My Father And Other Working Class Football Heroes

by Gary Imlach

  There was a system of sharing out the best young players to try to head off the hegemony of a single superclub. Wage bills were capped at a figure set by the League for the same reason, and all player transactions were transparent: an athlete’s agent earned money only from the athlete. In the land that invented the concept of good greed, charitable foundations were almost mandatory for any high-profile player. By comparison, football in the birthplace of the welfare state looked like dangerously leveraged Darwinism, with all the financial checks and balances of a gold rush.

  The Yanks even seemed to work harder at our specialist subject, history. Perhaps because they had so little to start with, they went out of their way first to manufacture tradition, then to preserve it, with their Halls of Fame and annual induction ceremonies for the game’s greats. Even their seemingly dry obsession with statistics had the effect of plaiting a long cord of numbers that ran through the decades connecting the modern game to its past. We had so much history we’d become cavalier about it. The arrival of the Premiership, with its empty columns of new all-time records waiting to be set, looked from a distance like football’s Year Zero.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t to do with American sport. This wasn’t a transatlantic face-off, it was something much closer to home. Perhaps it was just me. I’d finally grown out of football just as everyone else was growing into it. I’d missed the tastefully reupholstered football special, powered by its Hornby engine and carrying implausible numbers of implausible fans (none of them admitting to having got on at the last stop). It had set off while I was away, and there was no catching up with it even if I’d wanted to. I’d been used to the role of outsider in the States, had enjoyed it. Now I felt like a stranger to my own game.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t entirely alone. Conversations with friends revealed a sort of non-specific unease about the brave new world of the Premiership. They were reluctant to mourn the loss of a connection with the past for its own sake; a break with tradition may be no bad thing if that tradition consists of standing to watch the game ankle-deep in a stream of other people’s piss. Still, how do you passionately support a PLC? How do you maintain the undying devotion that makes you a fan when the club is doing its damnedest to turn you into a customer? One answer is that you simply blank it all out and focus on the team, on what happens out on the pitch. But what if the team is a rotating cast of millionaires with no more connection to your world than Tom Cruise, half of them here for no better reason than that the lira supply dried up in Serie A. What are you rooting for then?

  In Italy, where football is anyway equal parts passion and cynicism, many fans simply declare themselves to be the club – after all they’re the only constant – and everyone from the president to this year’s crop of players merely their temporary representatives. They’re as likely to abuse their own side as they are the opposition. The other reaction is a slow drift into the less intense life of the freelance fan: a soft spot for that club because they have this player; maybe tracking someone’s career, changing allegiance when he moves; or deciding on the day, game by game, your loyalties up for grabs all the way through until kick-off. Hey, nice shirts . . .

  Of course, the idea of clubs as friendly societies, functioning for the benefit of the fan, never existed outside cloth-capped, moist-eyed myth. Yet somehow it had been easier to suspend disbelief when the whole pantomime was a more modest, low-budget production; the villain a fat local butcher or car dealer, the players living up the road, not on another plane of existence altogether as they were now. The tacitly agreed fictions that had sustained the illusion of football as some sort of community, albeit a flawed one, seem to have been a function of scale. They couldn’t survive enlargement. And, engorged as it was with money, the game was now very large indeed.

  I still had one reason for keeping at least half an eye on the weekend’s action: having something to say to my father during the weekly phone call home. The bulk of the conversation – weather, neighbours, family news – was with my mother, a Q & A routine of reassuring regularity which always finished the same way: ‘Do you want a word with your dad? – Stewart!’ While I was abroad it had been easy. I worked long hours at weekends and never knew the scores, so he was my results service. ‘How did Everton get on . . . ? Who got the goal . . . ? Who got theirs . . . ?’ I would ask him, and he’d talk me through it: ‘cut in . . . edge of the box . . . just clipped it . . . top corner . . . keeper, no chance . . . tremendous . . .’

  It was tremendous, a verbal sketch containing just enough structural information to enable me to add the colour and shading myself. Like baseball on the car radio, it was almost better than watching. Baseball, though, was a foreign language, one in which I had to work at processing the cues into a serviceable picture: ‘he winds . . . he deals . . . low and outside . . . full count . . .’ When I phoned home I was listening to my native sporting dialect, a distant short-wave signal transmitted from childhood and still travelling, cutting through the crackle and cackle of all the American that was slowly annexing my sports vocabulary.

  For most of the ’90s, I suppose, this is how I followed football: kidding myself that I was still interested deep down, just unable to keep up with the game through distance, time zones, pressure of work. My last real show of active support came when Everton reached the FA Cup Final in 1995. None of the local sports bars in Atlanta was showing the game, but a six-pack persuaded one of the technicians at our post-production base to pull the pictures down off a passing satellite. They were fed through to the building’s biggest television, in the boardroom, where I sat at the mahogany table with a takeaway breakfast and a dozen empty chairs for the 10 a.m. Eastern Time kick-off.

