Post by QPR Report on Feb 13, 2010 7:08:46 GMT
In one article, a reminder of all he is!
The Times
The rise and fall of John Terry
‘As a footballer you get thrown a lot of things and you have to come out and put a brave face on it even though inside you could be burning up’
Robert Crampton
When I first saw John Terry in the flesh, he wasn’t (some would say appropriately) wearing a great deal. Just a pair of shorts, in fact. He was having his picture taken in the dressing room of AFC Wimbledon, a non-league club in southwest London. The occasion was the launch of a new England kit. I’d come to interview him, an interview arranged through the kit’s manufacturer, and one of Terry’s sponsors, Umbro.
This was shortly before Terry’s face jumped from the back to the front pages and he became, for a fortnight, the most vilified man in Britain. Portrayed as arrogant, greedy, dishonest, philandering, Terry has been held up as symptomatic of all that is wrong with football and, by extension, all that is wrong with the country. Stripped of the England captaincy, abused from the terraces and the newsstands, Terry is now reportedly desperately trying to save his marriage.
Over the years I have interviewed a fair few footballers. Some (Ryan Giggs) I’ve liked, some (Ruud Gullit, Alan Shearer) I have disliked, and some (Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Andrew Cole) I’ve been fairly neutral about. Needless to say, taken together, they are not symptomatic of anything much; they’re just young men good at doing one thing.
Next to Giggs, Terry was probably the best company of the bunch. It’s worth saying that, unlike some of the footballers I ended up, after protracted negotiations, not interviewing, Terry didn’t demand payment for his time.
A good deal of Terry’s likeability came from his observance of the rules of simple human decency, an observance not always honoured, when we met, by some of the men listed above, some of whom gave every impression they did not care whether this latest intrusion into their cosseted existence lived or died. Terry, by contrast, shook hands, listened, gave me my agreed time (an hour), was solicitous of the various other people hanging around.
And the less important they were, the more solicitous he was, which is usually a good sign. There was a boy, Josh, about 12 years old, in the room, grandson of a local man who helped out at the club. Terry’s attentiveness towards Josh went above and beyond the call: autographs, pictures, “How you getting on at school?” etc. “Gianfranco Zola once said to me, one day fans ain’t gonna want your autograph, that’s when you have to worry. I took that advice on board.”
Another thing I liked about Terry – and this will sound strange – was his candour. I asked him if he’d like to be manager of Chelsea one day, and rather than hedging around he said, “I’d love to be, yeah.” I asked who was the most important player for England, and rather than waffling about “the lads”, he said what we all know. “It’s got to be Wayne [Rooney, not Bridge], hasn’t it?”
I asked how many caps he could realistically win (he has 59 so far, at the age of 29) and he said straight out, “I’d like to get to 100. That’s my target. I’ve got six goals. I want to get that tally up, too.” These sound like small matters, but most footballers are so terrified of controversy, and these encounters are conducted in such an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, that they usually speak in bolted-together platitudes. So Terry’s straightforwardness was refreshing.
And there was another quality which made me warm to him, which was his vulnerability. He really wanted that kid Josh to think well of him. He has the sort of face which looks as if he’s about to burst into tears. He has a puppyish, eager-to-please air. I felt he wanted me to like him, and, as is usually the case in that circumstance, I did. He didn’t want me to fear or revere him as many of these young sportsmen require, but rather go away thinking he was an all right guy, not just so I’d be nice about him in print, but because he needs people to think well of him.
Maybe this vulnerability is what appeals to the women in Terry’s life (no doubt the Bentley, the mansion in Surrey and the supposed £8 million a year play their part, too). Tears seem to course through his life. He cried when he missed the penalty that would have won the European Cup for his club. During our interview, when he spoke about his mum and dad, his eyes filled up. I’ll bet he cried when Capello sacked him eight days ago. He loves England, is an unashamed old-fashioned patriot. “I love the food, the summers, the winters too, the passion of the people.” When he’s on holiday – usually Dubai or Portugal – he says he feels homesick after a while.
