Accidental Ironman (4 page)

My dad was a man of many talents, mostly associated with fine wine, jazz, elegant suits and being extremely popular. There was one sport he was committed to though, and that was golf. American comedian Robin Williams once described golf as the only time a white man can dress like a black pimp and get away with it, and my dad took this to extremes, cutting a singular figure at Coventry’s Hearsall Golf Club in his red plus-fours, argyle socks, diamond-patterned Pringle sweater and large American baseball cap. Like most club golfers he was mildly obsessed with the game and all the cupboards in our house seemed to be full of individually wrapped Slazenger golf balls. I wish I’d kept a few now because they’re dead handy for rolling around under your foot if you’ve got plantar fascitis.

In truth, he wasn’t a bad player and reached a handicap of about 10. Once he even won a club trophy, in which Mum used to keep her sewing kit, much to his annoyance. Inevitably I was also drawn into this world and was given my first set of clubs at the age of about six, and given ‘lessons’ by my dad. Dad was not the most patient of souls, and ‘lessons’ would mostly involve watching me hack away at the ball like a lumberjack attacking a tree whereupon he would bellow ‘NOOOO! Like this!!!’, grab the club off me and then proceed to shank the ball into some trees before claiming I had ‘put him off.’

In recalling this, I’ve just remembered the one and only time Dad tried to teach me to play cricket when I was about eight. God knows why he did this because he couldn’t play the game for toffee but he decided that he would bowl and I would bat, whereupon he launched a ball at me that Jimmy Anderson would be proud of and which cracked me so hard on the shin that it made me dry heave. Unfortunately for him, my mum had just wandered into the garden and witnessed the spectacle of her son being poleaxed, whereupon she raced across the lawn with a roar, tore one of the stumps out of the ground and flung it at my dad like a Zulu warrior, spearing him in the knee. He collapsed howling in agony and was locked out of the house while I was carried inside for ice cream and sympathy.

Actually, I wasn’t bad at golf and managed to battle my way to a single-figure handicap, although I was never a natural and didn’t enjoy it enough to do any practising. I was capable of the odd good round and was particularly good at driving off the tee and belting the ball for miles down the fairway. The trouble was I used to putt the same way. I ended up playing most weeks with Dad from the age of about eight all the way through to my mid-thirties when he became too ill to stay out on the course for long. I still miss those rounds with him, crushed as I was by the embarrassment of walking down a fairway next to a man in multicoloured knickerbockers and a flat cap with a bobble on it. I never won anything, and in fact the only real highlight I remember was once playing with a pro called Tim Rouse and some other friends at a course called Hollinwell in Nottinghamshire. Hollinwell was very nice and very posh, with a final hole that finished right in front of a large clubhouse with a huge conservatory and patio. I had had an atrocious round, spraying balls all over the shop and playing what was generally known as ‘Military Golf’ (left, right, left, right). Having done nothing of any note for the whole game, on the final hole I produced a shot of dazzling brilliance that pitched in the centre of the green with backspin and rolled up to about two inches from the pin. As we walked on to the green the patio was thronged with people having their evening gin and tonics, and I received a round of applause from the crowd, politely acknowledging it with a modest wave when I walked over to my ball. This led Tim to turn to me and say: ‘you wanker.’

University is often the place where people discover or build on their sporting passions, but I continued my indifference all the way through my studies. I spent three years at Liverpool University between 1986 and 1989, having scraped there courtesy of an A-level in General Studies, which is the equivalent of being given a certificate after a pub quiz. I elected to prolong my education and be surrounded by girls and subsidised entertainment, rather than go straight to work in an office, factory or meat storage facility. During this period the only time I remember ever getting sweaty was while trying to unhook a girl’s bra, so it seems inexplicable that on returning to Coventry (Christ knows why) after my degree I decided to have another go at … football. Quite how I thought this would end I have no idea, and if I was hoping that the twelve-year gap between leaving junior school and starting work had suddenly imbued me with some kind of footballing ability, then I was in for a rude awakening.

