The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  Wimbledon’s victory party was held in a marquee that was erected on the furrowed pitch at Plough Lane. The BBC’s Match of the Day programme was broadcast from it that night and the cup was given pride of place on a plinth sited in the middle of the makeshift room.

  ‘I remember Laurie being there and throwing some shapes when we were all dancing,’ says Phelan. ‘He was joking with me, telling me he was going back to his castle in Spain. I never saw him again.’

  Cunningham could have taken a different path. Don Howe, Wimbledon’s assistant manager at the time, said later that he had impressed during his short spell at the club. The management were considering offering him a contract for the next season, but he left abruptly after the cup final and without a word. He was doubtless compelled by the fact that Sylvia had not long given birth to their son and wanted to go back to Spain.

  Yet even then he might have been persuaded to stay on had Wimbledon been able to offer him the carrot of European football. Ordinarily, the club would then have gained entry into the European Cup Winners’ Cup. However, English clubs were still under an ongoing ban from continental competition imposed by UEFA following the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985. This held Liverpool fans responsible for the sickening crowd trouble that broke out inside the venue before that season’s European Cup final with Juventus resulting in the deaths of thirty-nine Italian supporters.

  Instead, Cunningham accepted an offer to return to Rayo Vallecano for another season in La Liga’s second tier. It was a successful one for the club and they won promotion at the end of it. Niggling injuries kept him out of the side for half the campaign, but he managed nineteen games and the goal that sealed promotion. The team also included Argentinian midfielder Hugo Hernan Maradona, the younger and less blessed brother of the more heralded Diego. During the last weeks of Cunningham’s life, he was negotiating with the club over the terms of a possible new contract. The process dragged on and Cunningham grew frustrated. He contacted Brendon Batson at the PFA and asked his old team-mate to help find him an English club.

  ‘I spoke to him not long before his accident,’ says Batson. ‘There was almost like a kind of sadness in his voice. I think he was looking to find his way back home. At the PFA, we had a service for disengaged players and I put Laurie’s name on it. I said I’d have a look round for him, but I could never pin him down on what he wanted to do.’

  The acute sense of dislocation and of being unfulfilled that were felt by Cunningham sharpened when he went back to Spain. Slowly, irrevocably, he sank into despair and came undone. His family and closest friends aren’t, or can’t be specific about where and what this led him into, but what is clear is that at the end of his life he was profoundly conflicted. Bobby Fisher recalls Mavis, Cunningham’s mother, voicing her concerns to him. She expressed a fear that her son had got involved in something that was potentially perilous to him, and that he had also run into financial troubles. The ‘dead soul’ Fisher saw in Madrid seven years earlier had slipped further into the shadows.

  ‘We were worried about Laurie,’ he says. ‘Had he got into something that was deeper and quite dark down there? Was he mixing with some really villainous people? There is that idea. I don’t think anyone knew exactly, but there was this darkness about him. A mutual friend told me Laurie had rung and said he needed to borrow some money. They said that the sum was £350 and that Laurie had told them it was to get some curtains fixed. There was something weird about the whole situation.

  ‘Sometime before that, I know he’d been approached in a bar and told to get out of the place. A guy had opened up his jacket and shown him a gun. I spoke to him on the phone two or three weeks before he died. It was a quick, very superficial conversation. “How’re you doing? What’s happening?” Again, it was like speaking to someone who wasn’t there.’

  ‘Yes, he was a troubled man and also deeply hurt,’ says Nicky Brown. ‘You have to know someone intimately for a long time to understand how they’re affected and whether they’re faking it or not. Laurie and I could never put a face on for each other. I got from him a terrible sense of sadness.

  ‘Somehow, somewhere, I think he felt betrayed along the way by the money, the fame, by being for sale. He was no angel and he could be a bugger too, but he was too nice to be that clued up. It was so tragic, because he was beginning to develop as a man who recognised himself and was ready to stop playing games. He was ready to go on to something other than football.’