He admitted to choking up “over lots of things. I’m probably quite soppy when I’m at home. There’s a TV programme in America about families with no money, it brings tears to my eyes. I’m not embarrassed to say, just because I’m in the limelight, I don’t have feelings just like anyone else.” Rather more feelings than most people, is my guess.
After the photo session, Terry and I sat down opposite each other across a scuffed table in the bar. Terry told me he used to ballboy here for Chelsea reserves. A public relations man from Umbro sat next to Terry. I asked him not to, but they’re fearful, these guys, fearful of what the journalist will ask, fearful of what their clients will say. He stayed put.
A dozen other figures milled about in the background. There are always a lot of people fawning around footballers at these interviews, laughing at their jokes, fetching and carrying, trying to make themselves useful. The hanger-on problem is worse, much worse in my experience, than with either major Hollywood actors or global rock superstars. That said, much has been written about the poor quality of Terry’s “advisers” in recent weeks, but this entourage didn’t seem any dodgier or more sycophantic than the usual crew. Perhaps the seriously amateurish acolytes had stayed away.
He was wearing a fleecy grey tracksuit and drank a cup of tea, milk one sugar. I said that while he is an extrovert on the pitch, shouting, cajoling, a real Captain Marvel type, in person he doesn’t seem like that at all. “No, I’m not actually,” he said in his very quiet Cockney voice, the sort of accent that pronounces “after” as “artah”.
There was a wheedling strain in Terry’s voice. It even reminded me of certain small-time crooks I’ve met, trying to get round you, trying to impress. There is something Dickensian, something of the urchin, about Terry, a middle-ranking member of the gang, not loveable enough to be the Artful Dodger, not innocent enough to be Oliver, not nasty enough to be Bill Sikes, not clever enough to be Fagin. Not an unpleasant man, but with a character marked by weakness rather than strength, not at all the dependable rock his leadership style might suggest.
We talked at length about his lifestyle, and obviously, in the light of what we know now, much of what he said, especially about his wife, Toni Poole, a former beauty therapist and now full-time mother, takes on a poignant (or hilarious, or skanky-lying-bastard, depending on your point of view) tone.
“I probably don’t go out as much as I should do with my wife. She tells me a lot we should go out more. I’m away with football a lot, so when I get home I just really enjoy being at home, and it’s a case of having to get that balance with my marriage as well, keeping the wife happy, keeping the kids happy, making sure everything runs smoothly.”
Talking about his three-year-old twins, he paid tribute to his wife’s maternal abilities. “We had numerous offers of people coming in and helping out with the kids, but it was something my wife didn’t want. She wanted to take it on herself. We didn’t have nannies. My wife does it all when I’m not there. It’s getting easier now, but there was a time when they were younger and I’d be away and she’d be doing it all herself, getting up in the night and feeding them.”
Speaking of his life at home in Oxshott, Surrey, Terry painted a picture of domestic routine and happiness. “Up at 7am when the kids give me a nudge, take them to their nursery, Montessori, about 10, into training, then pick up the kids at 3pm, out in the garden with the kids, they both love football, the boy and the gel, dinner about half five, 6, bath at 7. Nine times out of ten I’ll get in the bath with them, then get myself in my pyjamas and put my feet up, get ready for a bit of EastEnders. I just try to enjoy them and give all my time to the kids really. That’s a normal day.”
There won’t, one feels, be many such normal days for some time to come. If he tries to watch too much football on the TV, he said, “I get told off by the missus.” One suspects watching too much football will be the least of her complaints at the moment.
Terry had some well-documented drink-fuelled incidents as a younger man: insulting American tourists in a hotel bar at Heathrow in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; urinating in a pint glass in a nightclub; a charge of affray (he was acquitted) involving a bouncer. Now, he says, fatherhood and an awareness of his encroaching mortality as a footballer (and probably the influence of José Mourinho when he was manager at Chelsea) have seen him clean up that particular act. It occurs to me now he might have replaced alcohol with sex.
