Pitch Black (7 page)

In the media’s reporting of the disturbances, little emphasis was placed on the fact that thousands of white youths were involved in the summer’s unrest. Racism as an underlying reason for the disaffection of black communities was given
rather short shrift. Where racism was reported, it was confined to the activities of the lunatic fringe. Thus, perpetrators of racism in football could expect a more than fair hearing.

For England right-back Viv Anderson, the decade had begun well. He was to finish the 1979/80 season with that historic England appearance and added a second European Cup medal to the one he’d picked up the previous season. Wolves had prevented Anderson from picking up a second medal in a year by defeating Forest in that season’s League Cup final. At the heart of the Wolves defence was George Berry. Berry had been born on a military base in Germany, where his Jamaican father was stationed. His family had moved briefly to south Wales, where his mother was from, before settling in Blackpool. Berry had been a keen sportsman. He was a very good tennis player and had been invited to a tennis academy run by the All-England Lawn Tennis Association to receive specialist coaching. Berry’s father was keen on sports, although he wasn’t a football fan and, like many from the Caribbean, loved cricket. Berry’s secondary modern school didn’t have the space or grounds to support the game, located as it was in a tight, densely populated area of Blackpool. Cricket was for the grammar schools in the area, so Berry, like many boys, became a member of the generation that broke the dominance of cricket as the premier sport of communities of West Indian heritage in the UK. Although school wasn’t of any real interest to Berry, his father, like many West Indians and indeed all migrant communities, valued education highly and wanted his son to get his qualifications. He insisted young George could only play football in return for working hard at school and had, on one occasion, hidden Berry’s football boots as punishment for a lack of academic application. George signed for Wolves the day
after completing his O levels and moved to Wolverhampton, where he started his football career as an apprentice. Berry’s duties as an apprentice were to clean out the first-team dressing room and what he learned while undertaking his duties shocked him. Wolves had been a traditional powerhouse of English football and were one of the leading English teams of the 1950s and early ’60s. They had won the League Cup in 1974 and the majority of that side formed the basis of the first team.

At many clubs at the time, apprentices did a variety of menial tasks such as cleaning the boots of first teamers, sweeping the terraces and cleaning the changing rooms. It was a good grounding and far removed from today’s academy set-up, where young footballers have everything done for them and are rewarded well financially. Dressing room culture at the time dictated that apprentices were often treated with disdain by seasoned professionals. Berry was expected to carry out his cleaning duties in relative silence and certainly would not be expected to speak to a member of the first team unless he had been spoken to. As such, Berry carried out his cleaning duties in apparent invisibility to first teamers, while a young black forward named Noel Gardner, who was on the fringes of the first team, was bullied mercilessly and suffered racist abuse by established first-team stars. Gardner took the abuse, but the young Berry vowed he wasn’t going to stand for the same kind of treatment.

George Berry was a physically imposing figure. He had grown up in an almost exclusively white, tough area of Blackpool where, as one of the few black kids around, he understood the importance of being able to fight. His father had encouraged him into boxing, where he excelled enough to represent Lancashire at schoolboy level. It was safe to
say that George knew how to look after himself. His first love, however, was football, and the choice as to whether to pursue football or boxing was made for him by a brawny but technically limited Scouse kid who had caught Berry cold at the opening bell of a bout and had landed a wild haymaker that dropped him for a count. The intervention of the big Liverpudlian had provided Berry with some excellent career advice and from that point on he decided to hang up his boxing gloves and concentrate fully on football.

Of all the stereotypes ascribed to black players, Berry shattered many of them. He had strength but he also had ‘bottle’, that somewhat slippery terminology that indicated a combination of bravery, courage, strength in adversity and stubbornness that common stereotypes dictated was a quality lacking in black players. In fact, he was a very typical British centre-half: strong in the tackle, good in the air, imposing, but limited with the ball at his feet. His wholehearted displays saw him progress into the Wolves’ first team, where it wouldn’t be long before he got a chance to banish the legacy of Noel Gardner’s treatment once and for all. Hours before a vital league match, Berry and his teammates were sitting around a table having their pre-game meal. From the opposite end of the table, one of the senior pros shouted to Berry, ‘Hey, pass me the nigger lips’, nigger lips being rhyming slang for chips. A few sniggers came from around the table and the room fell silent as everyone turned to Berry to see how he would react. Berry knew it was an important moment. How he responded would dictate the fate not only of himself, but of future black players coming into that environment. Not shirking the responsibility of changing the culture in the dressing room, Berry told the player in no uncertain terms that if he repeated the racist slurs, he would
kill him. Despite being severely admonished by the coaching staff for his reaction, while the racist was left alone, the young Berry had taken a brave step and had let the whole dressing room know that he wasn’t going the way of Noel Gardner, whose confidence had been shattered and who had drifted out of the game.

