I’ve got cancer but I’m going to be fine, I’m not going anywhere!
Record-breaking boss DAVE BASSETT opens up on the diagnosis that led to an outpouring of love
IT was when his phone would not stop beeping and ringing one day a couple of weeks back that Dave Bassett finally thought he had better say something.
‘I have cancer,’ Bassett tells Sportsmail with familiar bluntness.
‘It’s in my prostate. But it’s fine and I am going to be fine. I just need people to know that. I am not going anywhere.’
Bassett, 77, was diagnosed after his annual League Managers association medical last November. with an optimistic prognosis from his specialist, he did not tell anyone outside his circle of friends.
But Bassett has always been as good at talking as he was at managing football teams, so when he recently agreed to do a podcast for one of his old clubs, sheffield United, he found himself saying rather too much.
‘That set off of a deluge,’ Bassett explains. ‘It got on to Twitter and suddenly people think I am dying, don’t they?
‘My phone didn’t stop. Managers, ex-players, all sorts. I spent a day replying to them all. One friend called and asked if I was OK. I said, “well, I was OK when I saw you yesterday, wasn’t I?”.’
Bassett is laughing but only because he can. His treatment for a killer disease caught early is a course of hormone therapy. In august, he will begin 20 sessions of radiotherapy and knows he has been lucky.
When his LMA check-up showed a barely raised level of the Psa protein used to check for signs of prostate cancer, Bassett insisted on an MRI scan.
‘I just had an instinct it was cancer,’ he says. ‘I could have just had the levels monitored but pushed for a scan. I have always been like that. I like to tackle things head on.
‘I would have been delighted had the MRI been clear but it wasn’t. anyway, the cancer hadn’t spread and my consultant said if I was 85 he may suggest we just leave it. I could still have five to 10 years.
‘But he also said we could tackle it now and I said, “Let’s face it and get on with it”. so I’m fine. I am playing golf, I feel fit. I just know I have to tackle this. The alternative is to wait but what happens in five years if it’s jumped up and all of a sudden it’s chemotherapy? No thanks.’
BASSETT’S football story is long
and varied. an England amateur international as a gnarly midfielder, he could have played in switzerland as a teenager after being spotted on a summer tour with Hayes.
‘I turned down an offer as I am mildly dyslexic and languages would have been beyond me,’ he explains. ‘I didn’t know for many years. at school I got things mixed up but just thought I was thick.
‘sometimes I read the paper and think it doesn’t make sense. Then I read it again and realise it does. I don’t read books as it takes me so long. as a manager my players used to take the piss as my brain would work faster than my mouth and I would get muddled up when I spoke to them.’
Nobody takes the rise out of Bassett’s record. His total of seven automatic promotions is unsurpassed. He took wimbledon through four divisions to the top flight and sheffield United from the third tier to the Premier League and Fa Cup semi-final.
Before steve Cooper this season, he was also the last manager to take Nottingham Forest into the Premier League, in 1998.
‘The sheffield connection has been particularly moving recently,’ he says. ‘I got a staggering ovation when I went to the Forest game at Bramall Lane in the play-offs. How I didn’t have a tear I don’t know.
‘when I go up there, the dads get hold of the sons for pictures with me and the sons are like, “who the f*** is he?”.
‘They’re like, “He’s the greatest manager we ever had” but the sons say, “No that’s Chris wilder…!” I have had some wonderful texts from my ex-players after the cancer stuff came out. They tell me what I did for them and it means the world. Vinnie [Jones] sent me a picture of him on a mountainside in New Zealand where he’s filming. It said, “This is my new office”.
‘That bond with my players means everything. I could be horrible and ruthless but would have done anything for them.
‘what we did at wimbledon was unbelievable and doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. But the establishment was always against me and I had to live with that.
‘If one of my players played a ball in the air over 10 yards, it was “long ball”. I also swear too much. I know I do even though I don’t mean to. as a kid I spent my summer holidays with my uncle and aunt and he swore every other word. He was a great fella, kind and everything. But I learned all those words. Things like that stay with me. If I get the hump I tell people to… well, you know.
‘But when I bump into people on the Tube in London or I am in a cab, they tell me how much they loved the Crazy Gang at wimbledon. They just want to hear the stories.’
stories. Bassett has hundreds of them, the memory razor sharp and the demeanour enduringly lifeaffirming. Before he joined Forest in 1997, for example, he was offered a job by Manchester City. ‘I couldn’t work for Franny Lee,’ he explains. ‘He wanted a cardboard cut-out so he could pick the team, the tactics.