“The kids have helped me grow up quite a bit, something which I probably needed?There was a stage when I first got in the first team when after a game I’d be out on a Saturday night and have a good few drinks.” Now, however, his most recent taste of alcohol, he said, was at Christmas. “One sip of champagne to be polite, then pushed it to the middle of the table. If I go for a nice meal with my wife, I’ll have one glass of wine and that’ll do me. I just enjoy being able to appreciate nice restaurants with my wife, who’s stuck by me for a long time now.”
He does not socialise much with his team-mates, he says, either at Chelsea or England, although many are friends. “Wayne, Rio, Michael Carrick, Bridgey, who I know from Chelsea anyway. We all get on well, send the odd text, the odd call, ‘How’s the family?’” I don’t suppose there have been many calls or texts to Wayne Bridge in recent days.
We talked about his background in Barking, East London, though he considers himself an Essex boy. He was born in 1980. His father, Ted, was a forklift driver in a yard near the Thames Barrier, his mother, Sue, worked in an old people’s home. He has an elder brother, Paul, also a professional footballer. They lived in a council maisonette on the Thames View estate. “All the family was out of the East End, basically lived on the one estate, my grandparents grew up there and had a house round the corner.”
The dominant figure for Terry seems to have been his dad. It usually is for footballers. As with many successful pros, the father had played to a reasonable standard (trials for West Ham, the local club) but, for whatever reason, Ted never made it. “He enjoyed going out rather than knuckling down. He drummed it into us, me and my brother, to crack on, get our heads down, work hard every day, which is what we done.”
Like most footballers, Terry justifies his huge salary now by the sacrifices he has had to make. “I used to get a lot of stick off me mates. They were going to the pub or clubbing at 15, 16, doing drugs and smoking puff... But I was never one to be influenced by anyone. I’ve never tried drugs to this day. Never smoked cigarettes, never, not once.” He said he would play for nothing. “I didn’t complain when I was on £46 a week as a YTS and I certainly won’t complain now. I’ve got a family to feed.”
Terry showed exceptional talent on the pitch from an early age. At eight years old he recalls “West Ham coming to watch me play and taking my mum and dad out for dinner”. He was also courted by Manchester United, “and in the end it was between them and Chelsea, but from day one when I trained at Chelsea I loved it and said to my dad, ‘I wanna sign for Chelsea.’”
His father, he admitted, was a strict taskmaster. “I had a bad injury about 12 years old, was out of football for a year. I had a lot of rehab. I remember my dad tying a 1kg bag of sugar to my foot and telling me to do 100 leg raises with it on. I got to about 50 and wanted to rest, and my dad said, ‘If you want to be a professional footballer, this is what the pros have to do, get yourself back fit.’ I remember at times being in tears, but after 50 the next night I got to 60, by the end of the week I was doing 100. So my dad was pushy but about all the right things.
“The amount of times my dad would tell me I’d had a bad game when I was younger,” Terry went on. “I’d be in tears but definitely it’s made my character and taught me how to deal with things. As a footballer you get thrown a lot of things and you have to come out and put a brave face on it even though inside you could be burning up.”
Terry is known as an almost comically courageous player, frequently putting his face in among the boots, sustaining bloody head wounds, playing through pain and injury. “I wouldn’t go out there half-fit but there have been times when I’ve gone out there 75 per cent fit,” he admitted. “Ideally, it don’t matter about myself, in five or ten years’ time no one’s gonna worry about me, but the fans are still going to worry about Chelsea Football Club.” Such an attitude, of course, is why he is so revered at Stamford Bridge. It also speaks of a self-destructive nature.
