Think footballers are all selfish and thick? Think again
Rich, pampered and thick. That’s the popular view of professional footballers — a slur that quite a few of them do little to counter.
Even when a really insightful football autobiography comes along, it’s usually all the work of a ghost-writer. i once interviewed a celebrated former Manchester United player when his book came out and, to his publicist’s horror, he confessed to me that not only had he not written a word of it, he hadn’t bothered to read a word, either.
Paul Ferris’s compelling memoir is different. For starters, he wrote it all himself, beautifully. Also, it extends well beyond football.
During the Troubles in Northern ireland, Ferris grew up in a devoutly catholic family in an overwhelmingly Protestant town — Lisburn, just outside Belfast.
he brilliantly evokes the daily fears and degradations caused by rabid sectarianism. his parents were beaten up, his father’s best friends were murdered, and their house was petrol-bombed.
The council offered them a new home on an estate in Republican West Belfast. But it was a breeding ground for the iRA. Ferris’s mother, Bernadette, declined. She was tiny — less than 5 ft — and riddled with heart disease, yet utterly indomitable. She would not allow her children to be radicalised.
Ferris first witnessed his mother having a heart attack when he was five. Shortly after that, he defied his fears to climb up to the top of the garden shed, so he could watch her through the kitchen window, in the touching belief that if he could see her, he could keep her safe.
Anxiety about his mother’s desperately fragile health, as well as everyday dangers posed by Loyalist thugs, had made Ferris wet the bed until well into his teens.
in 1981, after a glittering career in schoolboy football that had him touted as the new George Best, he found himself on the books at Newcastle United.
it sounds like — it was — a big break. But he was only 16, desperately shy and lonely, and felt a million miles from his beloved ‘mammy’.
he describes, very movingly, the physical pain of acute homesickness. Sometimes, he could cope with it, accepting it as an emptiness within. ‘But at other times, it crushed my spirit, drove me to my bed and forced its way out through my eyes.’
in Newcastle, Ferris also had to come to terms with separation from his decent, caring father, a labourer at the Ford Motor company in Belfast, and his many siblings — except his eldest brother, who was a violent bully and wasn’t missed at all.
Above all, he could hardly bear to be apart from his childhood sweetheart, Geraldine. A sticker on the bus to the Newcastle training ground, bearing the National Front logo and the words ‘Paddy Go home’, made him yearn to do just that.
Moreover, one first- teamer, unnamed here, subjected him and other youngsters at the club to what would now be called sustained sexual harassment. Only the intoxicating promise of glory kept Ferris on Tyneside — plus the comfort he derived from bingeeating curly Wurly chocolate bars.
A flying left-winger, Ferris duly became the youngest firstteam debutant since the club’s foundation in 1892. A year after regularly wetting the bed, he was in the same team as his boyhood hero Kevin Keegan, as well as a young Paul Gascoigne.
But a series of injuries, including a devastating twist of his knee in training, torpedoed his dream. A flirtation with non-league football fizzled out.
At 25, he was finished, washed up, jobless and penniless. he had to suffer the indignity of applying for benefits at a welfare office next to Newcastle United’s mighty stadium, St James’ Park.
The first time he went, he was forced to stop while a car passed through the gates, driven by a former teammate.
By then, he’d married Geraldine, who helped him find his way through a fug of self-pity, and again when his mother died before her time, as her many heart attacks indicated she would.
A family history of heart disease, including his own, is one of the many blows life has dealt him, yet he has overcome them with spirit and humour, not to mention a fierce work ethic. When he realised he would never fulfil his prodigious early promise as a footballer, Ferris trained as a physiotherapist and got a job back at Newcastle United.
When the club hero, Alan Shearer, damaged his knee, Ferris lavished time and expertise on him, ensuring the talismanic Shearer could play again.
But Ferris was falling out of love with football. The Premier League era had begun and, with it, the mollycoddling and absurd remuneration of players.
he began to hate the ‘pointless ramblings’, all day in the treatment room, of ‘young boys with too much money, too much fame, and too little common sense’. SO
FERRiS decided to re-train again, this time as a lawyer. After three years, he qualified as a barrister and secured a pupillage at a chambers in Leeds.
But scarcely had he become, almost certainly, the world’s only footballer-turned-physio-turnedbarrister than the ‘ Beautiful Game’ lured him back.
his old pal Shearer had been offered a managerial job and wanted Ferris at his side. in due course, they ended up back at Newcastle, as manager and head of sports medicine.
Ferris now runs a successful health and fitness business called Speedflex, is still happily married to Geraldine and has three strapping sons.
it has been quite a journey from the garden shed he used to climb, back in Lisburn, that gives this engaging book its title — and one which thoroughly confounds the notion of the idiot footballer.