How Cunningham’s Madrid dream turned sour
England’s pioneering winger saw his dream move to the Bernabeu sour after defeat by Liverpool in the 1981 European Cup final. Ahead of Saturday’s rematch, Oliver Brown spoke to those closest to Cunningham – including his son – about his time in Spain
Laurie Cunningham was a naturalborn trailblazer, even if it was a glaring indictment of his era that the trail had to be blazed in the first place. Through his implacable dignity in confronting the most overt racism, not to mention the ease with which he wore his prodigious gifts, he became the standard-bearer for a generation of young black footballers who followed in his wake. But no chapter captured the turbulence of his life quite so vividly as his five fraught years at Real Madrid.
“Horrific” was how Cunningham described the 1981 European Cup final, the last one to have pitched Liverpool against Real. For a player so joyful and experimental, who loved to strike corner-kicks with the outside of his foot, those 90 shapeless minutes at the Parc des Princes in Paris, decided by Alan Kennedy’s late winner, were an abomination that all but killed off his Bernabeu career. To this day, the pity of it is that he should never have played.
“Laurie was carrying a very bad toe injury, but they gave him the magic injection,” says Nicky Brown, Cunningham’s girlfriend at the time. “It was discussed that perhaps he would only play one half, so as not to hurt himself any more. But the fans would not have it.”
Pre-match, many commentaries had dwelt on how Cunningham, the first black player to represent England and the first Englishman to don the all-white of Real, would feel about facing the Liverpool players whom he had come to know during his years at West Brom, where his brilliance alongside Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson had led manager Ron Atkinson to christen them “the Three Degrees”.
“People wondered, ‘What allegiance is he going to have?’” Brown recalls. “But Laurie was a diverse character. He never recognised those niche boxes of ‘you’re this, you’re that’.”
The story she and Cunningham shared in Madrid was as rich as it was deeply poignant, as they battled prejudice, pressures of conformity and the ravenous appetite of the local tabloid press. Over the course of a 2½-hour conservation with Brown, and a meeting with Cunningham’s son, Sergio, at the restaurant he now manages in the city’s Justicia district, the extent of this struggle is spelt out in the starkest terms.
In some ways, it began as an old-fashioned romance, as two teenagers bonded in London over a shared fondness for music and dance, before falling in love. But the interracial aspect of their relationship, a black man with a white woman, had long triggered poisonous abuse. After one victory for West Brom, Brown remembers, Cunningham was set upon by three assailants at their favourite Edgbaston kebab shop and “ended up with blood on his new Pierre Cardin shirt”. So frequent were such incidents he would perfect martial arts moves in self-defence.
Vicious intolerance was just as rife in the Spanish capital upon their arrival in 1979. Both were implanted into a profoundly conservative post-franco world. “The first thing was, ‘He’s black, she’s white. Then, it was, ‘They’re not married but they’re living together. They’re Satans’.” says Brown. “Real Madrid wanted us to get married as quickly as possible in a Catholic church, just to appease the fans. I suppose it would have made things easier.
“Being with a black man, I was what was classed as ‘n-----’s meat’. I would have white guys shouting it – it was everywhere. The typical attitude was, ‘Shall we put some bananas in a fruit bowl for him?’ He was a curio, up to be insulted.”
Still, lofty expectations were invested in Cunningham, whose transfer fee of 180 million pesetas (£995,000) had made him the second-most expensive player in the world, after Kevin Keegan. At his unveiling in front of 20,000 fans at the Bernabeu, as Dermot Kavanagh highlights in Different Class, a fine recent biography, he was required to perform a few party tricks, but found his mischievous sense of humour at odds with Real’s protocols. Trying to illustrate the art of the nutmeg,
he ill-advisedly slipped a ball between the legs of Jose Antonio Camacho, the club captain and not a figure disposed to suffer fools.
“Camacho was the small village lad who had become a star,” Brown says. “He was absolutely livid.”
Despite the acute sense of alienation, there were golden moments, when Cunningham expressed the full range of talent that has cemented him as an idol for a host of players since, not least Ian Wright. Against Barcelona on Feb 10, 1980, he was so irresistibly quick and elusive that Rafa Zuviria, the opposing full-back, scarcely knew which way to look.
As a report in Marca put it the next morning: “Barcelona had no response to the absolute command of the black man who plays football like the angels.” So dazzling was his trickery that home supporters at the Nou Camp gave him a standing ovation, an unheard-of accolade for anyone representing Real.
The performance was nothing, though, that Brown had not seen in the grounds of their own home. “Laurie loved drawing, fashion, dancing,” Brown says. “That’s why he was such a good footballer – it was all a dance move to him. As he danced, I would ask him, ‘Can you do that with a ball?’ And I would put some James Brown on for him in the garden. He could be out there for three or four hours, refining his technique.