  Brown had entered into another relationship and had given birth to a daughter since leaving Spain. However, she and Cunningham had stayed in touch and remained close. She’d spoken with him a week before he died. She was on holiday in Cornwall when the phone rang on the morning of 15 July 1989.

  ‘I heard about Laurie’s death four or five minutes before it was televised,’ she says. ‘My family had been desperately trying to get hold of me. In Spain, they bury their dead the next day. Mavis and her sister-in-law had to take off straight away to go and get his body because they’d already started that process. There was a big battle over the body.

  ‘As soon as Mavis landed back in England, I was in attendance. I had to be with him, and I didn’t leave his side till the funeral.’

  Bobby Fisher heard the news from Mavis Cunningham, who called him at 8 a.m. ‘She was crying and just said, “Laurie’s dead,”’ he says. ‘I turned the radio on and there was no more Laurie. It was a really odd, empty feeling.’

  Ron Atkinson was the first person from Cunningham’s West Brom days to get the call. He had the difficult job of breaking the news to Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson. Regis had spoken to Cunningham just two days before and was silent, crushed. Even now Batson says he ‘can’t remember the whole of that day. I was just numb.’

  Speaking to the Birmingham Post two days later, Atkinson described Cunningham as ‘the best player since George Best’. The new West Brom chairman, John Silk, added he was ‘a tragic loss to football. Laurie was in a class of his own during his time at the Hawthorns. Albion supporters saw the best of him and will always treasure memories of his partnership with Cyrille Regis.’

  Cunningham was buried near his family home in Tottenham, north London. The occasion was a public spectacle conducted before hundreds of mourners and in the glare of television cameras. Writing later in his autobiography, Atkinson claimed it was ‘very evident that certain influences had been at work involving what can only be described as a black brotherhood of people connected to the sporting world.’ Cunningham had latterly taken on an agent, Ambrose Mendy. A colourful self-publicist, Mendy’s other clients included Cyrille Regis and John Fashanu, and he would go on to represent the boxer Nigel Benn. Among the many black footballers who attended the service were Carlton Palmer, who’d just then left West Bromwich Albion for Sheffield Wednesday, and his new team-mate, Dalian Atkinson.

  ‘It was almost as if a bandwagon had taken over,’ affirms Bobby Fisher. ‘Quite a few people were there that day who wanted to use Laurie’s passing to nurture their own profile. It felt almost as if we’d lost Laurie again. I wanted to remember him with a little bit of joy and not the dark periods that he seemed to have later in his life. How he used to move and some of the things we’d done together growing up. Going out dancing till 3 a.m. and coming in late for training and getting fined.

  ‘After the service, a long train of cars and people followed on to the cemetery. Nicky and I didn’t go along with that. We went on later to say our farewells and when no one else was there.’

  ‘A year later, Laurie’s family held a memorial service for him,’ says Regis. ‘On that occasion, it was just the family and his close friends that turned up. It showed you how very quickly people move on. Even within a year, he’d gone.’

  The people who loved Cunningham and knew him best were left to pick up the pieces and to try to make sense of his death at thirty-three. His wife Sylvia returned to Spain after the funeral and later remarried. Their son Sergio has no recollection of his father other tha
n through flickering TV footage and photographs. Keith Cunningham says that he and his mother still speak with Sylvia, but that their contact isn’t close or regular. It is a fact that Nicky Brown’s ties to the Cunningham family have remained firmer, more binding. Ultimately, among the aspects of Laurie Cunningham’s end days that remain hidden and out of reach, the tragic accident of his death might be the clearest thing of all.

  As Cyrille Regis says: ‘My best mate was gone and I heard a smattering of things [about his accident]. But from all I can gather what happened was that he had been out at a nightclub, was on his way home and smashed up his car. He banged his head being thrown from it and died on the roadside.’

  In more recent years, Laurie Cunningham has been named among the greatest players to have represented Real Madrid and West Bromwich Albion in surveys of supporters conducted by both clubs. However, outside the bosom of his family he has been best remembered at his first club, Orient. A bar at Orient’s Brisbane Road ground and a block of flats adjoining it has each been named after him.

