Читать книгу Stan: Tackling My Demons - Stan Collymore - Страница 7

My father’s legacy to me was not just womanising, nor was it only fear and loathing and the sense of being haunted by domestic violence. I have never been proud of him, but I am as proud of my black heritage as I am of coming from the ferociously caucasian working-class area of South Staffordshire. You couldn’t get much more mixed-race than me: part Barbados, but also part Cannock, where the closest you get to soul food is battered cod and mushy peas at the local chippie.

Sometimes I feel thankful I’ve got both sides to draw upon. Sometimes I feel torn apart and isolated, as though I am neither one thing nor the other. Show me two rooms, one with black footballers in it, one with white footballers, and I would pick a room on my own. Sometimes I wonder which culture other mixed-race players like Rio Ferdinand lean towards. I wonder if they share the inner conflict that grips me.

Ambrose Mendy, who used to be Paul Ince’s agent, met me once to try to persuade me to let him act for me. He met me off a plane at Gatwick when I was about to join Nottingham Forest, and the first thing I saw was him surrounded by this entourage of gangsta black dudes looking mean and moody. They thought the black thing was going to work with me but the way they talked and acted was totally alien to me. I was still a boy who had been brought up on an all-white estate in Cannock.

Often, I think I’m lucky. I get immense pride, for instance, from reading about the heroic deeds of the South Staffordshire Regiment at Arnhem during the Second World War. Earlier this year, I drove down through France to visit the beaches where the Allied forces came ashore during the Normandy landings. I wandered around the cemeteries, too, and when I saw how many of the young men killed were from the South Staffs Regiment, it made me well up with pride for their heroism and sacrifice.

I drove inland for a few miles while I was there. Every so often I’d come across the grave of a kid from the South Staffs. Killed on 8 June. A little bit further inland and it might be 9 June. These lads from the Black Country were lasting only a few days as they pushed the Germans back and were then being cut down. It made me think that every child in this country, once they’re old enough to understand the gravity of what happened, should be made to go out and visit those beaches and those cemeteries.

I feel black pride, too. I feel moved when I read about the deeds of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association and the liberation of the realisation that black is beautiful. I am drawn to the speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and sometimes I even find myself inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers and the lyrics of bands like Public Enemy. I want to fight the power. Sometimes, I feel black resentment and oppression very keenly.

There is very little recognition, for instance, of the part that black soldiers from the Caribbean played in the Second World War. They joined up in their droves from the West Indies, and the high command decreed that they weren’t allowed to fight against white European Germans because they thought it wasn’t right. Then they come here in the 1950s to fill all the shitty, menial jobs and their reward is that they get spat on and people cross the road to avoid them. Meanwhile, my mate’s grandad, who was a German prisoner of war, stayed on, married a local Staffordshire girl and never got any bother at all. I’m not advocating the idea that he should have got any bother. I’m just trying to point out how unjust that double standard is. I’m just saying how unjust and sad that kind of racism is. My mate’s grandfather had been part of an army that had killed millions of English soldiers and he was accepted. People from the West Indies had fought for Queen and Country and yet they were persecuted. It sickens me to think of it.

So I’m a real mix. I am proud of both sides but I know they contradict each other. If you took your average factory worker in Wolverhampton and an average member of the Nation of Islam, they would have nothing in common. They would hate each other’s guts. But they are part of me. And I think that is a problem that a lot of mixed-race kids have. You don’t have an identity. There is no National Mixed Race Forum. I wouldn’t feel 100 per cent confident going to a Black Nationalist meeting and I certainly wouldn’t feel confident going to a BNP meeting.

I’m not for political correctness. I’m not for positive discrimination. I’m not for having set quotas of black people filling jobs. I’m not for dressing in African gear just because you are black. I don’t want the politically correct telling me off for celebrating St George’s Day. I am proud to be English and I think it’s ludicrous if someone tells me I shouldn’t feel that way. I’d hate to be a white bigot out of fear. I’d hate to see the white man as the enemy. I am fascinated by the strength of character on both sides.

I’m happy the bullying I got when I was a kid hasn’t really left any racial grievances. I’m happy that the victimisation of my mum and me on our little Close faded away. I’m happy that I’ve been able to see attitudes in Cannock and around soften as the years have passed and people have grown used to minorities living with them side by side. Most of the time, I don’t feel any anger or resentment towards the white man. Much of the time, I almost think of myself as a white man. I grew up among them, after all.

But when I see persecution and inequality, it enrages me all the more. When, out of a clear blue sky, Ron Atkinson spits out his poisonous words about Marcel Desailly, it makes me despair. It makes me realise that for all the progress we have made, it’s still there. Still there more than we thought. Still festering in underground minds, still a joke between friends, still okay as long as you don’t get caught, as long as you say it around the dinner table with no politically correct snoops around. Think it, mate, just never say it.

