A team-mate had described me as a lost soul who seemed happier away from people. Goodness knows what others were thinking. I had been neglecting my family, to the point where I could not be bothered to pick up the phone and speak to Mum and Dad and see how they were, or to tell them when I was injured. My attitude was that they would find out soon enough on teletext.
I like people to be comfortable, but I hadn’t made the effort to make those around me feel that way. Fortunately I realised before it was too late. Fortunately those around me stuck by me: my family, my friends – particularly Paul Grayson and Nick Beal – and my girlfriend Joanne. Which is why as I stood in the middle of the pitch inside the Olympic Stadium, my thoughts were not for me and for what I had achieved. The medal around my neck was for all those who had contributed to getting me there.
My story is a tale of ups and downs, of triumph and despair, of happiness and sadness, of being revered and reviled. Looking back it feels like I have lived nine lives, rather than just the one. But I wouldn’t swap it for the world; nor the people around me.
They didn’t hear the first knock. The radio was on and Dad was up a ladder. Mum was up to her arms in wallpaper paste, her stare locked on the pattern taking shape before her eyes in the upstairs bedroom.
It came again. More urgent this time. Ra-ta-tat-tat. Dad looked at Mum for a clue as to who it could be. We had only been in the house a week. We didn’t know anyone. Mum crept to the window and peered down. All of a sudden she froze.
‘Oh my God, Ron. It’s Matthew.’
Dad shot down the stairs to the hall where packing cases stood piled on top of one another, still half full after the move south from Birkenhead to Blackfield in Hampshire, where Dad’s new job had brought us. He opened the front door, and there, standing on the doorstep in front of him, was a lad wearing a motorcycle helmet. But this was no pizza delivery; in his arms was a distraught five-year-old. Me.
Our new home was at the end of a little lane on the edge of the New Forest. The day was warm and bright, and my sister Emma and I had been playing on our pushbikes up and down the leafy lane. You could not imagine a safer place to be. At least until the scooter hit me.
The shaken rider handed me over to Dad. I had a broken collarbone and a gashed head. He was all apologies, insisting I had come out of nowhere and he’d had no time to react.
By now Mum, who’d followed Dad down the stairs, was frantic with worry. As we were new to the area neither of my parents knew where the hospital was. Still, they laid me across the back seat of the car and set off, hazard lights flashing and Dad waving a white handkerchief out of the driver’s window. It must have been quite a sight, as must the expression on Dad’s face when we arrived at the local hospital in Hythe to find a notice pinned to the entrance which stated that they were shut and that we needed to go to Southampton, a further half an hour away.
We laugh about it now, particularly at the memory of the lad on the scooter returning to our house a week later to present me with a Tufty Road Safety board game. But it was not remotely funny at the time. My career could have been over before it had even begun.
I was born to Ron and Lois Dawson on 31 October 1972, and almost from the day I arrived kicking and screaming into the world at Grange Mount Hospital in Birkenhead I was a worry to them. They did not know then that I would go on to have lumps knocked out of me for a living, but based on the early evidence they might well have guessed. As a toddler I never used to walk anywhere; I was always running around on my toes and falling downstairs. One day I tumbled into a wrought-iron gate and emerged with a lump on my head and the clearly visible imprint of one of the gate’s bars. Another time, I got a wine gum stuck in my throat and stopped breathing.
Dad worked shifts at Mobil Oil, and my problems always seemed to come in the evening when he was away on the two till ten beat, so it was Mum who often had the traumatic task of scooping me up in one arm while using her free hand to point Emma, three years older than me, in the direction of the car for yet another mercy dash.
He was at work the day I performed a disappearing act which so alarmed Mum that she called in the police. Mind you, I was only two and a half at the time. She had left me playing barefooted with my first girlfriend, Elspeth, on a patch of grass at the end of the cul-de-sac in which we lived. But by the time she next turned round to check on us we’d decided to walk to our nursery school, through the estate and up and over the main road using the footbridge. Mum swears she realized we were missing within seconds of us leaving. Whatever the truth, she had the police around pretty smartish. They searched our house and then Elspeth’s before combing the neighbourhood, eventually spotting the two of us walking hand in hand on the other side of the main road.
Mum nearly suffocated me with her hug when she got me home. Then she lost it a bit. She was embarrassed that so many policemen had been called out to look for me. And there was another reason for her red face: her dad, Sam Thompson, was a chief inspector with the Birkenhead Police. The following day, Grandad went into work to find a note pinned to the noticeboard with his name on it: ‘Would C.I. Thompson please keep his grandson under control and stop providing extra work for half the Birkenhead police force!’
It didn’t get any easier for Mum and Dad as I grew older. Two days before my seventh Christmas Mum was wrapping presents in the upstairs bedroom when I charged through the door with my best friend, Spencer Tuckerman, in tow to ask if we could go sledging on a snow-covered slope down the road. So keen was Mum that I didn’t see my unwrapped gifts that she nodded straight away, without thinking through the possible consequences. Half an hour later, Spencer’s mum was on the phone. ‘Lois,’ she said, ‘bad news I’m afraid. Matt’s had an accident. His face has been run over by a sledge.’ Mum arrived at the scene of the head-on smash to find Mrs Tuckerman crouched over me trying to hold my nose together and staunch the flow of blood. I was once again rushed to Casualty where I had to have 16 stitches.
In a desperate attempt to keep me out of mischief, if not harm’s way, Dad turned to rugby union, the sport he had played as a centre for the Old Boys team at Rock Ferry High School during his younger days in Birkenhead. He took me along to the Esso Social Club where a shortage of lads of my age resulted in me being thrown in with the under-10s. I was very small for that age group, so in an effort to make me look mean Dad wrapped a towelling bandage round my head. They then stuck me out on the wing in the hope that I wouldn’t get involved too much (Mum still thinks that’s the best place for me during a match).
I enjoyed the rugby, but I also loved football, which I started playing when we moved to Marlow in 1980, and it was the only sport on offer at the Holy Trinity primary school. My grandfather on Dad’s side had played for Garston Gas Works, later to become Liverpool. I supported Everton. I continued to play rugby on Sundays at Marlow RFC, where Dad coached me (he’d initially just come along to watch, but after a while standing on the touchline someone asked him to help out; he agreed, he worked hard for his certificates and coached for the next 11 years), but football was my main love and before too long I was picked up by Chelsea Boys. A Chelsea scout had seen me and Spencer playing locally for Flackwell Heath, and the pair of us were invited to play for the baby Blues. To this day, Spencer’s dad, Alec, is convinced I would have gone all the way had I stuck with it. I was a right-back, ‘fearless yet quite skilful at the same time’ in Alec’s opinion – which, of course, I value. The reports coming back to my parents also suggested I had a good chance of making it. I was very dedicated and I wanted it badly.
But by that time I had left primary school and started at the Royal Grammar School, Wycombe, where rugby was the main sport, and I had only played a handful of games for Chelsea when I got the nod from RGS that I needed to concentrate on my work and rugby rather than go to Chelsea twice a week. I was reluctant to give up football, though, even when Dad told me I had more chance of making it in rugby because ‘every kid wants to play football’.
As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t as simple as that. I was