What happened was that I was approached by a bloke in a pub I used to drink in called the Windmill and asked if I wanted to turn out for the pub side. His name was Steve Brassington and he was trying to put a team together, having decamped there from another nearby pub called the Sportsman’s Arms (pound a pint and a stripper on a Sunday). Having been given £100 by the landlord to buy some new kit with the pub’s name on it, we promptly pissed this windfall up the wall on a night out and then turned out for our first game of the season in the old Sportsman’s kit with the name taped over. At our first training session, Brasso quickly realised the awful mistake he’d made in asking me to join the team, and I was moved from striker, to midfield general, to centre half, to right back, to substitute in the space of about five minutes flat. Pace, flair, skill and vision were just some of the traits completely absent from the team, but even in this company I stood out as a fat, lumbering oaf of no discernible use unless there was a chronic shortage of people with a pulse to turn out. Despite all this I quite enjoyed being part of the team while it lasted, chiefly because of some of the characters it featured, including:

Tom Sefton – an alcoholic goalkeeper who used to turn up Sunday mornings shaking with the DTs and who’d say things like ‘Don’t let ’em get any crosses in lads, I’ve got a bastard of a headache.’

Will Johnson – a ponderous striker known as ‘Shovel Foot’ for being the scourge of side-netting, or ‘Jigsaw’ because he frequently went to pieces in the box.

Simon Dale – known as ‘Black Bess’ because he galloped fruitlessly up and down the wing in search of the ball, or ‘Gunshot’ because of his habit of shooting at goal whenever he got the ball, no matter where he was on the pitch.

Chris Morris – Moggy was actually a good player and a lovely guy unless riled, at which point he’d turn into a combination of Vinnie Jones and Reinhard Heydrich until he’d upended someone, whereupon he’d return to being Penry the mild-mannered janitor.

Steve Ward – Wardrobe was a somewhat static defender, also known as ‘Douglas Bader’ for being good in the air but crap on the ground.

Greg Evans – a classy midfielder who later ended up in the clink for donning a raincoat, cap and glasses and collecting his dad’s pension for two years after he died.

We played in the heady heights of the Bedworth and North Coventry Sunday Alliance Division One and in 1992 actually managed to go through a whole season unbeaten. I made a number of substitute appearances (the number in question being four) totalling about 25 minutes of actual play in which I managed to touch the ball a couple of times but, more importantly, I managed not to cock anything up either, which was my main goal. Sadly, after securing promotion to the Premier Division, the team fizzled out and was reincarnated as a five-a-side outfit, a game even more fast-paced and bad-tempered than ordinary football, in which my need to still keep looking at my feet to control them was horribly exposed on the one occasion I tried it.

And that’s about it by way of sporting background and context-setting, so if you’ve picked up this book in search of the inspirational story of someone who overcame the odds to succeed, then you’re in for a disappointing read (and you may be in for one even if you aren’t looking for that). I have neither overcome odds, nor particularly succeeded. I have not challenged a disability, beaten the bullies, battled through setbacks, defeated schizophrenia by defying the voices in my head (either of them), or picked up the pieces of my shattered dreams and rebuilt them into a towering monolith of success. People do not throw rose petals at me as I walk down the street nor do I drink champagne from a golden slipper, which is probably just as well as I don’t want to die of greenfly or damp feet. I was just a nice, inoffensive kid who happened to be shit at sports. Except one …

It is 4.45 a.m. and the bedside alarm has just gone off, producing much the same effect as if I had been blasted in the coccyx with a taser. I spend the next five minutes lying in bed in a state of advanced death until the alarm goes off again, prompting me to sit up slowly, like a zombie rising from the grave, only even more furious and incoherent.

What follows looks like a mime artist attempting to portray the world’s most incompetent burglar as I stumble around the bedroom in the dark trying to put on socks, pants and shirt, all while also trying to stay completely silent for fear of waking my wife, Nicky. She will not be pleased if she is disturbed and can be reeeally grumpy if she doesn’t get enough sleep. I once did a radio interview in which the DJ asked how I managed to get up so early in the morning to go training, to which I joked, ‘If you’d seen my wife first thing in the morning you’d want to get out of bed as well,’ which got a laugh but boy did I get in trouble for that one.

I sneak downstairs like a dog up to no good and slink past my dog, Patch, who really has been up to no good and who is now watching me beadily through one open eye as I try to make myself a drink and a bowl of cereal. Normally I am pretty bad at staying silent in the kitchen and this morning is no exception, although not as bad as a few nights ago when I returned home ‘refreshed’ from the pub and set about making myself an amazingly large fry-up at 2.00 a.m. using every single pan in the kitchen. Then I pad quietly outside to my campervan, trying not to wake the neighbours, and start the engine. Actually, bollocks to the neighbours … they never care whether I’m asleep or not, so I rev the engine and screech off up the road, as impressively as one can in a Mazda Bongo.