  On 12 October 2013, Keith Cunningham, Brown, Fisher, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson were all present at Brisbane Road for the unveiling of a blue plaque commemorating Cunningham’s flowering at the club. It is displayed on the outer wall of the main stand and the testimonial contained within it reads: ‘Laurie Cunningham – 1956-1989 – Football legend; pioneering England international; player for Leyton Orient FC 1974-1977.’ Simple words, but conveyed within them is the extent of a remarkable and all too brief life.

  ‘We had fun together, man,’ says Keith Cunningham. ‘My brother had a lot of qualities. He was truthful, outspoken and very friendly. He was a nice guy, an all-rounder, but also a star and one in a million. There wasn’t another player who could dance with the ball like him. It was a lovely thing to watch. I loved him. I loved him very much.’

  The last time Ron Atkinson saw Laurie Cunningham was in May 1989. Atkinson had returned to the Spanish capital to agree the terms of his departure from Atletico Madrid, having been sacked as their manager after just one eventful season in charge of the club. He got in touch with Cunningham and the two of them arranged to meet up.

  ‘He was going to see Real Madrid in a European game with his president at Rayo Vallecano and invited me along,’ says Atkinson. ‘He’d just won promotion with Vallecano and as he was sat there at the Bernabeu he said to me: “I can’t wait to get back here next year. I’ll show them what they’ve been missing.”’

  Epilogue: Legacy

  It is the simplest of images. An unadorned portrait of Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson lined up in their West Brom shirts. Cunningham and Regis balance a ball between their heads and each of them is smiling. The mood is relaxed and carefree. Without the benefit of context, it would be nothing more than a snapshot. However, a deeper understanding of its backdrop transforms the photograph into an intimate, captured moment from the beginnings of a revolution. Its chief instigators framed together for the first time not as novelties or curiosities, but as men. Contained within it there is a powerful truth. When it was taken thirty-five years ago it conveyed something that was extraordinary, exotic even, and also to some a vision that was both alien and unacceptable. Now, it is the norm – an image of three black sportsmen representing one British team.

  When Cunningham, Batson and Regis were first united at West Brom there were just fifty or so black footballers playing in the four divisions of the Football League in England. Today, more than a quarter of the professionals in the English game are black or from ethnic minorities. In the years since Cunningham made his pioneering debut for the England U21 team in 1977, close to 200 black and mixed-race players have gone on to be capped by the country at both U21 and senior level. The three men in the photograph were the lightning conductors for one of the most profound developments in the sport, and perhaps its greatest and most abiding achievement.

  In the journey from then to now, there have been other notable turning points and victories. None of these was navigated without difficulty or won without a battle. John Barnes’s £900,000 transfer from Watford to Liverpool in the summer of 1987 marked another crossing of the Rubicon for the game in Britain. Barnes was the first black player to be bought by one of the proudest but most insular institutions in British sport. Magnifying the significance of Barnes’s arrival at Liverpool was the fact that the city was home to the longest established black community in the UK. Three months later, when he made his first appearance in a Merseyside derby at Anfield, the visiting fans chanted, ‘Everton are white.’ Not out of shame, but as a boast.

  The dreadful deaths of ninety-six Liverpool fans before an FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium on 15 April 1989 gave rise to another major development. In his subsequent report into the tragedy and on the wider issue of ground safety, Lord Justice Taylor recognised a correlation between racist attitudes and the football hooligan mindset. Taylor’s recommendations on this were a catalyst for the introduction of the Football Offences Act of 1991, which belatedly criminalised racist chanting within stadia and during matches.