It’s not a surprise to me that Ron Atkinson said what he said about Desailly after the Monaco versus Chelsea Champions League semi-final. I’ve heard plenty of stories about him before. Some of the press boys told me about being on an England trip to Poland with him once. England were playing in Katowice and some of the press lads made the short journey to Auschwitz to see the concentration camp there. When they arrived back at the hotel, most of them, for obvious reasons, were a little subdued. Big Ron was in the foyer. He was boisterous as usual. He wanted to know what was the matter with them all that they were all looking so fucking miserable. One of them told him where they’d been. ‘I suppose you went there by fucking train an’ all,’ he said. Nice one. Subtle as a fucking brick. I know ITV and the Guardian sacked him, yet the knee-jerk reaction over his comments about Desailly seems to excuse him in some ways, to say that it was a one-off and he was just being careless.

Careless is right. Ignorant, stupid, boorish and racist are all right, too. He called one of the most decorated players in the game, a player who has won the World Cup, the European Cup and the European Championships, ‘a thick, fat, lazy nigger’. It shouldn’t happen. No excuses. Particularly not the bullshit about him not realising his microphone was switched on. What difference does that make? If the microphone is switched off, does that mean he didn’t say it? Or didn’t think it?

The flawed logic of some of the arguments that the Big Ron apologists spouted astonished me in their naivety. I’m just surprised so many people were surprised that he said it. Then, to make matters a lot worse, he came out and said that all these people in the game had rung him up to sympathise. And so what are we supposed to think about how those conversations went, because if Ron’s boasting about it, we have to assume they weren’t ringing him up to tell him what a dreadful thing he had done. I can imagine it would go something like this: ‘We’ve all said it, we’ve all done it. Just you got caught, Big Ron, you daft sod. You’ll be all right in a couple of months, mate. Just keep your head down, pal. It’ll all blow over. You’ll be back in no time.’ Do you think one of those managers would have rung him up and said: ‘You fucking twat, Ron, you were bang out of order.’

They fucking should have done. Otherwise, that kind of behind-closed-doors racism is only going to be flushed out of football when the old school of management is out of the game. When they die off. Because so many of them come from that old school. And no one bats an eyelid that, according to Big Ron, the glitterati of football management are voicing their support for him in private.

Lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, another sports broadcaster, Jimmy Hill, came out and said calling someone a nigger was no worse than calling him ‘Chinny’. Thanks for that, Jim. And yet his employers, Sky TV, let him off after he apologised. They think he’s still fit to broadcast and yet the BBC take me off the air because I went to a few car parks to watch people having sex. Forgive me if I sound unforgiving about Big Ron and Jimmy the Chin. Why do I expect clemency for my dogging and yet I don’t offer them any for their racism? Well, that’s because I don’t think the two things are in the same league in terms of their offensiveness.

I do feel bitter about what Big Ron said. I felt so despondent and upset that every black player who had ever played for him came out and said ‘Ron’s no racist’. They dragged out Brendan Batson and Cyrille Regis because he had played the two of them at West Brom. That is what really narked me. All these people coming out and saying ‘yes, he said these things, but he’s not a racist’. I’m desperately disappointed in people like Carlton Palmer and Viv Anderson. If they are friends of his, that’s fine. If he has been good to them, that’s fine, too. But don’t use that to try to excuse what he said.

These were people that I grew up admiring and for them to align themselves with someone who has said what Big Ron said is just not good enough. Brendan Batson is at the FA. It makes you wonder about the work Kick Racism Out of Football has been doing. They have made some important strides but there is still an awful lot to be done, not least in trying to eradicate this natural deference that some former black players still seem to feel towards a racist like Ron Atkinson.

The only two people who summed up the outrage most black people felt were Robbie Earle and Ian Wright. Robbie Earle, who worked with Big Ron regularly on ITV, said that he had always valued their professional relationship but that he could not excuse or forgive what he had said. Wrighty mentioned that Atkinson’s words had carried a ‘plantation vibe’ and he was spot on there. When I heard what Big Ron had said, it made me think of a redneck sitting on a verandah in his rocking chair with a piece of straw coming out of his mouth.

And yet, in the newspapers a lot of the columnists and the feature writers didn’t touch the Big Ron stuff after the initial story. They joked about it a bit but it was almost as if a lot of them felt uncomfortable with it, as though they were going to be hypocritical if they slaughtered him too much, as if they were going to be attacking one of their own. Every feature that I read held out the prospect of him being welcomed back with open arms in a few months when all the fuss has died down. And believe me, he will get chance after chance after chance.

Let’s not forget it wasn’t so long ago when Alf Garnett was on our television screens talking about ‘yer blacks’ and ‘yer darkies’. It wasn’t so long ago when racists were posting abusive notes through my mum’s letterbox at our house in Cannock. Then, when a public figure comes out and uses language like that, you wonder if it has really gone away; if we ever really had become a more tolerant society, or if that kind of attitude is just lurking beneath the surface like the pus in a boil.

