I do feel bitter about what Big Ron said. I felt so despondent and upset that every black player who had ever played for him came out and said ‘Ron’s no racist’. They dragged out Brendan Batson and Cyrille Regis because he had played the two of them at West Brom. That is what really narked me. All these people coming out and saying ‘yes, he said these things, but he’s not a racist’. I’m desperately disappointed in people like Carlton Palmer and Viv Anderson. If they are friends of his, that’s fine. If he has been good to them, that’s fine, too. But don’t use that to try to excuse what he said.
These were people that I grew up admiring and for them to align themselves with someone who has said what Big Ron said is just not good enough. Brendan Batson is at the FA. It makes you wonder about the work Kick Racism Out of Football has been doing. They have made some important strides but there is still an awful lot to be done, not least in trying to eradicate this natural deference that some former black players still seem to feel towards a racist like Ron Atkinson.
The only two people who summed up the outrage most black people felt were Robbie Earle and Ian Wright. Robbie Earle, who worked with Big Ron regularly on ITV, said that he had always valued their professional relationship but that he could not excuse or forgive what he had said. Wrighty mentioned that Atkinson’s words had carried a ‘plantation vibe’ and he was spot on there. When I heard what Big Ron had said, it made me think of a redneck sitting on a verandah in his rocking chair with a piece of straw coming out of his mouth.
And yet, in the newspapers a lot of the columnists and the feature writers didn’t touch the Big Ron stuff after the initial story. They joked about it a bit but it was almost as if a lot of them felt uncomfortable with it, as though they were going to be hypocritical if they slaughtered him too much, as if they were going to be attacking one of their own. Every feature that I read held out the prospect of him being welcomed back with open arms in a few months when all the fuss has died down. And believe me, he will get chance after chance after chance.
Let’s not forget it wasn’t so long ago when Alf Garnett was on our television screens talking about ‘yer blacks’ and ‘yer darkies’. It wasn’t so long ago when racists were posting abusive notes through my mum’s letterbox at our house in Cannock. Then, when a public figure comes out and uses language like that, you wonder if it has really gone away; if we ever really had become a more tolerant society, or if that kind of attitude is just lurking beneath the surface like the pus in a boil.
I don’t want to brand Big Ron an evil man. But let’s not be embarrassed to say we were deeply offended by what he said. Let’s move on. It’s 2004. Make yourself realise that black people have got two arms, two legs, a nose and a mouth and they are no more of a threat than the man from the moon. And most of all, let’s not dress Atkinson up as some pioneer for racial integration who made one uncharacteristic slip. Don’t forget, he branded Batson, Regis and the late Laurie Cunningham ‘The Three Degrees’ after the famous black pop-group. They were favourites of Prince Charles. The singers, I mean, not the football players. Anyway, not exactly the actions of an enlightened manager. In fact, about as patronising and pathetic as you can get.
Okay, so he played them in his team. So what? I read a few articles in the press after Atkinson had called Desailly ‘a thick, fat, lazy nigger’ that said he had changed the world just by putting Batson, Regis and Cunningham in the side. I couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that someone could seriously think that; that someone could be that stupid. Changed the world? Come on, please. We’re not talking about Jackie Robinson or Muhammad Ali here.
Think about the premise of those newspaper articles. The black players break through but it’s the white man who’s changed the world. That’s the worst kind of lazy, limited, institutionalised, traditional racist thinking. Give the credit to the white boss, not to the black kids who have had to fight their way through the system to even get to that point. Trying to give the credit to Atkinson for that is like giving a white promoter credit for Ali or a white baseball coach credit for Jackie Robinson. It’s bollocks.
Ron Atkinson, a pioneer. Excuse me while I retch. We’re not talking about Tommie Smith and John Carlos and the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympic Games. These were men with real balls, not some champagne-swilling, perma-tanned prick. We’re not talking about a blow for freedom and equality. We’re not talking anything even remotely in that league. To suggest otherwise is offensive in itself. Atkinson didn’t even sign two of West Brom’s famous three. It’s not as if he went out on a limb. It’s not as if he put himself on the line to pick them. There wasn’t an outcry, but there certainly would have been if he hadn’t picked them. That’s the point. English football in the late Seventies may not have been particularly tolerant but it wasn’t exactly the segregationalist Deep South. What Big Ron did wasn’t even in the same ballpark as Graeme Souness signing Mo Johnston, a Catholic, to play for Rangers. That was courage. That was balls.
Big Ron just did what was best for him professionally. He did what served his interests and his career. And he obviously didn’t feel totally comfortable with it because he had to make a joke out of it by calling them ‘The Three Degrees’. Those three players were so far ahead of anything else they had at West Brom that it was blatantly obvious to anyone on the terraces that they would improve that side beyond all recognition. It was a business decision. The idea that it was a social experiment is utterly flawed. So let’s not have racist apologists dressing it up as a decision that changed the world.
I was lucky that in my time in football I was only the victim of serious, foul racial abuse once in my career. But when I joined Crystal Palace from Stafford Rangers for £100,000 in November 1990, a few months after they had lost the FA Cup final to Manchester United in a replay, I found myself at a club that was only just emerging from a period of deep racial tension, and one that was still split down the middle, white on one side, black on the other.
Four or five years before that, when Ian Wright first joined the club, there was a group of English rednecks there, led by people like Micky Droy, the former Chelsea centre half, who was a giant of a man, and Jim Cannon. Black players who were there at the time said there were a lot of obstacles to overcome, but because they were from the street the white guys couldn’t break them. That was how bad things were not so long ago.
Andy Gray, the black Andy Gray who played for Palace and Spurs, was there in those days and still there when I arrived. He remembered Cannon and Droy rubbing Wrighty’s face in the mud during training as a matter of routine. They were always calling the black lads ‘nigger’ and ‘black bastard’. They seemed to think they could treat them how they wanted.
One day, after the abuse had been particularly bad, Palace played a match at Brighton’s Goldstone Ground, and Andy Gray, who reminds me of someone out of Public Enemy because he’s a radical Black Power man, urged the other black lads to walk off in protest, to boycott the game. That would have made a statement, but not one of them, not Wrighty or Mark Bright, turned round and said a thing.
In the phalanx of black lads at Palace there was Wrighty, Brighty, John Salako, Eric Young, Andy Gray and a kid called Bobby Bowry. They were all Londoners. They all used a kind of Brixton patois that was alien to me. I’d never been exposed to black culture before and suddenly here were all these guys kissing their teeth and chilling out. For a while, to try and imitate them, I asked my girlfriend, Lotta, if she’d cook me rice and peas for my meal when I got home. I got boiled rice and green peas, which wasn’t quite the way the other boys ate it.
On the other side there was Gareth Southgate and his mate, the Del Boy of a reserve goalkeeper, Andy Woodman. There was Andy Thorn and Alan Pardew, who was fiercely ambitious even then, and Geoff Thomas, who I never liked because