively forgetting about everything,’ says Lowe. ‘Not talking about what had happened under Franco-ism and moving on.
‘Reading the Spanish press cuttings of the time, there was an obsession with the fact that Laurie was black. It doesn’t seem as if this was rooted in dislike, but more the idea that he was impossibly exotic. His being there was very exciting for some people in Spain, but then again, a challenge for others. This was seen to be something different and there wasn’t necessarily a rejection of that, but if things went badly for him then it could easily be turned into one.’
Cunningham and Brown were separated within a week of their arrival in Madrid. The team left for a training camp in Holland and were gone for two weeks. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish and barely ever would. At this early stage, he felt himself isolated and out on a limb. This was nothing new for someone who was as self-contained as he was, but the circumstances of it were different. In the past, he had always made a conscious decision to be sealed off. Even then, he’d managed to find common ground and a shared sense of experience with the likes of Bobby Fisher and Cyrille Regis.
The rest of the Madrid team regarded Cunningham with cold suspicion. After all, he had come to them as the so-called star. He was young and better paid than them. They were dismissed as labourers and he was being hailed as an artist. The fears and resentments that coursed through a dressing room were the same in Real Madrid as at West Brom. During that long and testing fortnight, he answered their doubts on the training pitch. He showed off his full repertoire: the outrageous jinks and flicks; a swivel, a feint and a burst of pace that left even a killer like Camacho looking benign. As he had always done, he found a state of grace with a ball at his command.
Years later, the astute Del Bosque said he saw in Cunningham all the qualities for which the Madrid faithful have now deified the Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo. To that extent, Cunningham returned to Spain from Holland having put his marker down. He had even impressed Real’s other overseas player, Uli Stielike, and this was no small achievement. Signed from Borussia Monchengladbach in 1977, Stieleke was an established West German international and a formidable presence at the back or in the centre of midfield. He had a military bearing and was nicknamed ‘The Stopper’, which accurately conveyed his approach to football and life in general. Renowned for his sense of order and self-discipline, Stieleke set himself exacting standards and expected others to submit to the same rigours as he did. In that respect, he kept his distance from Cunningham and waited to see what kind of professional he would turn out to be.
In time, Cunningham grew closer to other players at Real Madrid. Of the first teamers, his two most regular acquaintances were Gregorio ‘Goyo’ Benito and Juanito. The 33-year-old Benito had been a junior national champion at the javelin and was now a reliable centre-back for Real and for Spain. The younger Juanito was a lively striker noted for being a selfless team player. Upon joining the club from their city neighbours Atletico in 1977, he announced that playing for Real Madrid was like ‘touching the sky’. In effect, he was the sort of cog in the machine that Cunningham was brought to Real to enhance or else replace. There was a terrible symmetry to the fact that Juanito also died in a road accident in 1992, aged thirty-seven. Cunningham also drew one of the fringe players at Madrid into his typically compressed inner circle, Miguel Angel Portugal.
Real’s fans gave the club’s new signing an effusive welcome. At an open training session back in Madrid, Cunningham’s feats of conjuring brought cheers and a standing ovation from supporters massed in the public stand. As ever, the acclaim buoyed him and sent him into the new season with a spring in his step. He made his competitive debut for Real in front of 100,000 fans at the Bernabeu and scored twice in a 3-1 win over the side he’d first tormented the season before, Valencia.
The next game at the Bernabeu, he scored an even more significant goal, in the first El Clasico of the season against Barcelona. Inflamed to boiling point through the Franco era, the rivalry between the two great clubs was as intense as any in sport. Their mutual antipathy ran deep and was rooted in much more than just football. There was an ideological chasm separating the two clubs and their supporters. Real saw themselves as Spain’s club, Barcelona as the shining beacon of an independent-minded Catalonia. Real believed itself to be a bastion of solid, traditional values, while Barcelona propagated the idea that it was a centre for progressive thinking. In the most basic terms
, Real Madrid ran to the political right and Barcelona to the left.
In his book Morbo: the Story of Spanish Football, writer Phil Ball characterised El Clasico games as ‘a re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War’. Inflicting defeat on their despised enemy was the victory most desired and held up above all others at Real. Cunningham’s strike helped propel them to a 3-2 win in the opening skirmish of that campaign and accelerated his growing stature at the club. The Madrid supporters began referring to him as one of their own and christened him their ‘Black Pearl’.
These were amongst Cunningham’s happiest days at Real. Yet Nicky Brown claims even then that she detected a storm brewing on the horizon. He may have won over those on the terraces of the Bernabeu, but this, she says, fuelled petty jealousies among his team-mates. She’d also seen the manner in which he was regarded within the upper echelons of the club and how football at this rarefied level looked when its glossy veneer was peeled back.
‘One of us had to learn Spanish and there’s nothing like love to get you to do something with dedication,’ she says. ‘I was also a watcher of people. I picked up a lot through listening and observing, all of it disappointing. There was no love there. That had been lost at Orient. He was like a racehorse to them and could be replaced just like that.
‘The crowd loved him, but envy appeared in the team. It was like a pride of lions where the males are always scrapping for their place in the pecking order. Not a happy environment. Laurie was like the young lion that comes along to challenge an old leader. But at Real Madrid no one was going to be sent off into the wilderness without putting up a fight.