I don’t want to brand Big Ron an evil man. But let’s not be embarrassed to say we were deeply offended by what he said. Let’s move on. It’s 2004. Make yourself realise that black people have got two arms, two legs, a nose and a mouth and they are no more of a threat than the man from the moon. And most of all, let’s not dress Atkinson up as some pioneer for racial integration who made one uncharacteristic slip. Don’t forget, he branded Batson, Regis and the late Laurie Cunningham ‘The Three Degrees’ after the famous black pop-group. They were favourites of Prince Charles. The singers, I mean, not the football players. Anyway, not exactly the actions of an enlightened manager. In fact, about as patronising and pathetic as you can get.

Okay, so he played them in his team. So what? I read a few articles in the press after Atkinson had called Desailly ‘a thick, fat, lazy nigger’ that said he had changed the world just by putting Batson, Regis and Cunningham in the side. I couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that someone could seriously think that; that someone could be that stupid. Changed the world? Come on, please. We’re not talking about Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali here.

Think about the premise of those newspaper articles. The black players break through but it’s the white man who’s changed the world. That’s the worst kind of lazy, limited, institutionalised, traditional racist thinking. Give the credit to the white boss, not to the black kids who have had to fight their way through the system to even get to that point. Trying to give the credit to Atkinson for that is like giving a white promoter credit for Ali or a white baseball coach credit for Jackie Robinson. It’s bollocks.

Ron Atkinson, a pioneer. Excuse me while I retch. We’re not talking about Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympic Games. These were men with real balls, not some champagne-swilling, perma-tanned prick. We’re not talking about a blow for freedom and equality. We’re not talking anything even remotely in that league. To suggest otherwise is offensive in itself. Atkinson didn’t even sign two of West Brom’s famous three. It’s not as if he went out on a limb. It’s not as if he put himself on the line to pick them. There wasn’t an outcry, but there certainly would have been if he hadn’t picked them. That’s the point. English football in the late Seventies may not have been particularly tolerant but it wasn’t exactly the segregationalist Deep South. What Big Ron did wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Graeme Souness signing Mo Johnston, a Catholic, to play for Rangers. That was courage. That was balls.

Big Ron just did what was best for him professionally. He did what served his interests and his career. And he obviously didn’t feel totally comfortable with it because he had to make a joke out of it by calling them ‘The Three Degrees’. Those three players were so far ahead of anything else they had at West Brom that it was blatantly obvious to anyone on the terraces that they would improve that side beyond all recognition. It was a business decision. The idea that it was a social experiment is utterly flawed. So let’s not have racist apologists dressing it up as a decision that changed the world.

I was lucky that in my time in football I was only the victim of serious, foul racial abuse once in my career. But when I joined Crystal Palace from Stafford Rangers for £100,000 in November 1990, a few months after they had lost the FA Cup final to Manchester United in a replay, I found myself at a club that was only just emerging from a period of deep racial tension, and one that was still split down the middle, white on one side, black on the other.

Four or five years before that, when Ian Wright first joined the club, there was a group of English rednecks there, led by people like Micky Droy, the former Chelsea centre half, who was a giant of a man, and Jim Cannon. Black players who were there at the time said there were a lot of obstacles to overcome, but because they were from the street the white guys couldn’t break them. That was how bad things were not so long ago.

Andy Gray, the black Andy Gray who played for Palace and Spurs, was there in those days and still there when I arrived. He remembered Cannon and Droy rubbing Wrighty’s face in the mud during training as a matter of routine. They were always calling the black lads ‘nigger’ and ‘black bastard’. They seemed to think they could treat them how they wanted.

One day, after the abuse had been particularly bad, Palace played a match at Brighton’s Goldstone Ground, and Andy Gray, who reminds me of someone out of Public Enemy because he’s a radical Black Power man, urged the other black lads to walk off in protest, to boycott the game. That would have made a statement, but not one of them, not Wrighty or Mark Bright, turned round and said a thing.

In the phalanx of black lads at Palace there was Wrighty, Brighty, John Salako, Eric Young, Andy Gray and a kid called Bobby Bowry. They were all Londoners. They all used a kind of Brixton patois that was alien to me. I’d never been exposed to black culture before and suddenly here were all these guys kissing their teeth and chilling out. For a while, to try and imitate them, I asked my girlfriend, Lotta, if she’d cook me rice and peas for my meal when I got home. I got boiled rice and green peas, which wasn’t quite the way the other boys ate it.