The reason for all this creeping around is that I am off swimming with my local swimming club – or Masters Swimming Club to be precise as the adults team is known, to differentiate us from the juniors and seniors. They have separate training times away from the grown-ups lest they should have to share a changing room with us and end up running screaming from the pool at the sight of several saggy scrotums resembling the last turkeys in the butcher’s shop window.

The swims take place in Coventry’s main sports centre, or ‘Coventry Baths’ as it is better known, which happens to be one of the few 50-metre pools in Britain despite the Council’s persistent attempts to turn it into some kind of tiresome splash pool. There are seven swimming sessions on offer to members of the City of Coventry Swimming Club each week, two of which take place from 5.30– 7.00 a.m., which is why I’m up with the lark and wrestling the turkey into my budgie-smugglers. The reason for starting so early is because the pool is not open to the great unwashed public until 7.00 a.m., so this way we get to have some quality training time without having to dodge round some old gimmer who blocks the lane by hanging in the water like a bloody jellyfish. The session is presided over by Allison Stoney, former international swimmer, multiple medal winner and highly respected ASA coach, who possesses the most important qualification any swim coach can have – that of having a voice like an estuary foghorn that can be heard even when your head is under water. This morning’s session involved a warm-up of 8 x 150m freestyle (yes, that’s a
warm-up
of 1200m!), followed by a prep set of 1,000m worth of drills, before the main set of 2,000m worth of 100m and 50m sprints punctuated by recovery swims of backstroke and fly. By the time we are done I feel as though someone has spent the past ninety minutes hitting my upper arms with a frying pan, and I have clenched my jaw so hard to achieve Allison’s target times that the enamel may have dropped off my teeth. Allison is a hardened swim coach of the old school who operates a competitive Masters team, but she doesn’t mind a few triathletes joining in with the sessions provided we also turn out for the club in relay teams in big national galas. Sharing the lane with me this morning is fellow triathlete Keith Burdett, a silver-haired freestyle powerhouse who looks like a bleached Wookie. This session is not unusually hard by Allison’s standards. No matter what she throws at us we keep turning up like we’ve all got Stockholm Syndrome.

I mentioned that I was shit at all sports except one, and that one is swimming. I was actually a reasonably good swimmer as a kid and swam for City of Coventry as a junior and teenager until girls, going out, girls, drinking and girls began to occupy my time. As ever with me, it wasn’t a straightforward story; as a toddler I apparently hated the water, screaming the pool down as my dad towed me round in a rubber ring making chugging noises – although this may of course have been because he was wearing some multicoloured knickerbocker trunks. At the age of seven, though, I broke my leg after dicking about on a hillside with some other kids and once I’d left hospital after eight weeks in traction, the doctors told my parents that swimming was the best way to get me up to strength, so I was packed off to Livingstone Road Baths to kick my way up and down the pool. This time I took to swimming like a duck to hoisin sauce and soon I was in the team in galas, enduring that horrible moment of total silence you get just before a race starts while you’re standing on the blocks bricking yourself.

Now forgive me if I digress for a moment but this is MY book. Okay, you’ve paid for it so technically it’s yours, but this is my only chance to get something off my chest that has been on there for almost 40 years. My leg-breaking incident took place at my junior school during playtime and was caused by me falling awkwardly after being pushed down a hill. The fall not only broke my leg but also knocked me unconscious and when I came to I was being dragged – yes,
dragged
– by the shoulders by two older kids into the assembly hall under the supervision of one of the teachers. Once in there I was laid flat on my back on one of those long wooden benches whereupon the teacher, now accompanied by another teacher and presumably fellow member of the Hitler Youth, tried to
straighten my leg out
. Needless to say I screamed the place down, leading them to declare my leg was broken. I was then carried to the entrance hall, sat in a chair with my bent leg propped on a table, while they phoned not an ambulance, but my mum to come and pick me up. Mum was left to carry me to her car alone, lie me on the back seat and drive me to Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital where a passing stranger helped her carry me into A&E where I spent the next eight weeks. I don’t remember seeing either of these teachers again after this, presumably because my dad went up to the school and killed them with one of his golf clubs.