The soft side of football’s hardest man
Graeme Souness doesn’t care if people think he’s a ‘dinosaur’. But in a remarkable five-part podcast the tears flow as he opens up about his brush with death at 38, the sick little girl who inspired his Channel swim — and the one regret that still haunts him
GRAEME Souness is 71 — at that age where too many friends are departing for that great football stadium in the sky. ‘I’ve lost a few recently,’ he says, referencing fellow footie legends Trevor Francis and Gianluca Vialli, who both died last year, hitting him hard. ‘I have a few others who have dementia.’
He may appear hale and hearty, but who can tell? This is, after all, a man who had a triple bypass aged just 38, when he thought he was in peak fitness.
He takes nothing for granted. ‘Nothing brings it home to you about how fragile life is like looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “You are not so special after all, are you, son?”
‘After my operation I remember sitting in a shower and being washed by a nurse. I didn’t even have the strength to lift my own arms. She was great. She wasn’t letting me get away with feeling sorry for myself and she made me laugh about it, but that’s a moment you don’t forget.
‘One minute, you’re on top of the world, loving life, walking into a room having won the European Cup and with a Miss World as your date, and then… well, you realise that you are not so special.
‘However cocky you are — and someone once said about me, “if Souness was a bar of chocolate he would eat himself”, and there was some truth to that — you can’t escape the reality. Life is fragile and unpredictable.’
TODAY the hair (always Souness’s pride and joy, but he insists ‘can you clarify that I never had a perm’) is getting whiter by the year. ‘The way I see it, I’m standing on a railway line, looking into a tunnel and I can hear something coming — but I’ve no idea what it is.’
Who knew the hard man of British football — almost as famous for throwing punches and rubbing people up the wrong way as for his skills on the pitch — had become such a philosopher? He chuckles, though, at a recent ‘altercation’ with one of his footie pals who seemed to have been next on the list to depart.
He and Alan Hansen — fellow Scots, fellow Liverpool FC legends — go back a long way, on and off the pitch, and he tells me that when he heard from Hansen’s wife that he was in a bad way, he feared the worst. ‘I was actually in touch with her, calling her on Alan’s phone — he’s saved in my phone as Big Al — but this particular day I was on a train in Germany.
‘I was trying to find my seat when my phone rang and Big Al came up. I thought it was the call I’d been dreading, from his wife.
‘I couldn’t answer. Didn’t want to hear it. I sat there, then plucked up the courage to call back. And Big Al himself answered! He was giving me dog’s abuse for my punditry. I have never been so relieved to hear him tell me to eff off.’
Souness is in a reflective mood today, having recorded a podcast about his life story for the Daily Mail’s Everything I Know About Me series. Listening to it is like throwing yourself into a ‘Who’s Who’ of football, the span of his career meaning that football icons like Bob Paisley and Jack Charlton come to life as he talks.
And what a rollicking life it has been. How fruity the language was in dressing rooms, back in the day, how un-PC the atmosphere.
And what a lot of baths, communal or otherwise!
There are stories about sharing a room with a young Kenny Dalglish (who wrongly thought Souness was gay because he unpacked a hairdryer) and a communal bath with the giant that was Charlton (this is a hair-related anecdote too — Charlton, who was using ‘red carbolic soap’ to scrub himself down, took a dim view of the young Souness’s two-step shampoo and conditioner routine).
In between there are tales about punch-ups and plaudits, triumphs and tragedies. Lots of death too, among the high living.
Today he gets a little choked talking about being there when the late great Jock Stein, then Scotland manager, collapsed and died ‘on the job’, with Souness watching through the doors as the team doctor tried to revive him. Every Souness anecdote starts something like, ‘We’d just won the European Cup’, or ‘we were 2-1 up against Leeds’ – but this one ends with him weeping. ‘A great man,’ he concludes. Ditto the late Joe Fagan, another old-school mentor, and his onetime boss at Liverpool. The tissues come out again when Souness remembers being on a team bus, aged 31, having been told his mother would not survive the night. ‘We were playing Southampton and I’d got off at Oxford to call my brother from a payphone. He said she wasn’t going to make it. I got on and Joe Fagan gave me hell for being late back on the bus. “Who do you think you are, holding everyone up?”
‘I didn’t say a word and went and sat down, but someone told Fagan. That man came and put his arm around me and sat like that all the way from Oxford to Southampton. That was the mark of the man.’
WHAT’S a little surprising, given that Souness typifies a certain era (‘people can call me a dinosaur if they want,’ he shrugs) is to hear him talk in very modern touchy-feely terms about the peaks and troughs of his life. Has he gone soft?
At some stages he almost depicts that life as a ‘game of two halves’, with his heart bypass in 1991 — and the feelings of fragility that came with it — as half-time.
‘I’ve never been so scared before or since as I was when I was alone in that intensive care unit,’ he says, taking himself back to perhaps his most vulnerable