A year or so after breaking into the first team, Berry was joined by Bob Hazell. Although he had paved the way for black players to gain a smoother entry into the Wolves dressing room, Berry said of Hazell, ‘Bob didn’t need looking after. He was militant and he was a big lad. He was a bad boy from Handsworth.’ The two instantly formed an imposing centre-back partnership and a lifelong friendship. Indeed, Berry went on to marry Hazell’s cousin. The two ensured that the culture within the dressing room remained free of abuse and they provided mutual support in the face of terrace taunts and the casual racism of opponents.

On one occasion, Berry had confronted a racist fan. Late in a home cup game against Watford, Berry horribly sliced a clearance, which fell invitingly for Luther Blissett, who promptly dispatched the ball into the top corner to put Watford 3–0 up and confirm Wolves’ exit from the competition. The final whistle sounded immediately after the ball went in and a hugely despondent Berry trudged off the pitch to be met with a Wolves supporter giving him abuse: ‘Coon, fucking black bastard, fucking nigger … piss off back to Africa.’ As he made his way down the tunnel towards the dressing room, Berry had a change of heart, turned back towards the pitch, jumped into the crowd and punched his abuser. Berry was eventually pulled away, but all hell had broken loose. Both he and his abuser were arrested. The racist threatened to press charges for assault and the next day both Berry and
the racist fan were summoned to see the Chief Inspector, who agreed that if both men apologised and shook hands, the matter would be dropped. Through gritted teeth, Berry agreed, and by some kind of ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, the incident was cut out of TV footage and wasn’t reported in local papers. Berry had had a lucky escape. Through the rare intervention of a reasonably sympathetic police chief, not only had he escaped the possibility of criminal proceedings being brought to him, but he would surely also have faced a lengthy ban, at a minimum, if the incident had reached the attention of the national media and the FA.

By the turn of the decade, Berry’s partnership had been broken up as Hazell was sold to QPR and, in the same summer, Laurie Cunningham became the first Englishman to play for Real Madrid when he was sold to the European giants for a shade under £1 million, so bringing to an end the exploits of the legendary trio.

If 1981 was the summer of unrest within many black communities, it proved to be a summer of firsts for black footballers. Dave Bennett of Manchester City and Garth Crooks of Spurs became the first black British footballers to appear in an FA Cup final, with Crooks gaining the honour of becoming not only the first black FA Cup winner but also the first black player to score in an FA Cup final, as Spurs ran out 3–2 winners over City, after a replay. Following his move to Real Madrid, Laurie Cunningham appeared for his new side as they were beaten by Liverpool in the final of the European Cup in May 1981.

As for Cyrille Regis, his game had continued to blossom. The additional experience he’d acquired, along with the responsibility of leading the West Brom line, meant he was becoming one of the most feared strikers in English football.
The season proved to be a brilliant one, at least individually. He was rewarded with a full England cap in February 1982 and ended it with the Goal of the Season for a brilliant, thunderous, long-range strike in a cup game against Norwich.

At the end of the 1982 season, the FA Cup final pitted the holders, Garth Crooks’s Spurs, against Second Division QPR, whose defence included Bob Hazell. In the semi-final, Hazell had marked Cyrille Regis out of the game to help put his side in the final against hotly fancied Albion. At the end of Wembley Stadium, reserved for the Rangers support, an elaborately made giant banner depicting two black players, one in a QPR kit and one in a Spurs kit, was displayed with the caption ‘Bobby Locks Up Crooks’. Hazell did pretty well but couldn’t prevent Crooks adding another FA Cup winners’ medal to the one he’d received the previous year. Spurs won narrowly, again after a replay, their class in the end seeing them through. That summer of 1982 was also the year that English football would be shamefully linked to the apartheid regime.

