I’m lucky to be a footballer ..and to be alive
KIND-HEARTED CHRISTIE’S CHARITY WORK IS A TESTAMENT TO HIS PERSPECTIVE ON WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE AFTER SURVIVING A TROUBLED UPBRINGING
CYRUS CHRISTIE describes himself as really privileged and not just because he is a Premier League footballer.
He feels lucky to just be alive after seeing friends stabbed before his eyes and having his own string of brushes with death.
And having had his own tough upbringing and then experience of poverty and the struggle through the charity work he now does, Fulham defender Christie said: “You realise you are really privileged. “Not in terms of wealth but in terms of your health – how much your life is valuable.” Kind-hearted Christie, 26, spent the Sunday before Christmas helping out with friends and family at the Brixton Soup Kitchen, a homeless shelter in south London.
It is just one of a number of causes he supports with Christie determined to give back to the less fortunate,
who he feels he can associate with having not grown up in “good surroundings” himself. Christie went to a Coventry school that was “surrounded by BNP voting areas” and where “race wars” were the norm. The Ireland right-back said: “It just got to the point where there were three or four incidents where people had been stabbed and I just managed to disappear and not be there at the time.
“I feel someone was watching over me. That was a lesson – ‘Maybe you have to distance yourself from these kind of people.’
An incident while he was coming through the ranks at Coventry, when he was banned for a week for attending a party with now Bournemouth striker Callum Wilson the night before a youth team game, was the final straw.
“That’s when we had to get ourselves 100 per cent committed to what we wanted to achieve,” Christie said.
It took plenty of willpower to break away from those he had grown up with, many who have now turned their lives around.
And after knuckling down and making the grade at Coventry, Christie arrived at Fulham a year ago via spells at Derby and Middlesbrough.
Sadly, tragedy has never remained far away. Christie’s legendary boxer uncle Errol lost his battle with lung cancer in 2017, while he had to attend a hospital in London to identify his late aunt within his first two weeks at Fulham after she passed away.
He added: “Only the other week a lad I grew up with was shot dead. Sometimes, it’s bad to say, but I’m at a place where it’s almost normality for me, I’ve lost that many people.”
Christie admits some of what has happened off the field has led to people at previous clubs at times having “the wrong perception of me.” But that is totally at odds with the Christie who dedicates as much time as he can to a string of deserving causes.
When a member of Derby’s staff had a daughter born prematurely right-back Christie paid for the machine she needed to stay alive.
He paid for a child in Africa to have a leg-saving operation and, while at Coventry, became an ambassador for a charity based in Palestine and Syria, a cause close to his heart as his granddad is Palestinian.
Christie has been on a big fundraising drive to continue the charity work Errol did outside of the ring and also support the British Lung Foundation.
And while he has never been homeless he said: “My mum Melanie worked hard to put food on the table when she was going through uni, had to get another job and we didn’t have much money growing up,” which fuelled his desire to support the shelter three weeks ago.
The experience was an “eyeopening” one which gave Christie further perspective on what is important in life.
Football feels all a little trivial after hearing some of the horrors he has witnessed and tragedy that has struck his family.
But he said: “Once you cross the white line you kind of forget about everything for 90 minutes, what’s going on outside. I just try to occupy myself and stay away from thinking too much as that’s the dangerous one.
“And I count myself lucky that I’m healthy and doing the job I love.”