Dad was out of control. ‘I am going to kill your mum,’ he said, and pointed to us kids. ‘Then I’m going to kill you, and you, and you.’
In a searingly honest interview, Troy Deeney on the father he still loved despite his abusive upbringing
TROY DEENEY is driving around Chelmsley Wood, the sprawling estate in Birmingham’s eastern suburbs where he grew up. Now and again, he spots someone he knows walking on the street and pulls up to talk. His mum, Emma, is in the passenger seat, pointing out some of the landmarks of her son’s childhood. But this is a sightseeing tour with a difference.
Deeney pulls into Arbor Way, a quiet crescent off a main road, and the memories come flooding back. He remembers his mum opening the door one day more than 20 years ago and the look of terror on her face when she saw his dad standing there.
Paul Anthony Burke was a repeat offender who liked to intimidate people, both physically and psychologically. He was absent for spells of Deeney’s childhood while he served time for grievous bodily harm, affray and whatever else came his way. He would be away for six or eight weeks usually. Deeney was always told he was on a work trip.
‘Some of his friends made millions from crime but he never wanted the money,’ says Deeney. ‘He didn’t have any money. He enjoyed a tear-up. He liked going into a pub and people jumping up to buy him a drink. He scared people. He enjoyed creating fear. He enjoyed walking in somewhere and someone going: “F***, there’s Burkey”.
‘There was one time when I had just started playing for Walsall and he came to pick me up from an away game at Northampton. He arrived in a blue Mercedes and I knew he didn’t own a Mercedes. He hadn’t even passed his driving test. I got in the car and we were driving back down the M1 and he had the music on loud. We stopped for petrol and when the engine died and the music went off, I heard these noises coming from the boot.
‘I asked dad what it was and he said casually he had a lad locked in there. It was a lad who was a drug dealer on our estate who owed one of dad’s friends money. I was horrified. I was just starting out on my football career but dad was blase about it. “It’s okay. I’ve fed him and everything”, he said. “He’ll be fine. And I guarantee you when we get back, he’ll pay the money”.’
By the time Burke knocked on her door, Emma had left him and the council had rehoused her, Troy and his two younger siblings, Ellis and Sasha, in the maisonette on Arbor Way. Burke had not taken it well and Emma had kept the location of the family’s new home a secret. On this day, Deeney’s dad found him, Ellis and Sasha playing at the house of a friend and forced them to show him where they lived.
‘Mum opened the door quite casually, then I saw her expression turn to pure fear,’ Deeney recalls in his autobiography, Redemption, which was released last week and which I helped him compile. ‘I will never forget that look on my mum’s face. I was crying my eyes out. So were Ellis and Sasha. I told him to calm down but he was out of control.
‘“I’m going to kill your mum,” he said to me and started to point at each of us kids in turn. “Then I’m going to kill you and I’m going to kill you and I’m going to kill you”.
‘He began flinging punches at my mum. I jumped up and tried to get between them and he punched me and knocked me over and hit mum again. He said to my mum that she had to take him back. Every time she said no, he hit her. I was jumping up and getting in front and saying: “Don’t hit my mum” and then he’d hit me.’
A friend of Deeney’s knocked on the door to ask if he was coming out to play. ‘No, he f ****** isn’t,’ Deeney’s dad yelled. The alarm was raised. The police were called. After a stand-off, they smashed the front door in and took Burke away.
Deeney turns the car around and drives a few miles through schoolrun traffic to Lyttleton Road, in Stechford. His grandparents used to live here and, once, he considered it a sanctuary.
He stares at the street and another memory assails him. He checks with his mum, who is, he says, ‘the strongest person I know’, to ensure he has the details right. She nods when he says that one day, his dad chased them from school to this house in his van, tailgating them all the way. He locked the kids in the van and got into the car with Emma. He said she had disrespected him outside the school by laughing at him.
Emma said she had been smiling at a friend to try to reassure her she was okay when Deeney’s dad started yelling at her. ‘If you want to smile, I’ll give you a f ***** g smile,’ said Burke, prising the sides of her mouth apart and stretching them with his thumbs. ‘I’ll give you a permanent smile.’ He banged her head against the window a few times and then got out. Lyttleton Road was a sanctuary no longer.
Deeney’s dad died in the summer of 2012 of oesophageal cancer and, a few days after his funeral, Deeney began a 10-month jail term for affray after a brawl in Birmingham city centre. When he arrived at Winson Green, Deeney noticed a prison officer staring at him. ‘Are you Burkey’s son?’ the man asked. Deeney nodded. ‘Makes sense,’ the prison officer said.
But Deeney’s story is way more complicated than the idea that an apple never falls far from the tree. His dad was not his biological father, for a start. His biological father was a hospital warder and wannabe DJ who walked out on Deeney and his mum when he was a few months old and showed little interest in him thereafter.
Deeney refers to his biological father in the closing chapter of Redemption as ‘Sperm Donor’. That original rejection, the idea that his biological father did not want him, explains not only why he has spent his life trying to fit in but why he stayed close to the man he called ‘dad’ even after he beat him up.
Burke was a member of the Zulus, the Birmingham City hooligan firm, and he would take Deeney to the less adversarial home games at St Andrew’s.
Deeney has the Birmingham club crest tattooed on his leg and when he joined the club last month after a decade at Watford, he put a message on Twitter. ‘We did it, Dad,’ it read. ‘This one’s for you.’
‘He would have driven everybody crazy, talking about his boy playing for the Blues,’ says Deeney. ‘I always ignored bad things about my dad because at least he stuck around. He may not have been perfect but he was there and, most of the time, he still protected me.
‘I knew he loved me and I loved him and, mostly, I had a happy childhood. He did some bad things. And he did some bad things to me. But that doesn’t change the basic equation: he took me on when my biological father didn’t want me.’
A gradual change came over Deeney while in jail and continued after his release. He started to read more, entered into regular therapy sessions (which he is still having), he was celebrated for sound bites as well as goals and assists and has become one of the leading voices in the movement to tackle racism in football.
‘The scars I got as a kid are evident and they have made me who I am today. That’s why I’m so aggressive in my delivery when I’m playing or how I talk. It’s relevant to what I knew as a child. All in all, I’m proud of who I am. The scars have left me proud, whether it’s the jagged teeth I got when dad hit me or whatever.
‘I am who I am. I don’t want to come away from that person but I know everything moving on now is about happiness. It’s a different style of life I am looking for. I started off as an innocent kid and then changed. Now I’m changing again.
‘I’ve been moved by how many people have already said they love my book and I hope some will find strength in it. I read that domestic violence in this country was up 68 per cent during Covid, so there may be people now who are a year removed from an incident and their family don’t talk about it. They may read this book about what someone else has gone through and I hope it helps.
‘You don’t know if that boy or girl is thinking about taking their own life or is really angry and wants to hurt other people. I hope this book will show that you can get out of it, you can talk about it and get through it. It will show people you’re not weak to talk. I’m nothing special but I am somebody that never gave up.’