On the other side there was Gareth Southgate and his mate, the Del Boy of a reserve goalkeeper, Andy Woodman. There was Andy Thorn and Alan Pardew, who was fiercely ambitious even then, and Geoff Thomas, who I never liked because he fancied himself so much. And there was Nigel Martyn, who used to get the piss ripped out of him by Wrighty, who must have enjoyed turning the tables on a white country boy. ‘You thick Cornish cunt,’ was Wrighty’s favourite way of greeting Nigel.

The last of the white boys was a bloke called John Humphrey, a defender whose nickname was Tasty. He was coming to the end of his career. I remember taking a video of the 101 Greatest Goals on to the team coach once for an away trip. All the young lads sat down the front. The more experienced you were, the further back you sat. I stuck the video on and from the back this voice yelled out. It was Tasty. ‘Get that fucking shit off,’ he shouted. I asked him what his problem was. ‘Tasty, we’re footballers aren’t we,’ I said. ‘Can’t you enjoy Marco Van Basten scoring an overhead kick?’ He just said: ‘Stan, put the ball away. I have been doing this for 20 years. I have had enough of football. It’s bad enough playing it, let alone watching it as well.’ Fair enough, I suppose. Tasty always used to run himself down. He said if he was a car, he would be a Fiesta. Always dependable but nothing special.

When they went out on the pitch, black and white worked well together. So well that we finished third there in my first season, the equivalent of a Champions League place today, and Palace’s most successful season ever. But off the pitch it was two teams, not one. Me? I was 19. From my physical appearance I should have been in the black camp. But I didn’t talk like them. I didn’t have the same eating habits. I didn’t have the same experiences or the same background.

But to Alan Pardew and the rest of the white lads, I was a black Brummy. So I never felt I belonged. And I think having those two polar opposites at my first professional club had an impact on me. Neither side accepted me and perhaps that contributed to the reputation I gained at Nottingham Forest later in my career for being a loner. My only real mate at Palace was another reserve striker, Jamie Moralee. We hit it off immediately.

It was a real windfall for Stafford when they got six figures for my transfer fee to Palace. The Stafford chairman, Dave Bundy, was so happy he drove me down to south London in his Bentley to sign the contract. I had been down to Palace on trial for a week, staying in digs with a family in Biggin Hill. I hated it, but when Steve Coppell offered me the chance to sign I knew I had to take the opportunity. On the way back, the chairman pulled his Bentley in at Rothersthorpe services on the Ml and me, him and the manager, a brilliant bloke called Chris Wright who had rescued my career after I was released by Wolves, had a celebratory dinner at a Little Chef.

When the time came for me to leave Cannock properly, my mum and my girlfriend, Sharon, drove me to the station to put me on the train. I had one suitcase with all my stuff in it. That was it. They came up onto the platform to wave me off and I swear that with every retelling of the story that battered old InterCity train changes into a steam locomotive in my mind and Sharon’s dressed like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter.

I got to London and hopped on the Tube, a cornflake in my throat the whole way because I was so homesick already. Someone picked me up from Morden station, at the southern end of the Northern Line, and took me to my digs. I stayed with Bryn and Leslie Jones in a little annexe at the back of their flat in South Croydon. All I remember about that first day was going up into my room and Byker Grove blaring out from the television.

I hadn’t gone down there with any expectation of playing in the first team initially. Steve Coppell had told me I had the raw materials and that they would try and develop them. He said they would teach me my trade. And he was right about that. From Steve Harrison in particular, the first-team coach, Jamie Moralee and I learned everything we needed to know about how to make our runs, how to time them, how to bend them, and which runs tended to yield the most goals.

The two things that were obvious when I met Steve Coppell were how small he was and how unnaturally deep his voice was. Particularly for a bloke who was so small. If you were called into his office at the training ground at Mitcham, it was going to be something fairly serious. For such a little bloke, he commanded a lot of respect, especially from somebody like me who was wide-eyed and nervous about everything.

My first game in the reserves at Tooting & Mitcham was against Ipswich. I came on as a substitute and I scored. I scored ten or fifteen goals between then and the end of the season. I was on £300 a week with a £10,000 signing-on fee. I felt like I had won the lottery with that signing-on fee but a lot of it went on buying a Vauxhall Belmont that Andy Woodman managed to flog me.

I got the piss taken out of me the whole time I was at Palace for that car. It was like an Astra with a boot on the back of it, hardly a pulling machine, but it drove well, and anyway I didn’t even have a full driving licence then. Too impatient even to get a licence. But Andy Woodman didn’t care about that. He would have sold his granny if he could. I never understood why him and Gareth got on so well because they were like chalk and cheese, but they were inseparable.

Wrighty and Brighty ruled the roost. No question. They were the top men. They both drove a Mercedes. Everyone else had a Vauxhall Calibra or something of that ilk. When Wrighty and Brighty were together, you had no chance. You couldn’t shout them down. You couldn’t outwit them. They would always come out with some funny line to put you down. Wrighty was the off-the-wall guy, a bit of genius in him. Brighty was the archetypal solid pro who would cycle into pre-season training every day. He was having pasta on the team coach when everybody else was still eating fish and chips and sucking back the beers.