“I’ve read a few stories saying I may struggle with this or that in 10 or 15 years’ time ’cos I do put myself on the line, but at the minute I feel good.” Was he a courageous player as a kid? “Yeah, yeah. Probably got that from my dad – he was wholehearted and always taught me to go in fully committed.” Terry’s relish for a physical battle is almost pathological. He likes coming up against “old-fashioned centre forwards? Give ’em a kick and they give me one back. The amount of time Kevin Davies [the famously combative Bolton striker] has given me a whack in the eye! Big black eye the next day!”
Money, he says, was tight when he was growing up, the obvious explanation for why he seems to want to scoop up so much of it now. “Sometimes I didn’t have my dinner money for school [Eastbury Comprehensive, Barking] and had to go in to ask the headmaster for a dinner ticket. It made me determined to do well for myself.”
His parents split up when he was 15. He stayed with his mum and saw his dad at weekends. “Things were difficult at times. When my dad was working long hours they didn’t really see each other. Like all families they had a lot of big rows.” His mother, he said, is more relaxed than his dad. “Still to this day I’ve really respected what they done. I know since they’ve both had things in the papers that have not been good things, but at the same time you can never choose your parents and I’ll always love them.”
The “things in the papers” he’s referring to are his mother’s arrest and caution (along with his mother-in-law) for shoplifting from Tesco and Marks & Spencer in 2009 and his father’s alleged sale of three grams of cocaine to an undercover reporter from the News of the World last autumn.
“Let’s steer away from that whole topic!” interjected the PR guy. “It was me that brought it up,” said Terry, mildly. “As parents they worked their socks off. Even now I have conversations with my mum that at Christmas they would get themselves into debt so me and my brother could have the new football kit.” Later, he pleaded, “Just be sensitive on my mum and dad.”
The relevance of these parental misdemeanours is surely that they confirm a wide risk-taking streak in the family. With a son who adores you earning £170,000 a week, basic, you hardly need to be out nicking cat food or dealing charlie in the pub, unless it’s for the thrills. And the son – driving in broad daylight to meet his mistress in his Bentley, seducing other girls in front of team-mates, gripped by the lure of high-stakes gambling as well – clearly exhibits the same reckless personality. Yet recklessness doesn’t necessarily mean a man is arrogant or cruel or symptomatic of a society gone to the dogs. It means he is deluded as to the likely consequences of his actions. Either that or at some level he welcomes the chaos his actions cause.
And it might also mean, in John Terry’s case, that he’s none too bright. I’m not one of those people (there are many) who think that just because you earn a living playing football, probably from a working-class background, probably of limited educational attainment, then that must mean you’re thick. More often than not, when you meet successful sportsmen, or musicians, or other people who, having made it big very young, had a truncated education, you’re struck by how bright, how shrewd and streetwise they are.
That was not the case with John Terry. He didn’t seem bright, or shrewd, or streetwise, although he likes to claim, playing to the crafty East Ender stereotype, that he is the last two. But his actions are not those of a shrewd, streetwise character. Streetwise is not getting yourself in a situation of offering sneak trips around Chelsea’s training grounds for £10,000 in cash. Streetwise is working out that in the long run, being a respected captain of England will be more remunerative than milking your position for a few quid short-term. Streetwise is knowing when you’ve cocked up, apologising, moving on.
Just because you were born on a council estate doesn’t automatically make you shrewd, any more than it automatically makes you lazy or thick. Far from streetwise, Terry’s crass attempts at entrepreneurship, which are probably what cost him the captaincy more than his affair, were naive in the extreme. Idiotic, really, to tout your executive box at Wembley out for hire and think this might not come to public attention. And that when it does, you will look bad.
Anyway, that’s all over now. He might, if his body holds out, get his 100 caps. And his ten goals. And he might, even, given a lot of luck and a lot of Wayne Rooney, get to lift the World Cup in South Africa this summer. But he won’t be lifting it as captain. He won’t be the heir to Bobby Moore. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that moment,” he told me. “I’ve fantasised about lifting the World Cup, of course I have. I’m only human.” Indeed so. I almost feel a little sorry for him. Almost.