One of the enduring images of the struggle against apartheid, and one that helped to bring international attention to the campaign against the regime, is of the limp body of a boy being carried through the streets of Soweto after being shot by South African police. His body is being carried by his friend and flanking him is his distraught sister, Antoinette Sithole. The boy was declared dead on arrival at hospital. He was thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson.

In June 1976, a number of school students from Soweto boycotted school in opposition to the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in schools. Afrikaans was the language of the white minority and the official language of the apartheid regime. The decision by the South African authorities could not be viewed in any light other than as
an instrument of oppression and on 16 June some 20,000 students marched in protest to the Orlando Pirates football stadium. Their way was blocked by the South African police, who opened fire and set their dogs on the children. Hector Pieterson was amongst the first to be shot, and by the end of the day twenty-three protesters were dead, almost all of them children. The following day the South African police, in a show of force, occupied Soweto and continued to kill protesters. With unimaginable bravery, the protests continued and, by the end of 1976, somewhere between the official figure of 176 and an estimated 700 people had been murdered by the security services, almost all of them children and young people.

These events, and the image of Pieterson’s lifeless body, caused international revulsion and, under pressure from African nations in particular, the Gleneagles Agreement was drawn up by Commonwealth heads of state in January 1977. The agreement, named after the Scottish town where the heads of state met, agreed to impose a ban on all sporting ties with teams and individuals from South Africa.

Over the next few years, there were concerted efforts to break the agreement, mainly in cricket and rugby, the sports that were most closely associated with white South Africa. In 1982, former PFA chairman Jimmy Hill accepted an invitation by South African Breweries, who had bankrolled previous cricket and rugby tours, to organise a six-match series. In order to provide the tour with a modicum of credibility and create the illusion that the purpose of the visit was to bring the races together, it was critical that the tour should include a black player in the squad. A number of players were approached, amongst them Cyrille Regis and George Berry, both of whom declined the invitation.

Nineteen-year-old Calvin Plummer, who had recently made his first-team debut for Nottingham Forest, had been called to his manager’s office and naturally wondered why he had been summoned. Speculating as to whether he was to be offered a new contract, he found out that Brian Clough had a proposition for him. Clough explained to Plummer that he’d been in contact with ‘James’, who was organising a three-week tour to South Africa. He was told that as Viv Anderson and Justin Fashanu had England careers that may have been placed in jeopardy if they participated in the tour, it was unwise for them to go, but that he could go and earn some good money. He suggested that Plummer think about the offer and let him know his decision the following day. Plummer spoke to his parents, who encouraged him to go, and at a later stage he sought advice from Anderson, who suggested it was a good opportunity. Knowing nothing about apartheid, Plummer informed Clough that he was willing to participate in the tour. Clough explained to Plummer that they wanted him to attend because he was a black European and was just starting out in his career. Clough further explained that the Forest coach, Jimmy Gordon, would also attend and that there may be some controversy, but assured Plummer that Gordon would look after him.

As the date of the tour approached, an agent provided Plummer with an itinerary. He was to meet at Heathrow to fly to Jan Smuts Airport, Johannesburg, and it was only when he arrived at Heathrow that he found out who else was to participate in the tour. Most participants were ageing stars who were at the end of their careers. Mick Channon, Dave Watson, Brian Greenhoff and Stuart Pearson were all former England internationals. Milija Aleksic and Gordon Smith were also players in the latter stages of their careers.
Jack Taylor, the former ref who had officiated at the 1974 World Cup final, was brought along for refereeing duties. Plummer realised that not only was he, by some way, considerably younger than other tour participants, but he was the only black player to tour. The other players were all established names and nobody knew who Plummer was, given that at that stage he wasn’t an established member of Forest’s first-team squad. However, the starry-eyed Plummer was particularly impressed with the identity of the two most exotic names on the tour, namely Ossie Ardiles and Mario Kempes, two of Argentina’s 1978 World Cup winning squad.