An ex-player with a life story that’s well worth telling
Darkness and Light: My Story. By Joe Thopson with Alex Fenn. Published 2018.
CONTINUING our classic sports book series…
The basic story arc underpinning many sporting biographies is so repetitive, you wonder how some of them get published. Such criticism cannot, however, be levelled at Joe Thompson’s Darkness and Light, co-authored by Alex Fenn.
Thompson is still a young man and his searingly honest account of how a teenager who appeared to have the football world at his feet was, in the space of a decade, released by Manchester United, recruited and playing (well) in the lower leagues, at which point he contracted the first of two bouts of cancer, is sporting biography at its best.
That Joe Thompson is alive is testament to his tenacity, courage and wonderfully positive attitude, attributes inherited from his mother, yet not once does Thompson give the impression that he feels sorry for himself.
That he continued to play professional football until 2019 after scoring a fairy-tale winner to keep Rochdale in League One, is miraculous.
If the sign of an engaging read is measured by the speed with which you’re suddenly well over half-way through a book, then Darkness and Light qualifies as one of the year’s best.
We don’t learn of Thompson’s diagnosis until we’re more than a third of the way through, thanks to a pacey narrative which expertly blends the perfect quantity of footballspeak with generous helpings of behind-the-scenes anecdote.
As a youngster at Old Trafford, Thompson felt he was en route to the top, watching in awe as the likes of Giggs and Scholes practised their shooting.
But he suffered rejection following a slowdown in the rate at which he grew, a setback seemingly confirmed by a hand scan which suggested he would never be taller than 5ft10in.
The scan proved inaccurate, but Thompson soldiered on, becoming a YTS trainee at Rochdale, the club that would give him his first professional contract.
Throughout his nascent playing career, Thompson, though comparatively small, clearly looked after himself, physicallyspeaking, which makes the revelation regarding his Hodgkin Lymphoma, a cancer of the blood, so shocking.
Following his diagnosis, Thompson’s tenacity, allied to a deep love for his family, played a huge part in his recovery.
It seems inconceivable that this decent, hard-working guy could later suffer from cancer for a second time, but he does and survives it.
Still a young man aged in his early thirties, his professional footballing days behind him, Thompson has developed a second career as an accomplished motivational speaker; in an extremely crowded market, one suspects that Joe Thompson is one of the genre’s very best.