The new Umbro England away kit goes on sale on March 3 (umbro.com)
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/international/article7020356.ece
The Times
The rise and fall of John Terry
‘As a footballer you get thrown a lot of things and you have to come out and put a brave face on it even though inside you could be burning up’
Robert Crampton
When I first saw John Terry in the flesh, he wasn’t (some would say appropriately) wearing a great deal. Just a pair of shorts, in fact. He was having his picture taken in the dressing room of AFC Wimbledon, a non-league club in southwest London. The occasion was the launch of a new England kit. I’d come to interview him, an interview arranged through the kit’s manufacturer, and one of Terry’s sponsors, Umbro.
This was shortly before Terry’s face jumped from the back to the front pages and he became, for a fortnight, the most vilified man in Britain. Portrayed as arrogant, greedy, dishonest, philandering, Terry has been held up as symptomatic of all that is wrong with football and, by extension, all that is wrong with the country. Stripped of the England captaincy, abused from the terraces and the newsstands, Terry is now reportedly desperately trying to save his marriage.
Over the years I have interviewed a fair few footballers. Some (Ryan Giggs) I’ve liked, some (Ruud Gullit, Alan Shearer) I have disliked, and some (Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard, Robbie Fowler, Andrew Cole) I’ve been fairly neutral about. Needless to say, taken together, they are not symptomatic of anything much; they’re just young men good at doing one thing.
Next to Giggs, Terry was probably the best company of the bunch. It’s worth saying that, unlike some of the footballers I ended up, after protracted negotiations, not interviewing, Terry didn’t demand payment for his time.
A good deal of Terry’s likeability came from his observance of the rules of simple human decency, an observance not always honoured, when we met, by some of the men listed above, some of whom gave every impression they did not care whether this latest intrusion into their cosseted existence lived or died. Terry, by contrast, shook hands, listened, gave me my agreed time (an hour), was solicitous of the various other people hanging around.
And the less important they were, the more solicitous he was, which is usually a good sign. There was a boy, Josh, about 12 years old, in the room, grandson of a local man who helped out at the club. Terry’s attentiveness towards Josh went above and beyond the call: autographs, pictures, “How you getting on at school?” etc. “Gianfranco Zola once said to me, one day fans ain’t gonna want your autograph, that’s when you have to worry. I took that advice on board.”
Another thing I liked about Terry – and this will sound strange – was his candour. I asked him if he’d like to be manager of Chelsea one day, and rather than hedging around he said, “I’d love to be, yeah.” I asked who was the most important player for England, and rather than waffling about “the lads”, he said what we all know. “It’s got to be Wayne [Rooney, not Bridge], hasn’t it?”
I asked how many caps he could realistically win (he has 59 so far, at the age of 29) and he said straight out, “I’d like to get to 100. That’s my target. I’ve got six goals. I want to get that tally up, too.” These sound like small matters, but most footballers are so terrified of controversy, and these encounters are conducted in such an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, that they usually speak in bolted-together platitudes. So Terry’s straightforwardness was refreshing.
And there was another quality which made me warm to him, which was his vulnerability. He really wanted that kid Josh to think well of him. He has the sort of face which looks as if he’s about to burst into tears. He has a puppyish, eager-to-please air. I felt he wanted me to like him, and, as is usually the case in that circumstance, I did. He didn’t want me to fear or revere him as many of these young sportsmen require, but rather go away thinking he was an all right guy, not just so I’d be nice about him in print, but because he needs people to think well of him.
Maybe this vulnerability is what appeals to the women in Terry’s life (no doubt the Bentley, the mansion in Surrey and the supposed £8 million a year play their part, too). Tears seem to course through his life. He cried when he missed the penalty that would have won the European Cup for his club. During our interview, when he spoke about his mum and dad, his eyes filled up. I’ll bet he cried when Capello sacked him eight days ago. He loves England, is an unashamed old-fashioned patriot. “I love the food, the summers, the winters too, the passion of the people.” When he’s on holiday – usually Dubai or Portugal – he says he feels homesick after a while.
