Souness warned me it would be bad, but I had never experienced this
Mark Walters suffered awful abuse on his Old Firm debut – but worse was to come at Hearts
Racism didn’t become black and white for me until I signed my first senior contract, and it was something which was more or less exclusive to away games, where opposition fans would taunt you with monkey chants and you’d get the odd earful whenever you ventured anywhere near them.
Most of the time it was isolated abuse by little pockets of tanked-up supporters, but in the 1980s there were a few grounds where you were almost guaranteed to get slaughtered. These were West Ham, Newcastle, Leeds United and Millwall, where everyone seemed to be a skinhead and decked out in Doc Martens.
I did suffer racial abuse from certain players now and again, but it was mostly fans that dished it out. I did get some abuse from a player against Spurs: I genuinely can’t remember his name, but I do remember Spurs defender Graham Roberts intervening and telling his team-mate in no uncertain terms to calm down and shut up.
But if I thought the abuse I had suffered in England was bad, it was about to fly off the scale when I joined Rangers. Somehow it was as though certain groups of supporters up there had never seen a black man before. I was just 23 years old and the first black guy to play in the Premier League, and boy how I would soon know it. I arrived in Scotland to sign for Rangers on New Year’s Eve 1987. A couple of days later I made my debut at Celtic Park, home to our greatest rivals.
Graeme Souness, our manager, spoke to me beforehand and warned me what to expect, before joking: “Frankly, Mark, you would have a bigger problem if you were Catholic!”
I could laugh about it later but I wasn’t in the mood for chuckling before the game, as I was a bag of nerves. I remember reading one of the papers on the morning of the game and there was this lad who had bought boxes of fruit and was standing there proudly, telling all the readers: “This is for Mark.” Instead of feeding his family, he’d spent £30 on boxes of bananas to throw at a black guy! It was pathetic. The abuse started the moment we got off the team bus, and continued when we walked out on to the park for the warm-up. My team-mates were brilliant and tried to start some banter in an effort to deflect the chants and monkey noises coming from many of the Celtic fans. We ended up losing the
There was this lad in the newspaper who had bought boxes of bananas to throw at me
game 2-0 but I was singled out for the type of stick I had never experienced before. It had nothing to do with football, and it made me think whether or not I could handle it every week. We’re talking 60,000 people in a stadium and 55,000 of them are caning you. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, and if I’m wide of the mark it certainly didn’t feel like it.
Previously I had played in front of 25,000 fans, 30,000 maximum, so I’d gone from being just another player to being singled out by more than 50,000 people which, at the time, was really hard for me to comprehend. I thought to myself, ‘What kind of place have I come to? What type of people populate this country?’
I tried hard to shrug it off, but it was an awful experience and I considered my future after that game. At one point I noticed a scary array of missiles that had been thrown at me. I didn’t hear any of them hit the ground, and I didn’t notice them flying through the air, so I’m wondering whether or not I had been the intended target in the first place, but deep down I knew I was.
Probably the scariest items there were darts, as they could have taken my eye out. Maybe if I hadn’t been playing so wide I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but because I was out there on the wing, and taking corners, then I was bound to notice all these objects lying on the running track.
But if I thought the scenes at Celtic Park were bad, then what I endured at Tynecastle – home of Hearts – a few weeks later was 10 times worse.
For some reason, the moment I stepped out for the pre-match warm-up, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be in for an easy ride. For starters, the crowd were almost on top of you. In the past, I had bemoaned stadia with a running track between the pitch and supporters, due to their lack of atmosphere, but that afternoon I would’ve loved some extra space between us.
I got stick during the warm-up and it continued when I went to retrieve the ball to take a corner in the first half at the Hearts end.
I placed the ball on the little arc, took a couple of steps back, and the first bunch of bananas landed just a foot or so away from me. The next one hit me on the shoulder, though, and many others landed close by. I took the corner quickly and got the hell out of there.