A Book of Eli  2

     I was choked the other week. Roger and I were due to meet at the Potting Shed for another big breakfast but it was the day the snow came down in Leeds. Three miles from home at Greengates with the car all over the road and the surface compacted ice and slush (not a gritter in sight) I thought this is daft and turned back home. I’ll do a lot of crazy things for a Full English, but driving to Bingley in those conditions alas was not one of them. Fortunately the inner goodness of Mrs T took pity on me and cooked me one for lunch. The best one I ever had was sitting in a Greek harbour early one morning just as the fishing boats were coming back in and the place was waking up. It wasn’t so much the food but more the location and the feeling of utter relief that I had just taken early retirement and in September there was no more headmastering to go back to. It was way back in ’96 and the memory and image is still as vivid as ever. I remember wiping up the last runny egg yellow with a bit of crust, sitting back, sipping coffee, sighing and thinking this is utter bliss.
 
     Anyway things move on and it’s a small world. There’s a Longside Reference diary piece somewhere in which I mentioned that Mrs T and I once upon a time did Salsa dance classes and who should the teacher be but Ces Podd. For those who don’t know, Ces Podd was a landmark footballer. He’s only one of those incredibly brave black guys who took all the flak and abuse in the racist 70s and 80s from crowds that knew no better. He played at a time when a black player was rare but the insults plentiful.
 
     At Leeds where Roger started there had been Albert Johannson in the early 60s and when he arrived and entered the dressing rooms for the first time he asked where he should change. The other players asked him what he meant. There must be a separate room for me he said. I am not allowed to change with white people am I. In response, the players, the story goes, stripped him and threw him into the bath with them to show im tnat he was now one of them. From that he became the first black player to play in a Cup Final. Sadly in his final years he was destitute and forgotten with his body undiscovered in the flat for several days according to Ivan Ponting’s obituary. I used to see him every now and then shuffling up and down the street in Headingley where I lived. One thing I remember is that poor as he might have been, he was always so smartly dressed. When he left Leeds for York City it was the beginning of the end for him and the cloggers of the Fourth Division found him an easy target to terrorise and the smaller crowds made every racial insult clearer and more hurtful. The drink he took to was inevitable.
 
     Meanwhile: boy is Ces Podd a silky mover (and so am I now) and he was a damned good full-back as well and played over  500 games in all for Bradford City and I have a hunch he played against Burnley a couple of times. Role model – he invented the words, as nice a bloke as you could wish to meet, did all kinds of work to improve race relations, and still does.
 
    Anyway one of the questions I asked Roger was who were your early role models and heroes. Unfortunately he went through a list of Leeds United legends that we aren’t too fond of in Burnley, although he did include good guys like Eddie Gray. But when I asked if he had any early black heroes who should he come out with but (amongst others) the one and only Ces Podd, the others being Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham and Viv Anderson.

      So, digging out Ces’ email address I sent off a letter and asked would he be interested in meeting up sometime to chat to us. Turned out though that next time I spoke to Roger that he knows Ces well, both sons of Bradford as it were, and quite recently played football with him. Roger also can’t wait to see my smooth salsa dance moves. Boy do I glide. I’m afraid I may have exaggerated a little when I said the women there just stood and stared.  Mrs T simply sniggered.

     Racism was a huge problem and in an interview I found in an old mag Roger tells the story that as an apprentice he earned £25 a week, but on a Saturday after the game when he had to clean up the dressing rooms etc he would spend £15 on a taxi rather than walk to Leeds City Station and run the gauntlet of the Leeds United supporters amongst which were more than any fair share of racists. How much of the book will be devoted to the subject of racism isn’t clear yet, as much or as little as Roger wants. But those early black players in the 70s and 80s were amazing blokes. They created a trail for others to follow. That’s not to say there were none before that. Arthur Wharton was believed to be England’s first professional black player in 1889 and he was also a gifted athlete.
 
    Back at Leeds, not only was there the deeply entrenched racism  but Roger was there at a time when they had one of the worst, most violent sets of supporters in the country as a sort of added bonus. Grimsby, Birmingham, Millwall (naturally) were just some of the battlegrounds. The FA imposed a ban on away support at one time, but they found it impossible to implement so abandoned it although for a time all away games were all ticket. The club was so worried they expected the FA to close the ground.
 
     Roger was there when the managers were Eddie Gray and then Billy Bremner. The glory had gone, they were in the Second Division, with no money and no prospects, and followed by vile gangs of supporters who wreaked havoc everywhere they went.  After one game there were 106 known injuries. After one game, 114 fans were up before the magistrates the next week. At one ground a fish and chip van was set on fire and rolled down the terraces. It became traditional too that they would exit the FA Cup in the Third Round year after year.

     By coincidence Peter Swan was a Leeds apprentice at Leeds at the same time as Roger and in his book he describes some of the escapades the apps got up to. So, from that book I got a few ideas to pursue with Roger. There were players there such as Kenny Burns, Frank Gray, Peter Lorimer, and the one and only Frank Worthington who used to turn up for training in cowboy boots and a stetson. If you saw the celebrity Come Dine With Me that included Carlton Palmer, Frank Worthington, John Fashanu, and Razor Ruddock  you’d have seen that Frank still thinks he’s Elvis and can’t cook to save his life. It was by the way one of the most hilarious programmes I’ve ever seen.

     It was Bremner who released him from Leeds and he joined Wolves at a time when that club too was at rock bottom having just plummeted from Division One to Division Four in consecutive seasons. That’s quite an achievement. The club really feared going out of business. It was the 86/87 season when he joined and you will remember immediately “ah that was the Orient season.”

   Somewhere in an old diary I have a copy of the newspaper piece that featured the Burnley v Wolves game at Turf Moor that season and looked at it from the angle “oh how the mighty have fallen.”  In 59/60 these two clubs were the big names of English football and had slugged it out till the very last game when Burnley won 2 – 1 at Man City to win the title. From that they went to facing each other in the Fourth Division with both clubs utterly impoverished and in total decline.
 
     Roger joined them in January 87. Wolves came to Burnley and won 5 – 2. I dug out the old programme and yup there was his name in the programme pen pictures, but not on the team sheet, although he did play 18 games.

     Truth is we haven’t really started in earnest yet. A basic format and skeleton of the book is mapped out, chapters, topics and titles and what I think we can include in it. But not till we start doing for want of a better word, “interviews”, and all the stories and the detail comes out, will there be any flesh to hang on the skeleton, or will a clear picture emerge of whether the format needs to be changed.  I read somewhere that Roger might make a good stand up comedian; if there are a few laughs along the way we’ll grab them. There is a trend with football books at the moment to include a fair bit of fictional dialogue. I’ve never tried it. Why not in this one then? The tone in which it’s written is important as well. Neither of us wants something filled with expletives and sensationalism. I like the Stan Ternent book but it won’t be in that style, that’s for sure. But an Andy Payton book would fit that genre beautifully.
 
     The title certainly isn’t finalised. A Book of Eli is only the working title. I remember with the Willie Irvine book that the title was chosen at the very last minute because we couldn’t come up with anything. People often ask “whatever happened to…..?” Why not “Whatever happened to Roger Eli?”

     And something else he mentioned; it never ceases to amaze him that people will still recognise him and say “are you Roger Eli… I saw you play… “.  It happens sometimes in his business when he meets a new customer.
 
     Hmmm, memo to Roger: when that happens, charge ‘em double.

Dave Thomas Jan 11th 2011