  In June 1993, Paul Ince became the first black man to captain the full England team on a post-season tour of the USA. That same year, the Professional Footballers’ Association launched the Kick It Out campaign, aimed at combatting racism in the sport. By 1997 Kick It Out had evolved into an operating organisation and continues to be funded by the PFA, Premier League and the FA. It has had its critics. In October 2012, Manchester United’s Rio Ferdinand and Jason Roberts of Blackburn Rovers were the most outspoken of several black footballers to boycott its annual week of action. Their protest was at Kick It Out’s perceived lack of influence, and also at an apparent failure of strength and will from within the game to advance football’s fight against racism. However, Kick It Out’s sheer existence continues to represent another landmark for the sport. Its chairman, Lord Herman Ouseley, recalls how ignorance of racist abuse and intransigence towards tackling it were so long pervasive in the game.

  ‘Right back in the 1980s I’d tried to pick up the issue in London with people like Ken Bates, the Chelsea chairman,’ he says. ‘I was basically told that there was nothing to be worried about and to go away. I later became chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality and at least had some basis from which to challenge people, but there was still a great deal of resistance. Senior figures at the FA and Football League told me there wasn’t a problem. There was a whole lot of crap that I had to put up with.’

  Eventually, walls came down. In the summer of 2001, the FA made a formal apology to black footballers and supporters alike for its failure to address racism and racist chanting throughout the seventies and eighties. The giant leap made within the game was further emphasised in February 2005. That month, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger selected a sixteen-man squad comprised entirely of overseas players for a League match against Crystal Palace. Arsenal’s 5-1 winning team was made up of six Frenchmen, three Spaniards, two Dutchmen, a German, a Swiss, a Brazilian and a player each from Cameroon and the Ivory Coast. It included five black players: Lauren, Kolo Toure, Gael Clichy, Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry.

  There were also five black players in the West Bromwich Albion side that won 2-1 at Manchester United in a Premier League fixture on 28 September 2013. One of them, striker Saido Berahino, recalled Cyrille Regis’s explosive entry into the game, when making his first-team debut weeks earlier in a League Cup tie and scoring a hat-trick. West Brom’s victory at Old Trafford was the club’s first at that ground since Ron Atkinson’s men recorded their 5-3 triumph in the freezing winter of 1979, when Regis and Cunningham ran riot. It is that team that stands out as the jumping off point for all of these momentous events and the attendant changes that have since swept through the national game in Britain, making it so much the better.

  ‘There was a whole unsung generation of black guys who came up in the early seventies and who never made it into the game,’ says Regis. ‘Why?
It was because of racism and the idea that they lacked bottle or couldn’t stand the cold. We broke that stereotype. Young black boys watching television in the late-seventies saw Laurie shining for West Brom in the snow, or myself knocking heads with big, no-nonsense defenders, and what that did for their spirits.

  ‘The next generation, guys like Ian Wright, John Barnes and David James, it’s only when they tell you their story that you’re able to see the influence we had. At the same time, there was a sea-change in the mentality of football managers. Guys like Big Ron, Brian Clough, Johnny Giles, David Pleat at Luton, Alan Durban at Stoke and Sammy Cheung at Wolves were crucial to what happened. It was a double-edged thing.’

  Ron Atkinson for ever compromised his role in the story on the evening of 21 April 2004. By then he had carved out a successful second career as a television broadcaster, providing expert analysis on matches for ITV Sport. On that night he was commentating on the first leg of Chelsea’s European Champions League semi-final with Monaco in France. The English side slumped to a 3-1 defeat. In its aftermath, and believing that he was now off-air, Atkinson vented his thoughts at the lacklustre contribution of Chelsea’s veteran midfielder Marcel Desailly, a Ghanian-born Frenchman coming to the end of a fine career. During the course of his rant, Atkinson described Desailly as ‘a lazy fucking nigger’.

  Unbeknown to him, ITV was still transmitting to the Middle East at the time and his comments were aired in Egypt and Dubai among other countries. The erupting firestorm consumed Atkinson and torched his reputation. He lost his job at ITV the next day and has been banished from the mainstream media ever since, lurking like a pariah on the fringes of local radio and newspapers in the West Midlands. In the immediate fall-out, Ian Wright branded his remark ‘disgusting’. Brendon Batson was more measured in his response, but withering too, expressing shock and disappointment.