CHELSEA’S DARK KNIGHT

“But, like most people — would you want him to be your friend? No. But he’s not there to be my friend.”

Nothing in his roller coaster of a career has matched what happened a year ago, when, in an onfield confrontation with a black player, Terry used a racial slur during an exchange of ugly insults. The scandal ended up engulfing all of English soccer, dividing players, exposing unsavory truths about on-field behavior and disgracing Terry, his team and the Premier League. Terry was acquitted in a criminal trial, but in a scathing j udgment last month, an indepen- dent tribunal called his defense “im- probable, implausible and contrived,” fined him £220,000 (about $354,000) and handed him a four-match ban.

The incident was merely the latest in a wearying series of unfortunate episodes.

There was the time Terry and some teammates went on a drunken binge in an airport hotel bar while passengers stranded by the 9/11 attacks watched the Twin Towers burn on television. There was the time he was charged with assault after a melee in a nightclub in which a bouncer was slashed with a broken bottle. (He was acquitted.)

There was the time he was fined £60 (about $97) after leaving his Bentley in a parking spot for the

disabled while he went to a pizza restaurant; the time he was thrown out of a bar in Essex after urinating in a beer glass and dropping it on the floor; the time he was investigated, and cleared, by Chelsea after he was accused of charging an undercover reporter money to show him around Stamford Bridge, Chelsea’s stadium; the time he brutally kneed a Barcelona player in the back in the Champions League semifinal last April and denied it until confronted with a videotape that proved he was lying; and the time when he violated the players’ unwritten code of loyalty by, it seemed, cheating on his wife not with a groupie in a bar, but with the estranged girlfriend of one of his teammates.

“He’s a walking disaster,” said Mark Perryman, a research fellow in sport and leisure culture at the University of Brighton and the author of Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation. Using English slang for hooligan, he said: “He’s been caught out serially, and that makes him a yob — but that doesn’t make him a bad footballer. It makes him a bad role model.”

He had promise from the beginning. Anyone who knows Terry says that he lives and breathes soccer and that it has always been that way, since he was a boy kicking a ball around the rough streets of Barking in East London. His father was a forklift operator in a wood yard who was never good enough to play soccer professionally, but played for a local amateur team and encouraged John and his older brother, Paul, to aim higher (Paul Terry now plays for Thurrock, a lowerdivision team). Money was tight. Terry’s father started work at 6 a.m., got home at 6 p.m., drove the boys to soccer and got home to dinner at 10. Soccer was a lifeline and a ticket out for an aggressively unacademic child like Terry.

When he was 10, he joined Senrab, a youth soccer club in Wanstead Flats, East London, with a reputation for training future Premier League players (the name is a backward spelling of Barnes, a local street). With Terry playing alongside teammates like Ledley King and Jermain Defoe, who would grow up to play for Tottenham Hotspur, and Jlloyd Samuel, who later played for Aston Villa, the team dominated the league and attracted talent scouts’ attention.

Terry had not yet grown into himself. He was short. He was pudgy. He played midfield.

The coaches knew he had something.

Terry spent four years at Senrab before Premier League clubs began wooing him for their junior programs. He picked Chelsea, and at 16 left school for good and enrolled in Chelsea’s Youth Training Scheme, a kind of soccer farm team; he was paid £46 a week. He will be 32 in December, which means he has spent half his life wearing Chelsea blue. He has played more than 550 games for the team (in 2000, he briefly played on loan with Nottingham Forest).

At a time when players flit from team to team, pledging allegiance to whoever pays the most, Terry’s commitment to Chelsea is one of the reasons his fans revere him (not that the team does not pay him a lot; various reports have him earning as much as £220,000 a week. To Chelsea fans, Terry is Chelsea.

“John Terry is quite a rare thing in football, because he’s a one-club man,” said Trizia Fiorellino, chairwoman of the Chelsea Supporters’ Group. “That used to be common 20, 30 years ago, but these days it’s incredibly rare. He’s been passionate, incredibly loyal and very demonstrative — lots of beating of the chest, touching his heart and looking up at the fans. We feel he’s one of us. We’ve always cherished him as one of our own.”

Graham Stewart, who played as a midfielder for Chelsea when Terry was in the youth program, said, “He would run through a brick wall to play for Chelsea.”

In a way, Terry’s image problem is compounded by his symbiotic relationship with the team. To many English soccer fans, Chelsea is like the Yankees, only worse: obnoxious and arrogant, too rich for its own good, full of preening egomaniacs, with fans who are as entitled and pleased with themselves as the players. It does not help that in 2003, Chelsea was bought by Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch who, in true oligarch style, tends to throw money at problems. Terry had a growth spurt in his midteens, shooting up to his current height, 6 foot 1. His puppy fat turned to muscle. He moved from midfield to his current position, center back, the linchpin of a team’s defense. By the time he was 17, he was regularly substituting for first-team players, playing alongside the gifted French defenders Frank Leboeuf and Marcel Desailly, whom he would eventually succeed as captain.

“He was like a sponge, the way he took in all the information you were giving him,” said Ray Wilkins, a longtime coach at Chelsea, who left the club in 2010 and is now an assistant coach for Paris Saint-Germain in France.

At 20, Terry was named Chelsea’s player of the year.

When Desailly sat out with injuries, Terry sometimes filled in as captain; he was given the job for good in 2004.

“John is naturally somebody who attracts people to follow him,” Desailly said. “You know how you can dress any way you want, but if you don’t have natural style, it doesn’t matter? John has that leadership naturally.”

Terry was already captain when Avram Grant took over as manager in 2007. The club was full of outsized, alphamale personalities, but Terry helped wrangle them into a cohesive playing unit.

Other players say that Terry leads by force of personality and by his consistently high level of play, season after season. And in an age of histrionics and exaggerated dives, of players clutching body parts and rolling around in fake pain that evaporates when they realize no one is buying it, Terry plays through his injuries — he has been plagued by back and ankle problems — and sometimes even courts them.

But it is the other side of Terry that people who are not Chelsea fans tend to emphasize. Along with talent, trouble has dogged him at every step: trouble with drinking, troubles with women, trouble, reportedly, with gambling. English soccer is full of young players with extreme talent, indifferent educations, big egos, rough upbringings, astronomical salaries and little understanding of how to manage all these things at once, and their teams have done little to help them. Terry is hardly the only one who gets in trouble. But Terry seems to do worse things, or to do bad things more often, or to get caught more frequently, than other players do.