Golf balls, bananas, a pig’s leg and a letter from the Ku Klux Klan
MARK WALTERS ON LIFE AS A BLACK FOOTBALLER IN THE ’80s
THE team bus on the way to a football match in 2018 will typically see players lost in their own thoughts or their own music. It is tempting to wonder what footballers did before someone invented giant headphones.
But on the Rangers bus en route to an Old Firm game at Parkhead on January 2, 1988, Mark Walters and his team-mates could not take their eyes off the local newspaper.
‘There was a picture of a guy who had bought a load of fruit especially to throw at me during the game,’ said Walters this week. ‘The paper did a story with him. That says everything.
‘ I was laughing at the guy, really. The fact he’d spent all this money on fruit was ridiculous. He would have been better off paying his electricity bill. It was my Rangers debut and I just thought, “This is gonna be fun”.’
What followed that day — and at Hearts where Rangers played a few weeks later — wasn’t much fun. Walters was the first black footballer to play in Scotland for many decades and the racist abuse he suffered was so bad he almost quit immediately.
BBC footage of him preparing to take a corner in the Hearts game is astonishing. As he waits to start his run-up, a banana lands at his feet. Walters just takes the corner anyway.
‘I probably didn’t see it,’ he said with a shrug when we talked last week. ‘But I remember the coins and darts.
‘It was intimidating and scary. I looked behind me and there was a dart stuck in the ground. And a pig’s leg and golf balls.
‘I had been warned about it. Graeme Souness (the Rangers manager) said it would have been easier if I was a Catholic. I thought about quitting after that first game. Was it worth getting a dart in the eye? I got a letter from the Ku Klux Klan that I didn’t even tell anybody about. I just tore it up.’
Walters stayed only because the authorities cracked down on the abuse. In two and a half seasons he won three Scottish Premier Division titles and two League
‘Graeme Souness said it would have been easier if I was a Catholic’
Cups. He remains revered at Ibrox. Walters grew up within a stone’s throw of Villa Park, but idolised black players Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham at West Brom.
‘I saw Cyrille get racist stick from Villa fans but he didn’t jump in the crowd like Cantona, he responded by just playing better,’ he said. ‘He was a trailblazer. That is my advice to players now. Don’t walk off. Hurt people with your football.’
Walters is 54 and has a book out. A Christian, he has learned to forgive and recently received a tweet from a Celtic fan apologising for abusing him 30 years ago.
‘I said to him that it was good to realise he had been wrong and to move forwards,’ he said. ‘Education is important.’
Walters (below) began his career at Villa and played 181 league games before moving north. He progressed through the local system to join the club whose floodlights he could see from his house.
Sadly, a chapter of Walters’s book reveals how, as a 10year- old, he witnessed first hand the behaviour of paedophile Villa scout Ted Langford. A coach at the Dunlop Terriers club, Langford was jailed in 2007 but died in 2012 five years before further allegations came to light. ‘The recent stuff has brought all those feelings back,’ said Walters. ‘How come Villa say they didn’t know? A couple of the lads I knew have tried to commit suicide. ‘I am of West Indian heritage and our culture is different. If we misbehaved we got beaten. ‘So I thought the cuddling and love bites I saw Langford give these boys was maybe normal. His friend would walk into the showers and take pictures. We would throw water on him but didn’t realise he was taking them to circulate. ‘It’s the reason I’ve never started an academy for kids. How could I ever truly trust the coaches? These people gravitate to those places.’
Walters’s career was successful and he talks fondly of it. He was once listed in World Soccer’s top 20 players in the world. His personal life has occasionally been more difficult.
He had next to no relationship with his father and when he went to find him in 1999, he was told he had died. During his spell at Liverpool, Walters’s wife — the couple have since divorced — suffered a stillbirth.
‘I was having nightmares and not sleeping and things,’ he said. ‘I wish I had some counselling. I have never got over it.’
Walters won an FA Cup and League Cup at Liverpool but probably his most notable achievement was scoring the club’s first Premier League goal in August 1992. When manager Souness was replaced by Roy Evans, Walters witnessed a side of football he didn’t like.
‘The young players would turn up late and things,’ he said. ‘They would pass a bit of paper round during a league game and the player who had it at full time would have to pay money.
‘They would gamble and I would hear them say they owed £4,000. Then on Monday it would be, “OK, call it a grand for cash”. How could you play football knowing you owe that kind of money? It didn’t surprise me that things went pear-shaped on the pitch.’
Walters has coached at Villa and also for the FA at youth level. He is disappointed he has not had the chance to work at senior level and, asked if he thinks some of the racism he witnessed 30 years ago still influences people’s decisions now, he said: ‘I’d like to think not. That would be very sad indeed.’
Wingin’ it: The Mark Walters Story by Jeff Holmes is out now on Pitch Publishing. RRP: £18.99