Wrighty was a goal machine. He was instinctive. Brighty was a bit more calculating. I learned a lot from both of them. Wrighty was a one-off and Brighty knew he was never going to be Wrighty so he worked the percentages. I had a bit of both of them in me. I could be a cocky fucker like Wrighty even though I wasn’t an extrovert like him, and I could be a target man like Brighty. I didn’t like being in their shadow at the time but my time observing them improved my striker’s education.

Then there was Salako. He was Wrighty and Brighty’s gimp. He was their fucking slave. He would put the crosses in, they would score and then they would reward him. Wrighty would say: ‘Salako, listen to me, right, if you put three good crosses in for me, I’ll buy you a nice pair of shoes.’ And Brighty would say he’d buy him a jacket. They’d compete with each other over who could feed the gimp the most treats.

Salako knew he was talented. He was stuck in the team fairly early and he was on fire. He was getting in the England squad but Wrighty and Brighty treated him like they had him at the end of their leash. ‘Salako,’ Wrighty would say, ‘you put those crosses on my head this afternoon, otherwise I am going to fucking kill you.’ On Monday, one of them would come in with a pair of Oliver Sweeney shoes or an Oswald Boateng shirt for him. That was his reward.

I roomed with Salako a few times. He was a nice-enough lad. He was a born-again Christian. I would go and have a walk around the hotel, and when I came back, almost invariably, he’d be lying on his bed, banging one out. Having a wank with Penthouse in front of him. I’d say, ‘I thought you were supposed to be fucking born again.’ And he’d be all sheepish and say, ‘I am, but we all succumb to our desires now and again.’

Fashion seemed to be everything with the black lads at Palace. A former player called Tony Finnigan used to come in every Tuesday with loads of John Smedley shirts for the boys to buy. It started to feel like you were in a chapter of American Psycho down there sometimes, everyone analysing what everyone else was wearing. It was label and logo heaven.

I always felt Wrighty thought I was a bit of a threat. I don’t know why, really, because I was never given anything like a run in the first team. But unless you agreed with him 100 per cent, he could be quite brusque with you. He was usually all right with me but he was scoring shed-loads of goals and it was obvious he was going to move on to bigger and better things. Both Wrighty and Brighty knew they were kings of the castle and Steve Coppell indulged them in that thinking. They were his babies.

We played in a pre-season tournament one year in Gijon, against Sporting Gijon and some Bulgarian team. We were at the Gijon training ground and there was me, Wrighty and Brighty doing some shooting practice. There was some minor disagreement and words were said between me and Wrighty. I told him to fuck off and he said, ‘You know what, I don’t even think you’ve got what it takes to fucking do it. I don’t think you’re even going to fucking make it.’ There was real disdain and scorn in his voice. That stayed with me. It gave me special pleasure when I was with Liverpool and we beat Arsenal, when Wrighty was in the side. We beat them at Highbury and at Anfield. Of course, when I saw him socially he was always dripping with sentimentality. ‘I’ve got so much love for you, baby,’ he says. All that kind of false shit. I always knew with him. I always remembered what he said that day in Gijon. When I was nothing, he tried to push me further down. When I was someone, he wanted to be my friend.

So when I scored a decisive goal for Liverpool at Highbury in my second season on Merseyside, it was nice to look over at him and know that I had made it in my own right, despite what he had said. I’ve got no problem with him, really. I never really wanted to prove him wrong because I’d always rather prove myself right. Maybe it was just the way he said he didn’t think I’d make it. The spite of it. I don’t know, but it stuck with me long enough to make a bit of a difference. It’s people in the football industry who can wind you up the most, not the press.

Wrighty had gone to Arsenal at the start of my second season at Palace. I already knew I wasn’t going to get bumped up to the first team in his place. Coppell signed Marco Gabbiadini from Sunderland in October 1991 for £1.8 million. He was on big money and I remember being in the canteen with him and listening to him reading out his Mastercard statement and telling everyone how much he’d just spent at Harvey Nichols. That went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine.

Gabbiadini didn’t do well at Palace. In fact, he had a fucking disaster. The crowd didn’t like him. He wasn’t Ian Wright. Wasn’t like Ian Wright in any way. They played him and played him and played him. And it affected Brighty badly as well. I thought I must get a chance. But then Coppell bought Chris Armstrong from Wrexham. And he did well. And when he was injured, the gaffer stuck Chris Coleman in rather than me, even though Cookie was a centre half. He tried Jamie Moralee but he never gave me a run of games. I had 20 appearances for Palace and only four of them were starts. The rest, I was coming off the bench.