He admitted to choking up “over lots of things. I’m probably quite soppy when I’m at home. There’s a TV programme in America about families with no money, it brings tears to my eyes. I’m not embarrassed to say, just because I’m in the limelight, I don’t have feelings just like anyone else.” Rather more feelings than most people, is my guess.
After the photo session, Terry and I sat down opposite each other across a scuffed table in the bar. Terry told me he used to ballboy here for Chelsea reserves. A public relations man from Umbro sat next to Terry. I asked him not to, but they’re fearful, these guys, fearful of what the journalist will ask, fearful of what their clients will say. He stayed put.
A dozen other figures milled about in the background. There are always a lot of people fawning around footballers at these interviews, laughing at their jokes, fetching and carrying, trying to make themselves useful. The hanger-on problem is worse, much worse in my experience, than with either major Hollywood actors or global rock superstars. That said, much has been written about the poor quality of Terry’s “advisers” in recent weeks, but this entourage didn’t seem any dodgier or more sycophantic than the usual crew. Perhaps the seriously amateurish acolytes had stayed away.
He was wearing a fleecy grey tracksuit and drank a cup of tea, milk one sugar. I said that while he is an extrovert on the pitch, shouting, cajoling, a real Captain Marvel type, in person he doesn’t seem like that at all. “No, I’m not actually,” he said in his very quiet Cockney voice, the sort of accent that pronounces “after” as “artah”.
There was a wheedling strain in Terry’s voice. It even reminded me of certain small-time crooks I’ve met, trying to get round you, trying to impress. There is something Dickensian, something of the urchin, about Terry, a middle-ranking member of the gang, not loveable enough to be the Artful Dodger, not innocent enough to be Oliver, not nasty enough to be Bill Sikes, not clever enough to be Fagin. Not an unpleasant man, but with a character marked by weakness rather than strength, not at all the dependable rock his leadership style might suggest.
We talked at length about his lifestyle, and obviously, in the light of what we know now, much of what he said, especially about his wife, Toni Poole, a former beauty therapist and now full-time mother, takes on a poignant (or hilarious, or skanky-lying-bastard, depending on your point of view) tone.
“I probably don’t go out as much as I should do with my wife. She tells me a lot we should go out more. I’m away with football a lot, so when I get home I just really enjoy being at home, and it’s a case of having to get that balance with my marriage as well, keeping the wife happy, keeping the kids happy, making sure everything runs smoothly.”
Talking about his three-year-old twins, he paid tribute to his wife’s maternal abilities. “We had numerous offers of people coming in and helping out with the kids, but it was something my wife didn’t want. She wanted to take it on herself. We didn’t have nannies. My wife does it all when I’m not there. It’s getting easier now, but there was a time when they were younger and I’d be away and she’d be doing it all herself, getting up in the night and feeding them.”
Speaking of his life at home in Oxshott, Surrey, Terry painted a picture of domestic routine and happiness. “Up at 7am when the kids give me a nudge, take them to their nursery, Montessori, about 10, into training, then pick up the kids at 3pm, out in the garden with the kids, they both love football, the boy and the gel, dinner about half five, 6, bath at 7. Nine times out of ten I’ll get in the bath with them, then get myself in my pyjamas and put my feet up, get ready for a bit of EastEnders. I just try to enjoy them and give all my time to the kids really. That’s a normal day.”
There won’t, one feels, be many such normal days for some time to come. If he tries to watch too much football on the TV, he said, “I get told off by the missus.” One suspects watching too much football will be the least of her complaints at the moment.
Terry had some well-documented drink-fuelled incidents as a younger man: insulting American tourists in a hotel bar at Heathrow in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; urinating in a pint glass in a nightclub; a charge of affray (he was acquitted) involving a bouncer. Now, he says, fatherhood and an awareness of his encroaching mortality as a footballer (and probably the influence of José Mourinho when he was manager at Chelsea) have seen him clean up that particular act. It occurs to me now he might have replaced alcohol with sex.