  No studio pundits, no how-they-got-there, no Wembley Way; the pre-match build-up was a full-screen caption of transponder and coordinate details, which yielded worryingly late to mute pictures of the teams already out on the pitch. It was hardly a classic final. Still, I shouted and banged the table, an apoplectic chairman berating his minions to no effect. With the game itself silent, I was the only noise in the room. A security guard from reception put his head round the door.

  ‘Sir, everything OK?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, sorry.’

  He didn’t bother to come back when the goal went in.

  Once I was home again in London, tuning in to watch seemed far more of an effort. On Sunday mornings I’d head out for the papers with a vague feeling of guilt at having no idea of the scores from the day before, or even what the fixtures had been. I’d skim the sports sections before I called home, not in order to pretend that I’d actually caught the highlights, just to make sure I had a list of prompts ready: ‘I see we got beat again, eh, bloody hell . . . what was the Man U game like . . . what about Vieira, was it a sending off?’ And he’d be away, nothing perfunctory about the answers, still full of passion and opinion.

  Football’s massive transformation hardly seemed to bother him. There was the occasional show of irritation – ‘Pathetic!’ – at some excess or other of the modern game, but he got much more worked up about yesterday’s disallowed goal and that terrible tackle which had gone unpunished than any of what I thought of as the larger concerns.

  The fact was, I’d lost the ability to see past the state of the game to the game itself. My father stared straight through it and saw what he’d always seen: the great first touch, the well-timed run, the perfectly judged ball to the far post, the reflex save. It was a passion he’d been born with, and he’d sustained it – it had sustained him – for the best part of seventy years. He’d handed it down to me and my brothers, and I’d mislaid it. Whose fault was that – mine, the game’s, no one’s in particular? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was something I couldn’t tell him, any more than I could tell him that he was pretty much the only reason I still paid the game any attention at all.

  In the later stages of his illness, when climbing the stairs required a stop halfway to regather his strength, television expanded to fill most of
my father’s horizon. On Sundays he’d sit half reclined in his chair like a man on a long-haul flight, and segue from the Premiership to the Nationwide, from Scotland to Spain and Italy, sidestepping the pre- and post-game blather that he detested as he went. Any gaps were plugged with golf.

  It was into golf that he’d channelled all of his competitive energy once he was no longer playing football, and a fair proportion of it while he still was. In the early 1960s the Coventry Evening Telegraph ran a feature piece on my father which they illustrated with a family picture. In the photograph he is standing on the garden path with his bag of clubs over his shoulder, looking back at the group which has assembled on the front doorstep to wave him off. My older brother is holding a cap-gun and looks as though he’s fidgeting to get back to whatever fiction he was acting out before being press-ganged into this one. My mother, pretending that stilettos and a pleated skirt were what she wore around the house every day, has me in her arms and is holding my hand up to wave to my departing father, no doubt at the photographer’s request.

  It’s a fairly standard piece of stage-managed, provincial photojournalism that just happened to capture a family truth. My mother spent most of her marriage waving my father off: away games, pre-season tours, exhibition matches, foreign competitions. And when he wasn’t away with the boys playing football, he was away with them playing golf. Even in retirement he’d drive up to the golf club each morning, to potter about if not to play. She saw little more of him than when he’d been at the training ground every day. It was his last club, his last set of lads.

  Formby Golf Club was both expensive and exclusive; the committee had reportedly turned down the chance to host the Open because they didn’t want the intrusion. My father joined as an artisan member. The artisans were based in a brick bungalow that they’d built themselves behind a hedge in the corner of the car park, out of sight of the main clubhouse to which they weren’t admitted. Working men, they were allowed onto the course at certain times and at reduced fees in return for performing a range of duties: divot replacement; green-sweeping at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. As an adolescent I’d been indignant that this sort of forelock-tugging set-up still existed, and mortified that my father seemed happy to sign on for the tugging side. Surely he’d been through all this as a player, why on earth did he want to re-enact the whole business in his spare time?

  To him it was perfectly straightforward: he wanted to play, and didn’t want to pay the huge green fees. But it also meant that he was among his own. In the Scotland of his childhood, golf had been a working man’s game: the spectacular links courses all municipal and populated by men off the trawlers, savouring the privilege of planting two feet on solid ground to sink a putt. Becoming a full member at Formby, which he could have done, would have been deserting the dugout for the directors’ box. Not that he’d ever felt any sense of personal inferiority among the cigars and the cashmere coats, but he recognised the divide and knew which side of it he belonged. He made sure the main club knew it too. One of his proudest post-football achievements, alongside his hole-in-one, was captaining the artisans to victory in the President’s Cup, the annual match against the full members.

  It was his golfing companions who first realised something was wrong. He’d begun producing a sharp bark of pain on the follow-through to every shot. More than once they tried to persuade him to abandon a round and walk in – they’d take his clubs. He persevered, shouting his way round the course for several weeks until it became too much. The pain was damage to his spine and ribcage. He had multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow, and the disease was dissolving the calcium from his skeleton, making it brittle. Each swing of the club was an attack on his own bones. By the time the diagnosis was eventually made, chronic had become acute. In the space of a week he jumped a generation, from a fit 67-year-old to a fragile grandfather figure. He seemed to have shrunk. In fact he’d collapsed, his spine compacting like an inexpertly dynamited chimney.

