Graeme Le Saux: Left Field. Graeme Saux Le

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ taboo.

      It started in the summer of 1991 soon after we reported back for pre-season training. I was in my first spell at Chelsea. We had what is known as ‘a strong dressing room’ – which is usually a euphemism for a group of players who were very good at dishing out a lot of stick. It was not a place for shrinking violets. The banter was flying around more than ever in those first few days back at our Harlington training ground. There was a lot of talk about where people had been for their holidays.

      I’d had a good summer. I was twenty-two and had just broken into the first team. Over the previous eighteen months, I’d got matey with two of the forerunners of Chelsea’s foreign legion: Ken Monkou and Erland Johnsen. Ken, who was originally from Surinam, had signed from Feyenoord in the spring of 1989 and we made our first-team debuts within a fortnight of each other that May. Erland, who was Norwegian, arrived from Bayern Munich the following December. During that season and the next one, the three of us became good pals.

      Erland invited Ken and me to go and visit him in Norway once the 1990/91 campaign was over. He wanted us to go and put on a few coaching sessions for some kids in a town on the border with Russia. So when the season finished, I took Ken down to Jersey, where I’d grown up. We spent a couple of days there and then we drove up through France, Belgium and Holland. Then we flew up to Norway. We had a good time. When the trip was over, Ken headed back to London, Erland went on his honeymoon around the Caribbean and I went off on holiday with my girlfriend.

      When I got back to Chelsea and the boys asked me where I’d been, I told them. Somebody – I can’t remember who – said ‘Oh, so you went camping with Ken’. There was a bit of chortling and sniggering. It got to me straight away. I was sensitive about it immediately. I bit on it. I told them we hadn’t gone camping. I told them we’d been staying in hotels. But it stuck. It became a bit of a running gag. And soon, to my horror, it was out there on the grapevine that Ken and I were an item.

      I was insecure enough as it was. I had come over from Jersey a couple of years earlier when I was eighteen and signed a professional contract. I felt isolated from the start. I didn’t belong to any of the groups or cliques I found at Chelsea. I didn’t do an apprenticeship so there was no group of lads that I’d come through the ranks with. And just because I had signed a professional contract didn’t really make me a professional footballer or part of the established group.

      There were a lot of old-school footballers there when I arrived: men like Steve Wicks, Joe McLaughlin, Colin Pates and John Bumstead. They were soon joined by lads like Vinnie Jones, who arrived at the start of that 1991/92 season from Sheffield United, Andy Townsend, John Spencer and Dennis Wise. Some of them were good guys but I never got to know them during that time. They were footballers and I was this kid fresh out of Jersey. They would go back to their homes in Hemel Hempstead or wherever it was and I would get the tube back to my digs in Burnt Oak.

      The club had stuck me in there. It was one stop away from the northern end of the Northern Line, about as far away from Harlington as you could get. It took me an hour and a half and two trains and two buses to get into training each day. It was ridiculous. It was one of these situations where the assistant manager, Gwyn Williams, knew a friend of a friend who had a spare room and was doing him a favour. But he wasn’t doing me any favours at all.

      Everybody regarded me as an outsider. I was an easy target because I didn’t fit in. The only couple of people I knew in London were students so I turned up at training with my student look. I had my jeans rolled up and my Pringle socks on and my rucksack with The Guardian in it.

      For much of my career, reading The Guardian was used as one of the most powerful symbols of how I was supposed to be weirdly different. It was pathetic really. It was used to give substance to the gossip that I was homosexual: Guardian reader equals gay boy. Some people really thought that added up. Most of the rest of them read The Sun and The Mirror and complained about how they were being stitched up all the time by those papers.

      Andy Townsend got on the bus to an away game once and saw me reading The Guardian. He picked it up and said he wanted to look at the sport. He threw it back down a couple of seconds later. ‘There’s no fucking sport in here,’ he said. The rest of the lads laughed. I tried to laugh, too, but I felt a bit embarrassed – not embarrassed enough to stop reading it and conform to what they wanted but embarrassed nonetheless. I don’t know, maybe they were just trying to help me fit in.

      By the time I broke into the first team at the end of that 1988/89 season, the other players had pigeonholed me as a bit of a loner. I wasn’t a loner. In fact, away from football I was pretty sociable. It was just that because of my background, I wasn’t what footballers regarded as typical. I got the impression they hadn’t really come across anyone like me before and that was the basis of a fair amount of stick I used to get.

      Everything that led up to the spread of the rumours that I was gay stemmed from the fact that I didn’t fit in. Teammates looked at me and thought I was a bit different, a bit odd. So I became the target of day-to-day ribbing which just got worse and worse. I’d never had any problem with bullying at school. I never had any sort of problems of that type. I wasn’t the main kid but I wasn’t unpopular. Being a pariah was new to me.

      I was sensitive and pretty naive and my greatest fault was that I stuck up for myself and took things a bit more seriously than I should have done. I reacted to jibes when I can see now that I should have just laughed them off or come back with a decent riposte. But I didn’t do that. And by the time I started to try and laugh them off, it was too late.

      Going into training became an ordeal. I was trying to get used to London, trying to get used to living away from the tight-knit community in Jersey. And I was trying to persuade myself that I really could make it as a professional footballer. All the people I was competing against seemed so much older than me. So I lived in my own world with my Walkman and my newspaper and spent my spare time discovering London, like anyone new to a big city.

      Ken and Erland used to get plenty of stick, too. This was partly because they were doing their own thing; they didn’t fit the stereotype. Foreign players had a better attitude to diet even back then. The British lads used to take the mickey out of Erland and pretend he was from a different planet just because he had a Scandinavian accent. But I had more in common with Erland and Ken, and so when the three of us went on this trip, it was manna from heaven for the piss-takers.

      I think Ken probably got some ribbing about the gay stuff. He was a good-looking guy, single, did his own thing. In the programme that season, he listed his hobbies as ‘swimming, reading and meditation’. He probably ticked some of the boxes the bigots look at; but I don’t think it ever got to the same level that it reached with me. He was guilty by association with me but that was it. The more successful I got, the more it became an issue. The focus was more on me than Ken because I gradually became more newsworthy. I was also a lot easier to rile.

      Once all the taunts about homosexuality started, Ken and I drifted apart. We stopped being friends, really. You succumb to the pressure, I think. When I left Chelsea, he went his way and I went mine. It’s not anything we ever spoke about which is quite strange in a way. None of the other players ever sympathized with me about it. I suppose they were just glad none of it was aimed at them; or perhaps the people who had initiated it felt embarrassed about it.

      I took the homosexuality stuff very seriously very quickly. In those days, if anyone thought you had the slightest hint of the effeminate about you, you were in trouble. It was such a delicate stage of my life anyway. I already felt like the odds were stacked against me without being pitched into a world of double entendres and nudging and winking about being gay. I didn’t feel comfortable in my environment unless I was playing football. But the more my supposed homosexuality became a topic of humour, the more upset about it I became. I started confronting people about it all the СКАЧАТЬ