“The kids have helped me grow up quite a bit, something which I probably needed?There was a stage when I first got in the first team when after a game I’d be out on a Saturday night and have a good few drinks.” Now, however, his most recent taste of alcohol, he said, was at Christmas. “One sip of champagne to be polite, then pushed it to the middle of the table. If I go for a nice meal with my wife, I’ll have one glass of wine and that’ll do me. I just enjoy being able to appreciate nice restaurants with my wife, who’s stuck by me for a long time now.”
He does not socialise much with his team-mates, he says, either at Chelsea or England, although many are friends. “Wayne, Rio, Michael Carrick, Bridgey, who I know from Chelsea anyway. We all get on well, send the odd text, the odd call, ‘How’s the family?’” I don’t suppose there have been many calls or texts to Wayne Bridge in recent days.
We talked about his background in Barking, East London, though he considers himself an Essex boy. He was born in 1980. His father, Ted, was a forklift driver in a yard near the Thames Barrier, his mother, Sue, worked in an old people’s home. He has an elder brother, Paul, also a professional footballer. They lived in a council maisonette on the Thames View estate. “All the family was out of the East End, basically lived on the one estate, my grandparents grew up there and had a house round the corner.”
The dominant figure for Terry seems to have been his dad. It usually is for footballers. As with many successful pros, the father had played to a reasonable standard (trials for West Ham, the local club) but, for whatever reason, Ted never made it. “He enjoyed going out rather than knuckling down. He drummed it into us, me and my brother, to crack on, get our heads down, work hard every day, which is what we done.”
Like most footballers, Terry justifies his huge salary now by the sacrifices he has had to make. “I used to get a lot of stick off me mates. They were going to the pub or clubbing at 15, 16, doing drugs and smoking puff... But I was never one to be influenced by anyone. I’ve never tried drugs to this day. Never smoked cigarettes, never, not once.” He said he would play for nothing. “I didn’t complain when I was on £46 a week as a YTS and I certainly won’t complain now. I’ve got a family to feed.”
Terry showed exceptional talent on the pitch from an early age. At eight years old he recalls “West Ham coming to watch me play and taking my mum and dad out for dinner”. He was also courted by Manchester United, “and in the end it was between them and Chelsea, but from day one when I trained at Chelsea I loved it and said to my dad, ‘I wanna sign for Chelsea.’”
His father, he admitted, was a strict taskmaster. “I had a bad injury about 12 years old, was out of football for a year. I had a lot of rehab. I remember my dad tying a 1kg bag of sugar to my foot and telling me to do 100 leg raises with it on. I got to about 50 and wanted to rest, and my dad said, ‘If you want to be a professional footballer, this is what the pros have to do, get yourself back fit.’ I remember at times being in tears, but after 50 the next night I got to 60, by the end of the week I was doing 100. So my dad was pushy but about all the right things.
“The amount of times my dad would tell me I’d had a bad game when I was younger,” Terry went on. “I’d be in tears but definitely it’s made my character and taught me how to deal with things. As a footballer you get thrown a lot of things and you have to come out and put a brave face on it even though inside you could be burning up.”
Terry is known as an almost comically courageous player, frequently putting his face in among the boots, sustaining bloody head wounds, playing through pain and injury. “I wouldn’t go out there half-fit but there have been times when I’ve gone out there 75 per cent fit,” he admitted. “Ideally, it don’t matter about myself, in five or ten years’ time no one’s gonna worry about me, but the fans are still going to worry about Chelsea Football Club.” Such an attitude, of course, is why he is so revered at Stamford Bridge. It also speaks of a self-destructive nature.
“I’ve read a few stories saying I may struggle with this or that in 10 or 15 years’ time ’cos I do put myself on the line, but at the minute I feel good.” Was he a courageous player as a kid? “Yeah, yeah. Probably got that from my dad – he was wholehearted and always taught me to go in fully committed.” Terry’s relish for a physical battle is almost pathological. He likes coming up against “old-fashioned centre forwards? Give ’em a kick and they give me one back. The amount of time Kevin Davies [the famously combative Bolton striker] has given me a whack in the eye! Big black eye the next day!”