I broke into the first team in January 1991 against QPR at Selhurst Park. I was playing as a winger because that’s how Alan Smith, the reserve-team manager, who went on to be the first-team boss later, saw me producing my best football. My first goal was against QPR in the league at the beginning of the next season. I ended my first season by playing 30 minutes at Anfield in the same match that Gareth Southgate made his league debut.

Gareth had been there since he was an apprentice but we were both the same age, both trying to make our way in the game. I know he comes across as a sweet-tempered, affable, wonderful middle-class guy but I never really felt comfortable with him. He was very adept at saying one thing to one person and another to somebody else. Alan Smith sucked up to him, and he had a good ally in Andy Woodman who was a chirpy chappie that everyone liked.

Gareth and I were just like oil and water. I never felt he was sincere. He can sit in front of a camera and he comes across as a nice bloke. That is not the impression I had of him. I played with him for two seasons at Palace and two at Villa. That is just the vibe I got from him. Smile in your face and then once you have left the room he would be saying ‘what a fucking prick’ behind your back. I knew he worked his bollocks off with the limited ability he had and he saw me coasting through training sessions and he resented it.

There was definitely something festering there about me in his mind. When he was playing for Villa and I was in the Liverpool side, we met in the 1996 FA Cup semi-final. He tried to do me and I tried to do him. All through the game. I told him I was going to break his fucking jaw. I swept the ball past him at one point and he just went for me with one of those tackles that made it obvious he had no intention of getting the ball. He was just going for me. And I was glad. I was glad all that seething enmity we felt for each other was out in the open at last. I just wanted to get it on. It was the best place to do it.

Even though Gareth and I never got our dislike for each other out into the open at Palace, I did have a few proper rucks with people while I was there. It wasn’t the sort of club where people hid their light under a bushel. It was in your face. It was put up or shut up. Most of the players and the coaches there didn’t take any shit from anybody. Most of them had worked bloody hard to get to this level from the lower leagues and they weren’t about to let anyone push them aside without a fight.

Someone like Geoff Thomas, though, was an accident waiting to happen. The better he did, the cockier he got, and when I was at Palace he was being picked for the England squad. So he was at the high end of his cockiness. I helped by serving myself up on a plate. The club went on an end-of-season trip to Gibraltar. I was just a kid and I’d bought an England shell suit to take on the trip. I got on the plane wearing it.

As soon as they saw me, Geoff and Wrighty started laughing at me. They were pretending to wince at the sight of the shell suit. Geoff said: ‘Fucking hell, we’ve got a real one of those.’ I felt really embarrassed. I was just proud to be English but in their mind you only wore an England tracksuit if you played for England. That stayed with me, too. One day at training, Geoff was moaning about something so I got up and chinned him. Same with Brighty. There were always loads of rumours about his sexuality, so one day we had an argument about something on the training pitch and I called him a faggot. He came over and clocked me.

And then there was Wally Downes, nicknamed ‘Wals’, one of the founder members of the Crazy Gang at Wimbledon, who had been brought in as the reserve-team coach under Alan Smith. If he could pick on you, he would. He got to me after a game at Swindon. I’d played a back pass from the halfway line right into the path of their centre forward who had taken it round our goalkeeper and scored. Wals had a bit of a go at me in the dressing room afterwards. I thought he went over the top so I got up and smacked him.

There was never any question about disciplinary action being taken about any of these incidents. The culture was different then. Physical retribution was seen as part of normal interaction. After I chinned Wals he said he was actually glad that I had reared up and smacked him. He had been worried I was too quiet. Because my middle name was Victor, for some reason he would call me Verne. He’d always be saying ‘all right Verne’ in this really mocking manner. But he knew a player. The ones that weren’t talented, he didn’t give a fuck about.

Alan Smith was all right, I suppose. He was always very dapper. Immaculately dressed. All-year-round tan. He would come in at half-time of a reserve-team game and say, ‘You lot are a fucking disgrace. See my fucking Rolex. See my fucking Jag outside. See my fucking Savile Row suit. Do you think my Jag drove itself into the car park here on its own? No, I had to fucking work for it.’ He had his favourites, mainly Gareth and Jamie Moralee.

But the best coach at Palace and probably the best coach I ever worked with in terms of technical input and knowledge was Steve Harrison. He was beginning his rehabilitation. He had been sacked by the FA when he was a coach under Graham Taylor for sitting on a banister and shitting into a cup ten feet below. It was his party piece, but on one particular occasion it had been witnessed by the wife of an FA committee member. She was not quite as impressed with the trick as most footballers appeared to be, and that was the end of Harry’s England experience.

