I was talking to Chris ten days before he died. He said we would catch up when he was back home. But that never happened and I deeply regret it
CHRIS HIGGINS REMEMBERS HIS LATE FRIEND AND TEAM-MATE CHRIS MITCHELL
HE is gone. But he has never truly left. ‘I still think about him every day. He pops into my mind all the time. It was the way he laughed. I remembered that last night. It was a huge cackle.’
Chris Higgins, professional footballer, is talking about his one-time team-mate, his eternal friend Chris Mitchell.
Higgins, recovering from an Achilles injury that has ended his season at Ayr United, is nursing a greater hurt. His mate died after being hit by a train on May 7, 2016. Chris Mitchell was 27. A footballer who had stepped away from the game prematurely, he had been suffering from anxiety and depression.
‘I was talking to him ten days before he died. He was working down south as a salesman with his uncle’s firm. He said when he was back up the road we would catch up. That never happened and I deeply regret that,’ says Higgins.
It is the further pain of suicide. The thought of what might have been, the theory of what could have been avoided. It plagues the survivors even though there is no grounds for recrimination.
Higgins searches the past and finds ‘Mitch’ smiling, cackling and winding up the dressing room to such a degree that it should have been fitted with an outsized key.
‘You can flit in and out of people’s lives in football. It is the nature of the beast. People move on to other clubs, into other dressing rooms. But, no, Chris and me kept up. We met pretty regularly, phoned each other, sent text messages,’ says Higgins of a friendship forged during the three seasons they shared at Queen of the South.
‘The first day I met him he broke his nose. Ball right into his face. That sort of endeared him to everybody. His eyes were filling up with water and the rest of us were killing ourselves laughing,’ says Higgins.
This was the most apt introduction. Professional football is most often the school of hard knocks. ‘Mitch’ had taken a blow and smiled on. ‘Basically, he was a great guy. Everyone got on with him. He was the heart and soul of the dressing room. I sat beside him in the dressing room for three years but we became really good mates when we did a personal training course together in Glasgow every week. He was just a laugh, a wind-up merchant,’ says Higgins.
So how does an apparently happy young man come to take his life? The complexity of depression as an illness confounds even the medical professionals. Friends, such as Higgins, search for clues, try to learn from awful tragedy.
Higgins’s thoughts always return to the moment when his friend had to undergo spinal surgery. Mitchell, who had played full-time football with distinction for Falkirk, Ayr United, Bradford City and Queen of the South, had to go part-time with Clyde, playing his last professional match only five months before his death.
‘I saw him change a little bit during the spell of his back injury but this was long before he passed,’ says Higgins. ‘I think when he went to Clyde he missed the day-to-day training and everything that goes with that.’
Mitchell, after all, was a long-time inhabitant of the dressing room, with a schoolboy international cap testifying to both a promising future and a justified feeling of pride as a pupil at Dunblane High School.
‘A football dressing room is totally different from a normal workplace,’ says Higgins. ‘Everyone is working hard together for a specific reward, whether it be on a Saturday or the end of the season. That’s the bond, that’s what creates the spirit. Chris loved that. He loved the serious stuff of training hard and he loved the laughs.’
Stories abound of his chirpy character, whether giving a teammate an unwanted Mohican or diving fully-clothed into a pool on arrival at a hotel in Ibiza. ‘His dress sense was unusual, too,’ says Higgins. ‘It would be minus ten outside but he would wander in wearing shorts and a T-shirt.’
But this camaraderie of the enclosed professional arena can have its limitations. ‘A football dressing room can be a difficult place to express your feelings because you don’t want to be seen as the weak person in the room,’ says Higgins. ‘That’s why Chris might have been scared to speak. He was an emotional person. He would let you know when he was happy and he would get angry at times, which is common in football. Obviously, though, he found it really difficult to express how he was feeling at other times.’ Higgins carries a heavy regret about this silence, saying: ‘You can look back and see he changed a little bit. You see things that maybe you should have noticed more. When he was injured with his back, he reported for training and headed straight to the gym when we did our session. But when we had finished he was nowhere about. He had just gone straight home.
‘I questioned him about this and he said he just had things to do. Maybe we should all have made more of this but, again, it was a long time before he passed.’
However, ‘Mitch’ did not disclose his anxieties to Higgins. The effect has been powerful on the survivor.
‘It has changed me, absolutely,’ says Higgins. ‘It is about shining a light on mental health in football. It is about getting people to speak if they have an issue. I think I would speak if I had a problem but I don’t know because I have never been in such bad straits. But it must be made easier to talk about such things.
‘I always try to speak to players, particularly the young ones,’ says Higgins, 32. ‘It’s mostly about football — contracts, training, that sort of thing. But I hope they could come to me if they needed to talk about anything else.
‘It has changed the way I speak to people. I am always telling my
He was a great guy. He was the heart and soul of the dressing room
mates: “If you ever want to speak to me just let me know”. If a mate loses anyone or doesn’t get a contract or has an injury, then I want to be able to listen to them.’
Higgins has stayed close to the family of his friend and is a passionate supporter of the Chris Mitchell Foundation that seeks ‘to bring to the forefront the need for the awareness of mental health and wellbeing’ within Scottish football. It aims to do this ‘by sharing knowledge and skills and improve learning, forging cohesive and sustainable partnerships, connecting and supporting service users and campaigning to raise awareness on a national scale’. The next major fundraising event will be an SPFL Trust golf day on the Carrick at Cameron House on May 23.
The father, former girlfriend, and sister of Chris Mitchell are all on the trustee board. There is a concerted effort to bring some light out of the darkness of that night in May 2016.
Higgins says: ‘I learned about his death in a call from my girlfriend, Natalie. As soon as she told me I called his phone. It was just instinct. I didn’t believe it. I just didn’t believe it. The next morning I spoke to his sister Laura. Devastating.
‘It was surreal. Even when you know it’s true there is disbelief. Me and three of his mates met up that day off the cuff. We just wanted to be together for Chris.’
Higgins praises the Mitchell family, saying: ‘They are going through a million times more heartache than everyone else but are working so hard to see that others don’t suffer. Mitch would be so proud of what they have done and what they are doing.’
A son, a brother, a boyfriend and a mate has gone. His legacy is one of continuing anguish but also of hope. Chris Mitchell lives on as a force to help fellow sufferers.