“He envisaged everything in terms of movement, flow, fluidity. Sometimes we would reflect on that as we slept outside on our roof terrace, looking up at the stars. Laurie was a strict believer back then in yoga, in how the body physically maintained itself.”
Together, the two of them were perfectly matched as free spirits. Dismissive of the black/white, Jamaican/ Jewish dichotomies in their backgrounds, they cared only about what bound them together: the closeness of their families, their fascination for choreography and performance art, their embrace of simple pleasures.
Eschewing the gilded existence familiar to most of Real’s star names, they swerved plush restaurants in favour of tiny rural kitchens. Instead of flavour-of-themonth nightclubs, they preferred underground flamenco taverns in Madrid’s African quarter. “These places weren’t renowned,” Brown says. “But they were dark, dusty and passionate.”
For all these fleeting escapes, their goldfish-bowl existence in Spain was one of which she tired. They were scalded by some degrading experiences, such as walking into a shop on Madrid’s Calle de Serrano and being told by the owner, seeing Cunningham was black, that there was nothing they could afford. Brown despaired at how every facet of the pair’s private life was misinterpreted.
Once, she was relaxing beside the pool with her mother and sister, only for a paparazzi picture to appear under the headline, “Laurie’s Harem”. By 1983, she had returned to England, but had not lost hope that she and Paul – she called Cunningham by his middle name – might one day meet again. “He was supposed,” she reflects, with no little emotion, “to come and get me on a white charger.”
Ultimately, a reunion never materialised. Cunningham’s Real career dissolved after the ’81 final, his turn of pace compromised by a succession of leg injuries and failed operations. His onceboundless prospects gave way to itinerant hopping from club to club, even if it did yield an improbable FA Cup winner’s medal, for Wimbledon in 1988.
Soon enough, he was back in Madrid, this time for Rayo Vallecano, still refusing to drop his dream of a glorious restoration at Real. Watching a game at the Bernabeu with Atkinson, his former mentor, he said: “I’ll come back and show them what they’ve missed.”
It was a promise thwarted with a desperate cruelty. On July 15, 1989, driving around a bend of the La Coruna road near Puerta de Hierro, a little north-west of Madrid, Cunningham came upon a stranded car with a flat tyre. He tried to dodge it but lost control, killed by the impact as his chest hit the steering wheel, throwing him out of the door. He was 33.
According to Jamaican custom, a 13-day wake ensued, in which well-wishers poured forth on what Cunningham had meant to them. “I was a racist when I first met Laurie,” one told Brown. “Three hours later, I wasn’t.”
Cunningham left behind Sylvia Sendin, his Spanish inamorata, whom he had married in 1988, and their one-year-old son, Sergio. Today, Sergio, now 30, works as the sales manager for Babel, a popular haunt on Calle Libertad, specialising in rustic food. He also helps run Moshing, a bustling Mediterranean eatery around the corner. We meet ahead of another busy lunchtime service, and the extent of his resemblance to the father he never knew is disarming. There is the same smile, the same restless energy, the same honed physique. “My grandmother says I have my father inside of me,” he says, with a grin. “Whenever I return to England, everybody is so happy. They say, ‘Seeing you is like seeing your dad again’.”
Sergio was back in England last month, for Regis’s funeral, where West Brom luminaries past and present could not wait to shake his hand. “The chairman, the players all wanted to speak to me,” he remembers. “For me, it was the best experience.”
He is aggrieved, however, at how his father’s tale seems to have been largely forgotten by Real, the club he has followed from the cradle. “Maybe it’s because he was foreign,” he shrugs. The same feints and stylish flourishes for which Cristiano Ronaldo has been so lauded formed part, as he knows, of the paternal repertoire almost 40 years ago. To see that inheritance airbrushed from history is a source of anger. “I learnt all the values about being a team player from Atletico.”
Sergio, a gifted player himself, turned out for Atletico Madrid’s academy until he was 16, when persistent knee trouble put paid to any longer-term aspirations. It remains a source of regret to him that he did not reach the heights in the game his father managed.
“I dreamt of following him. I will never find out if I could have been as good. I still hope I can coach a team. It’s terrible to keep doubting yourself like this.”
Such self-doubt will not, one senses, be uppermost in his mind when Liverpool and Real Madrid kick off in Kiev on Saturday. As he picks out some of the pictures of his father that hang on Babel’s portico walls, the most powerful feeling he exudes is one of pride.
“I never met my dad, but when I was a kid, I asked my mum, ‘What are all these pictures and trophies?’ She started telling me the story of how famous he was. All I could think was, ‘My God’.”
Cruelly curtailed though Cunningham’s life might have been, it is some reassurance to all who loved him that both his image and his spirit endure.
‘The typical attitude in Spain was: Shall we put some bananas in a bowl for him?’