He was a funny guy. His dad had been a comedian, a vaudeville act in Blackpool, and Harry was never short of a routine or two. At Mitcham there was always a lot of surface water on the pitches, and for no reason and fully clothed he would just run and throw himself headlong into these puddles. Another time, we were on our way to a reserve-team game at Crawley Town. He pulled up at some traffic lights. The lights were on red and he just got out and walked off. He came back about ten minutes later, got back in and drove off as if nothing had happened.

I linked up with him again at Villa but the relationship didn’t feel quite the same there. Nothing to do with Harry, really, just that he was part of the John Gregory regime that soon became anathema to me and which seemed hell-bent on destroying me. But I didn’t blame Harry for that. The last time I saw him, I walked into my mate’s porno shop in Birmingham and he was standing there lost in the pages of Escort. He seemed a bit startled when he saw me. ‘All right big fella,’ he stammered. And then he scarpered.

I look back on those days at Palace now and I think they were happy days. So many new things coming at me, so many possibilities opening up for me. There was Lotta, the first woman I was in love with. I was living away from home for the first time. I was playing in England’s top league. I was scoring goals in my own right in the reserves. I was playing at the shrines of English football, places like Anfield. I was sampling London nightlife for the first time.

Some of it scared me a bit because I felt I didn’t come off well against certain personalities. Some of my fears and self-doubts were exacerbated by some of the people there. They were strong characters. They could play with you and try to mess with your mind. These were guys who had cut their teeth in the lower leagues. No cunt was going to knock them off their perch, certainly not a naïve, raw Brummy. When I left in February 1992, sold to Southend for £80,000, I felt a little bitter because I thought I should have been given more of an opportunity at Palace. But my time there was two good years of learning behind some of the best in the business and some of the most hard-nosed players in the business.

I learned my lessons well. Off the pitch, too. I bought a Golf GTI off Jamie Moralee in my second season and Andy Gray’s brother, Ollie, financed it for me. He said he would lend me the money. I was supposed to pay it back over two months. He kept saying he was doing me a favour and I should never forget it. I was a bit late paying him back and then I wrote the car off. Ollie used to ring up Lotta’s house every day. It all got a bit sinister then. ‘Stan, I can’t lose, brother,’ he would say in his Cockney accent. ‘I can’t lose. Listen to me, hear me out. Unless I get my money, you’re going to get it, bruv.’ You come across people that are harsh fuckers.

Curiously, though, the one thing Palace didn’t prepare me for was being the target of racist abuse. I say ‘curiously’ because there were so many racial undertones there and the racial split seemed so obvious and so defined. But the days of Micky Droy had long gone, and despite the banter between, say, Wrighty and Nigel Martyn, despite the fact that the black guys hung out with each other and the white guys hung out with each other and there was little social mixing, there was still respect between the two groups. Racial abuse was never an issue. It was never a possibility. It just wouldn’t have happened. Anybody who indulged in it would not have had a prayer at that club. It would have made things unworkable. The only time I was ever confronted with rampant racism in my playing career was long after I had left Palace. It caught up with me when I was playing for Villa, and the culprit, funnily enough, came from among my former team-mates at Anfield.

When the Liverpool game came around on the last day of February 1998, I was in the middle of a goal drought at Villa. I hadn’t scored for seven games. It was also John Gregory’s first match in charge after Brian Little had been sacked. Because of that, and because it was Liverpool, I was wound up for the match. I played well. In fact, the Liverpool central defenders, Jamie Carragher and Steve Harkness, couldn’t get near me. And then, early in the second half, it started. It was the kind of abuse I had never suffered before and would never suffer again.

Harkness was the culprit. The ball was up at the other end and he stood right next to me. ‘You fucking coon,’ he said. ‘Fucking nigger.’ I was taken aback more than anything to begin with. Then he stepped it up a bit. ‘At least my mum never slept with a fucking coon,’ he said. Nice bloke, Steve Harkness. Fucking neanderthal from Carlisle with a very, very small brain. Then, it was all the time: ‘coon’ this, ‘nigger’ that.

When we were at Liverpool I had organised a collection for Children in Need one year. A lot of the players were very generous. Some of them put a grand in. I wanted us to make a really big donation. Harkness sneered. ‘I ain’t giving anything,’ he said. ‘Charity begins at home.’ I never got on with the cunt. I always thought he was the most mealy-mouthed bloke you could meet. He was a nasty, horrible, mean, racist little prick.

He managed to keep it up right until the final whistle. I’d scored two goals but I was shaken and incensed by what he had been saying. I told the referee during the game but he did nothing. I wasn’t hurt by what he said because he was just a moron, but I felt degraded.

When the game was over, I was ready to kill him. I ran straight down the tunnel and waited by the Liverpool dressing-room door. Two of their coaches, Sammy Lee and Joe Corrigan, were first in and I told Sammy he needed to have a word with Harkness, that that kind of behaviour and language just weren’t acceptable. ‘Why don’t you fucking say something to him,’ Sammy said. So I thought I would.