  Through sheer force of will, and to a mixed reception of admiration and horror, he resumed driving. But the list of things he could do for himself was being systematically scored through, an item at a time to start with, then in categories, until finally, and for the first time in his life, he was a spectator.

  The last game my father and I watched together was in September 2001, England’s 5–1 win over Germany in the World Cup qualifiers. Trips and phone calls home were much more frequent by then, and his health had forced its way onto the shortlist of conversational topics. Conversation, though, was briefer than usual; all his resources now seemed to be focused inwards on the illness, and he couldn’t stand too much noise or activity around him. Even a visit from his grandson, a lively nine-year-old on whom he doted, was sometimes too much. But on this Saturday afternoon it was just the two of us, a pair of England fans braced for the disappointment promised by the traditional fixture with Germany. My father was never an anti-Sassenach Scot. He’d had an entire playing career in England, a wife and three English sons; rooting for the auld enemy came naturally.

  When England took the lead just before half-time I leaped out of my chair and turned to see him wincing in his. He shrugged it off, but I could see that any pleasure he’d taken in the goal had been drowned out by the shock to his system from my celebration of it. He had enough going on internally without having to absorb sudden bursts of loud and unexpected sensory information from outside. I sat back down. The second half was a massively enjoyable, if slightly surreal, affair. As the score mounted and the tumult built in Munich’s Olympic Stadium, we sat like two light-opera enthusiasts, greeting each goal with polite and restrained rapture.

  A month later I watched the decisive qualifying game against Greece on my own. It was ninety minutes’ relief in the middle of a there-and-back trip to London from Formby to pick up my suit for the funeral. For a moment I’d thought of grabbing it when I’d got the call from the hospital the previous Monday evening, but it would have seemed a betrayal, as though I’d lost faith in him. After the late-night drive up the motorway I’d found him awake and alert at 3 a.m. on the quietly pulsing critical-care ward. ‘There’s been a bit of a fracas,’ he said.

  My mother, forever balancing her own levels of concern with his vehement reluctance to go to hospital, had called an ambulance some time after ten. Their next-door neighbour, a lay preacher, had followed behind in his own car and, when the time seemed to have come, administered the last rites. As he finished he was alarmed to hear a murmured reply. ‘Thanks, John,’ my father had said opening his eyes, ‘I enjoyed that.’

  The next day was one of his best for a long time. My mother and I visited him in the morning and said we’d be back later that afternoon. When we got there he was fuming. Dwarfed by the dimensions of the high-backed armchair at the side of the bed, he perched like a miniature pontiff. There’d been a misunderstanding over the time and he’d been waiting for what he thought was hours. For once, his obsessive clock-watching seemed perfectly understandable. His mood quickly brightened, though, and as we left for the evening he gestured towards us from his chair: ‘You are absolved.’

  When the midnight call came from the hospital this time the drive was only twenty minutes. My mother, worried about the police cameras, warned me not to speed. Before we could see him we were shown into a side room. The consultant wanted permission to turn off the machinery keeping my father alive. ‘But this happened last night and by the time I got here he was sitting up in bed,’ I told the doctor. That wasn’t going to happen this time. My mother made the decision, and with Steve, who’d had a longer drive from the Wirral, we sat round the bed to cheer him on. It was the only time I’d ever really watched my father, been there to encourage him and urge him forwards. Now that there was no chance of real recovery, just ever more painful delay, dying seemed like a positive act, something he could do for himself. We were ranged round the rectangle of the bed like fans to make sure he didn’t falter. This was something he knew how to do, perform un
der the pressure of expectation; we were improvising.

  The awful temptation of a modern death is to pay attention to the flow of medical information instead of the ebbing life in front of you. He was being counted out by the heart-rate monitor in ever lengthening pauses, each one of them indistinguishable from the beginning of unbroken silence, until the green screen pinged and peaked and the next pause began. The critical-care nurses, their ears tuned to pick the approaching death march out of this toneless electronica, moved in to switch it off and spare us the last few notes.

  ‘Did you ever see him play?’ I was asked a number of times at the funeral reception. It was my job to carry round the worn leather box containing his medal for anyone who wanted to see it. No, I wanted to say, but at least I was there to see him off. At least I started paying attention before it was too late, even if it was only by minutes.

  Almost the entire practical business of bereavement was taken care of from within the artisans’ brick bungalow. The undertaker was a man whose membership application my father had vetted, giving his approval only after an eighteen-hole test of ability and sportsmanship, the minister at the funeral was a regular playing partner. A couple of days after the service, eight or ten of them walked out with us to scatter his ashes at the seventeenth, which was as far onto the course as his stamina would take him when he could no longer play, and where he’d stand to welcome the lads in towards the end of their round.

  Epilogue:

  Homecoming

  RETRACING THE ROUTE. IT looked easy enough on the Nottingham A–Z: a spiralling sweep of the finger from the Midland Station, where the team had stepped off the train, to the Council House building in Market Square; five minutes’ walk away, or a triumphant hour and a half by open-top bus.