HE PITIED HIS TORMENTORS AND LET HIS TALENT DO THE TALKING

THE abuse which marked the occasion of Cyrille Regis’s England Under 21 debut in September 1978 was so extraordinary that you wonder how on earth it evaded investigation, even in those days of deeply endemic discrimination. Garth Crooks scored a hat-trick against Denmark and was promptly subjected to racist taunts from a pocket of England’s own fans. Regis was so resigned to this that the tone with which he addresses it in his autobiography barely reaches the realms of anger. ‘It amazed us,’ wrote Regis. ‘Why boo your own players?’ The black players who blazed a trail with Regis back then will tell you that he could brush off the bigots because he always saw the bigger picture. To nurse a sense of victimhood about the worst of it all — monkey chants when supporters even brought along bananas; the Tottenham Hotspur song about ‘Big Cyrille’ being ‘up a tree’ — was to let them win, he always thought. He even laughed off getting bullets through the post when he graduated to the full England side. A chant about licking boots was the only one that got to him. ‘It was loaded with overtones of colonialist supremacy, slavery and subservience,’ he said. Perhaps

it was his fundamental humanity which made this so, because there was certainly never a sense of entitlement about Regis. He cringed at some of the stunts of that time — like the photo-shoot in which he, Brendon Batson and Laurie Cunningham wore Santa outfits beneath a headline ‘Look Who’s Dreaming of a White Christmas’ — but knew there was no malicious intent behind it. He always urged forgiveness for his former manager Ron Atkinson over an off-air racist slur on Marcel Desailly in 2004. Atkinson had once picked a team of nine black players at Aston Villa, Regis pointed out, and had a relationship with Dalian Atkinson akin to father and son. Regis, for all the abuse he was dealt, knew the gravity that lay behind the act of calling someone else a racist. Those who knew him best attest to how he was tolerant, ready to give the benefit of the doubt where it was due. His autobiography is unflinchingly honest — full of his own misdemeanours from those West Brom days when they played hard and most certainly lived hard. It was striking, in the hours after Regis’s death, to see how many young black and minority ethnic players had been inspired by him to brave the same football pitches. He burst into English football at a time when the neo-Nazi National Front were enjoying significant success, yet simply let his football do the talking. To respond to the abuse would provoke the reaction: ‘They can’t handle it. They’ve got a chip on their shoulders,’ he once said. ‘I had my talent. I used that instead.’ Regis stood head and shoulders above all the bile. ‘To judge someone by the colour of their skin shows fear and insecurity about who you are,’ he said of those 1980s days when he was flying. ‘Thank God we knew who we were.’