As soon as Harkness came down the tunnel, I went for him. I threw a punch at him and then it all kicked off. It was a screaming, yelling, flailing melee. Everyone seemed to be involved. Stewards, players, coaches. Eventually they got me out of there and bundled me into the Villa dressing room and I was still shaking with the anger of it all. I was so enraged I had to go and sit down away from everyone else by the baths in a corner of the dressing room. John Gregory came over and told me to concentrate on the fact I’d scored two goals. I just told him I wanted to make an official complaint.

I made sure no one forgot about it and that the issue was not allowed to fade away. I reiterated in the press what Harkness had said and he responded by denying everything and threatening to sue me unless I stopped calling him a racist. What a joke that was. He trotted out the usual shit that racists always come out with about how a black man was one of his best friends. In the case of Harkness, it was Paul Ince apparently. The two of them used to share lifts in from Southport together. Something like that.

I wonder when people will start to realise that just because you might smile at a black man occasionally, even shake his hand, that doesn’t guarantee you immunity from being a racist. We never seem to learn. Okay, so somebody claims a black guy is his friend. Or somebody says he can’t be a racist because he let black players play in his football team. Does that mean that if the same man goes back home, puts on a white hood with holes cut out for the eyes and mouth and starts burning crosses and singing racist songs, he is still not a racist?

That is the kind of logic that people like Steve Harkness and Ron Atkinson seem to apply to their actions. They haven’t even got the guts to admit what they are. They try to hide it away. They try to conceal it. They try to keep it indoors among friends, among like-minded people. That is what makes them dangerous. And, usually, society lets them get away with it; lets their sickness fade away and then beckons them back into the warmth.

Well, I didn’t want to let it fade away. So the PFA got involved and Harkness and I were summoned to Manchester for a meeting. Harkness turned up with his lawyer. He insisted he couldn’t remember what he had said to me on the pitch but he denied again he was a racist. Gordon Taylor, the PFA Chief Executive, tried to get us to sign a joint apology to the fans for bringing it all out into the open. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I mean, the PFA brings out all these glossy brochures about kicking racism out of football, and when they’ve got a real live incident out there begging to be dealt with, they bottle it. They wanted me to apologise for being called a coon and a nigger. They wanted me to apologise because Harkness had taunted me about my mother sleeping with a black man. I couldn’t believe it. It had all been swept under the carpet. A cosy little cover-up to keep all the boys and girls happy about the Premiership. It left me feeling disgusted and disillusioned with football’s ability to police itself on race.

The next time we played Liverpool, I knew what I was going to do. The first time Harkness got the ball I was on him in a flash. I took him out. He was carried off. I found it fairly gratifying at the time, especially as I only got a booking for it. With hindsight and some time to heal the wounds, I regret it. Whatever he had done to me, there is no excuse for trying to injure a fellow professional.

So I’m glad he didn’t break anything. I got my comeuppance later in the game anyway. I had a tussle with Michael Owen, grabbed him by the throat and got sent off. I did my Harry Enfield ‘calm down, calm down’ impression to the Liverpool fans as I was walking back to the tunnel but at least I felt I had achieved some form of retribution for what Harkness had done to me.

And that was it. The only time I’ve been overtly racially abused as a player. What else lies beneath at football grounds and in football minds, I don’t really care to imagine. Once, playing for Villa at Tottenham after I had been admitted to the Priory, the Spurs fans had a field day with me. ‘You’re mad and you know you are,’ they were singing. Well, substitute the word ‘mad’ for ‘coon’ and that probably gives you a more accurate idea of what they were really thinking. Gazza never got any of that after his problems, did he? Nor Paul Merson. Nobody ever called them mad. Tortured, maybe. Or recovering. But, I’m sorry, when it’s a black man, it’s different. Frank Bruno has some problems and suddenly the front page of The Sun is ‘Bonkers Bruno Locked Up’. Even they realised they’d gone a bit far with that one. They had to pull it after the first edition. A few days later, they set up a charity for the mentally ill. You couldn’t make it up. The hypocrisy of it is unbelievable.

Funny that they didn’t decide Big Ron was mad for calling one of the best black footballers there has ever been a ‘thick, lazy nigger’. Funny how they set their standards and choose their targets for White Van Man. Papers like the Sun think they know what White Van Man wants so they give it to him. If they’re right and White Van Man wants thinly veiled racism, that tells us what we already knew: that promoting racial tolerance is still in its infancy in this country.

We’ll have to wait and see what happens with Big Ron. Perhaps forgiveness will find him quickly. Perhaps the public will want to forget what he said. Perhaps his influential friends in the game will smooth his path back to the limelight and public acceptance. My guess is he’ll be back broadcasting before we know it. He’ll be back before me, I guarantee it. What does that tell you about English football and society? It tells you it’s better to be a racist than a dogger.