‘We had to survive horrendo
As Mark Walters sits in Aston Villa’s players’ lounge, he looks around and says he simply does not recognise the place. With its swanky upholstery, plush mahogany bar and the 3D action pictures on the wall, it is nothing like the basic, uninspiring room of his day.
He is here to talk about his new autobiography Wingin’ It, covering his time with clubs such as Villa, Rangers and Liverpool, a career which spanned more than 650 games across 21 years. It is a tale full of eye-opening moments, from his fraught relationship with his bigamist father, to playing for a junior team under the auspices of a notorious paedophile coach.
But he smiles that when it comes to the football passages, much of it must read like a historical document, memories from another era altogether. Almost everything, he says, has changed since he made his debut at Villa Park in 1981.
For a start, in this era of carefully calibrated eating plans, he recalls that the only dietary advice he received as a young player was, to say the least, rudimentary.
“I remember Peter Withe telling me always to eat brown bread. ‘Much healthier than white bread,’ he said. That was about the extent of sports science in them days.”
How, he admits, he would love the chance to play in today’s game of manicured playing surfaces and substantial pay cheques. Not least because, as a jet-heeled, elusive, two-footed forward, he reckons he would thrive under the protection afforded by the modern rule book.
“There were some horrendous tackles in my time. I saw a picture the other day of me leaping in the air to get out of the way of Roy Keane going right through the back of me. I don’t think he even got a booking. He’d have probably got arrested in today’s game.”
But there is one area of football he is particularly relieved to see change: the public displays of racism which tainted his early days in the game. At least in Britain, today there is none of the collective abuse he suffered when, 31 years ago, he became the first black footballer to play in the Scottish top flight. What was only his second match for Rangers, playing against Hearts at Tynecastle in August 1987, was a particularly fraught experience.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” he admits. “It seemed like the whole stadium was giving it to you. I ain’t going to lie: it was shocking.”
It was not just the vocal disparagement. He recalls the battery of missiles launched in his direction. “They were throwing all sorts of stuff: the usual bananas, a pig’s trotter – that made me laugh, to be fair. The darts, though, they worried me. I didn’t see any actually flying through the air, but I saw a lot of them stuck in the ground.” However much he tried to block it out, he admits the welcome adversely affected his performance.
“I wasn’t at my best that day. I remember trying to take a corner and I’m being pelted with abuse, coins, fruit, all sorts. I scuffed it. The lads at half-time defused it a lot. They were saying, ‘For eff ’s sake, Mark, we paid all that money for you and you can’t even take a corner’. That was the only way I could deal with it: laugh about it.”
That was how he had sought to overcome abuse throughout his career: shrug and get on with playing. And the prejudice was routine. He recalls how, as a young player trying to make his way in Birmingham, when the winter encroached, coaches would make derisory comments about his resistance to the cold. “They’d say to me, ‘You’re not used to this weather, are you?’ I’d think, hang on, I was born in Handsworth. But it stuck with me. When I became a pro and had a choice of a short sleeve or long sleeve shirt, I’d always wear short sleeves to prove I could take the cold.”
His role model in facing down such nonsense was Cyrille Regis. “I remember in the Seventies coming ato Villa Park and seeing Cyrille play for West Brom and a section of the fans were giving him terrible abuse, the kind of stuff I wouldn’t want my mum to hear. But he didn’t do an Eric Cantona, he seemed to ignore it.
“That stuck with me. It was the way I tried to deal with it, too.
I had friends who couldn’t, though. They’d get into fights. Inevitably, they didn’t get on in the game.
“Whatever the justification, if you fought back you’d be reckoned a problem. You’d have a chip on your shoulder. I thought the best way to deal with it was to laugh and eventually it will subside.”
For all his calm, unflustered demeanour, decades on from those