‘They actually played us when I was at Crystal Palace and I saw him trying to get into their dressing room. I knew then that I wasn’t going anywhere near it.’
On another occasion, he received a phone call from a man purporting to be the athletic Bilbao chairman. ‘Peter Robinson [club secretary] from Liverpool had recommended me but I didn’t know,’ Bassett says. ‘This chap called and asked to meet at a hotel. I thought it was Vinnie messing about.
‘so I went wearing a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops and hadn’t shaved. I was expecting all the lads to burst out of the room and we would probably have a drink. Then this smart spanish bloke walks up and introduces himself. ‘Howard Kendall got the job instead so I f ***** that one up, didn’t I? But, again, the language issue would have been there, so I have never really dwelt on it.’ Other misadventures have been harder to shake free. Promotion with Forest should have been the start of something but the club sold striker Kevin Campbell behind Bassett’s back and Pierre van Hooijdonk went on strike. Fifty two promotion goals were taken away in one summer and Bassett was sacked by the new year.
‘I should have told them to stick their job and sued them for selling Kevin,’ he admits now. ‘But I had a reputation for being a battler so I thought I had no choice but to stick it out. I felt I couldn’t walk.
‘sam allardyce told me I should have had an agent but I didn’t respect them as I thought they were taking money off people. That’s still the case. But I should have had one to go in and battle for me. after all that hard work at Forest, it was hard to see it all taken away.’ This, however, is not the biggest regret. Not even close. No, that one revolves around
‘City offered me a job but I couldn’t work with Franny Lee — he wanted to pick the team’
relegation with Sheffield United on the final day of the 1993-94 season. Knowing they probably needed only a draw at Chelsea to survive, they conceded an injurytime goal created by Bassett’s exWimbledon dynamo, Dennis Wise.
‘My regret is not sending Alan Cork on as sub to tell Wisey we only needed a point,’ he explains. ‘Dennis still loved me and said to me after that had he known he would have given the ball to Graeme Le Saux and his cross would have hit the ice cream van behind the goal. But Wisey crossed and they scored.
‘That was the most devastating day of my life in football by a million miles.’
BASSETT has never considered vulnerability to be part of his make-up. He just was not raised that way. But that all changed when he started to suffer with anxiety three years ago.
He knows what triggered it and wishes to keep that to himself. But the period of self-doubt and unhappiness that followed caused him to look back at his career with a critical eye.
Why had he not taken the Blackburn job when offered it in 1999? Why had he not managed to keep Sheffield United up? ‘It was the first time in my life I had felt like that,’ Bassett says. ‘I started to worry about the future. I felt I had let my family down.
‘My wife says she remembers that period but knows I am over it because I am back to being obnoxious and a bloody nuisance. But seriously, it caught me out. I was one of those “pull yourself together and get on with it” types. But this has taught me that is the wrong attitude. I wish I had known that when I was managing. It was the way I was brought up. I was born in Willesden in 1944. We had a two-bedroom council flat.
‘My dad worked six or seven days a week with his window cleaning business and my mum also worked. I grew up with no privilege. We had f***-all really. I failed my 11-plus and was regarded as thick.
‘But I was fed and kept clean. I was never treated anything but well. But I was an only kid and you have to be stoic and self-reliant. You have nobody to lean on but yourself. I thought that was me and for 70 years it was. So when this thing hit me a few years ago, I didn’t see it coming and didn’t really know what to do.’
Again, the LMA form part of the story. Bassett was referred to the union’s in-house psychiatrist, Allan Johnston. ‘I did need help and Allan was brilliant,’ he recalls. ‘He told me to show myself more compassion. He called one day and said he’d seen my Wikipedia page.
‘He said: “You have done seven promotions. How come you never mention it? You told me about the relegations and getting the sack at Forest. But you also won the league at Forest. Don’t you think that was good?”. ‘I said, “That was what I was paid to do”.’
It has taken Bassett three years to talk about this brief period of his life and it is behind him now. Things are good again.
He has two daughters. Carly works for Sky as a producer, while Kim is a teacher. Soon he will celebrate 50 years of married life to Christine with a boat trip with friends down the Thames.
Football remains central. He is at a game most Saturdays — at Watford, Oxford, Wycombe, MK Dons or QPR mainly — and it is more often than not on the TV at home. ‘I tend to go to the smaller games as the big ones bore me,’ he says. ‘In the Premier League they are all frightened to attack.
‘In the lower leagues they go for it. They sometimes try to play like Liverpool and City but they’re useless at it. They tread on the ball and it leads to goals. But they have a right go.’
As a metaphor for Bassett’s life, it seems appropriate. Cancer or not, he is still giving it a go.