Money, he says, was tight when he was growing up, the obvious explanation for why he seems to want to scoop up so much of it now. “Sometimes I didn’t have my dinner money for school [Eastbury Comprehensive, Barking] and had to go in to ask the headmaster for a dinner ticket. It made me determined to do well for myself.”
His parents split up when he was 15. He stayed with his mum and saw his dad at weekends. “Things were difficult at times. When my dad was working long hours they didn’t really see each other. Like all families they had a lot of big rows.” His mother, he said, is more relaxed than his dad. “Still to this day I’ve really respected what they done. I know since they’ve both had things in the papers that have not been good things, but at the same time you can never choose your parents and I’ll always love them.”
The “things in the papers” he’s referring to are his mother’s arrest and caution (along with his mother-in-law) for shoplifting from Tesco and Marks & Spencer in 2009 and his father’s alleged sale of three grams of cocaine to an undercover reporter from the News of the World last autumn.
“Let’s steer away from that whole topic!” interjected the PR guy. “It was me that brought it up,” said Terry, mildly. “As parents they worked their socks off. Even now I have conversations with my mum that at Christmas they would get themselves into debt so me and my brother could have the new football kit.” Later, he pleaded, “Just be sensitive on my mum and dad.”
The relevance of these parental misdemeanours is surely that they confirm a wide risk-taking streak in the family. With a son who adores you earning £170,000 a week, basic, you hardly need to be out nicking cat food or dealing charlie in the pub, unless it’s for the thrills. And the son – driving in broad daylight to meet his mistress in his Bentley, seducing other girls in front of team-mates, gripped by the lure of high-stakes gambling as well – clearly exhibits the same reckless personality. Yet recklessness doesn’t necessarily mean a man is arrogant or cruel or symptomatic of a society gone to the dogs. It means he is deluded as to the likely consequences of his actions. Either that or at some level he welcomes the chaos his actions cause.
And it might also mean, in John Terry’s case, that he’s none too bright. I’m not one of those people (there are many) who think that just because you earn a living playing football, probably from a working-class background, probably of limited educational attainment, then that must mean you’re thick. More often than not, when you meet successful sportsmen, or musicians, or other people who, having made it big very young, had a truncated education, you’re struck by how bright, how shrewd and streetwise they are.
That was not the case with John Terry. He didn’t seem bright, or shrewd, or streetwise, although he likes to claim, playing to the crafty East Ender stereotype, that he is the last two. But his actions are not those of a shrewd, streetwise character. Streetwise is not getting yourself in a situation of offering sneak trips around Chelsea’s training grounds for £10,000 in cash. Streetwise is working out that in the long run, being a respected captain of England will be more remunerative than milking your position for a few quid short-term. Streetwise is knowing when you’ve cocked up, apologising, moving on.
Just because you were born on a council estate doesn’t automatically make you shrewd, any more than it automatically makes you lazy or thick. Far from streetwise, Terry’s crass attempts at entrepreneurship, which are probably what cost him the captaincy more than his affair, were naive in the extreme. Idiotic, really, to tout your executive box at Wembley out for hire and think this might not come to public attention. And that when it does, you will look bad.
Anyway, that’s all over now. He might, if his body holds out, get his 100 caps. And his ten goals. And he might, even, given a lot of luck and a lot of Wayne Rooney, get to lift the World Cup in South Africa this summer. But he won’t be lifting it as captain. He won’t be the heir to Bobby Moore. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about that moment,” he told me. “I’ve fantasised about lifting the World Cup, of course I have. I’m only human.” Indeed so. I almost feel a little sorry for him. Almost.
The new Umbro England away kit goes on sale on March 3 (umbro.com)
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/international/article7020356.ece