Pitch Black (10 page)

As Davis established himself as a first-team regular, one of his first challenges was to work out how to negotiate the tricky political environment of the first-team dressing room. In dressing rooms, it is usually the senior professionals who dictate the prevailing culture. Working out your place within it can be a tricky task. In Davis’s case he’d been an Arsenal apprentice. This might have afforded him some knowledge of the club, its traditions and its expectations, but it couldn’t provide him with all the tools necessary to manage his integration into the team.

Firstly, his apprenticeship status could confer on him a degree of contempt from senior pros. Only months before he became a first-team regular, he had been cleaning their boots and sweeping up their changing room. Apprentices were often treated with a casual, dismissive attitude in keeping with their status and their tender years. Secondly, Arsenal
hadn’t had a black player in the side since Brendon Batson, almost a decade earlier, and Davis was the first black player to be an Arsenal regular. Very few of the first-team squad had shared a dressing room, a coach seat or a hotel room with a black person.

As the only black player on the team bus, Davis felt isolated. It wasn’t that he was deliberately made to feel unwelcome – he wasn’t – but, as with many black players, he found cultural differences between him and his teammates were exposed during dressing room chat. A discussion about rock music, for example, would be outside of Davis’s frame of reference. As he couldn’t contribute to discussions of that kind, soon he wouldn’t be invited into conversations on anything and then there would be the tricky issue of dressing room banter and racist jokes.

Within British culture and beyond, when young men from any walk of life get together, be it in a workplace or social situation, banter and having a laugh are critical. It isn’t that women don’t do this also, it’s just that for men it’s the number one priority and the essential part of their bonding process. Ridiculing each other and possessing a self-deprecating attitude are essential components of male group identity, so an inability to laugh at yourself, or a tendency to take yourself too seriously, can lead to varying levels of ostracism from the group as a whole. As such, racist behaviour and abuse can often be masked by this kind of banter.

For black players, dealing with racism in the dressing room was an ongoing war and like all wars, real or metaphorical, it’s impossible to fight every battle every time and in the same way. Players who adopted this approach would eventually be sapped of all energy and be left horribly isolated. They would be forced to seek another strategy, be moved
on, be starved of playing opportunities or, in a few cases, would quit the game.

Choosing not to fight any battles at all would very rarely prove to be effective either, as invariably it would invite increasing levels of racist jokes, banter and behaviour that would often tip the scales into a world of racist bullying. The impact of this, like all bullying, would be to systematically drain the player of self-confidence, which would eventually impact on their game.

Therefore, most players had to decide which battles to fight, when to fight them and how to fight, but this also was no easy task. Sometimes it would depend on the dressing room itself. Two or three bullies in a dressing room, especially if they were senior pros, along with a manager who would not or could not provide support for a player, could make for a decidedly unhappy existence. If a player was isolated within the dressing room, it could be a thankless task to withstand the bullying. Complaining would invariably lead to accusations of a lack of mental toughness. At other times, an uneasy dressing room truce could be reached, whereby the holder of racist attitudes would tacitly agree not to express their ideas in a black player’s presence – only for wholesale dressing room changes or a transfer to another club to start the whole sorry process again.

Therefore, fighting a war in the dressing room was often a constant process of negotiation and accommodation. Players had to negotiate truces with out-and-out racists; ignorance had to be accommodated depending on upbringing, education, seniority or other factors. Just when you thought you were winning, the rules of engagement would change, requiring you to respond in new ways, and it all had to be done in the name of the team, the squad, the club and the game.

In some cases, the need to compromise your dignity and self-respect for the good of team was a one-way street. As George Berry observed,

Davis often had to deal with jokes that were very close to the knuckle and make a judgement as to when and how he would challenge racism. When it was close or it crossed the line, he’d politely but firmly tell his teammate that the joke wasn’t appreciated. He would always find the right time to confront their behaviour. Something inside him wanted to challenge: perhaps it was a by-product of the inner confidence and steely drive he’d displayed as a nine-year-old. On one occasion, he’d confronted two senior pros about a remark they had made, to which they responded with the time-honoured suggestion that Davis had ‘a chip on his shoulder’ – the default position of many when challenged to moderate their racist behaviour – but he’d earned their respect and after that he never had too many problems from teammates. He was later joined in the first-team set-up by Chris Whyte and Raphael Meade, two other black apprentices who progressed through the ranks at Arsenal at the same time as him. Their presence removed much of the sense of isolation that he felt in the dressing room and paved the way for a number of black players to join the club. This would have an impact way beyond the Arsenal dressing room.

On the international front, before the 1980s, support for the England national team on away trips was small. Supporting England was something of an anachronism for English football fans, the preserve of a small number of cranks and eccentrics. Club loyalties were the only show in town. Scotland had much more fervent support for its national side, bringing hordes of supporters south of the border for the bi-annual pilgrimage to Wembley to support their team in the Home Internationals. During the 1970s, as English clubs began to take away support to foreign fields, there were sporadic outbreaks of hooliganism involving fans of English clubs. Often, foreign police forces were far more benign than their British counterparts and were taken by surprise by the behaviour of fans. Serious outbreaks of violence involving fans of Leeds, Tottenham and Manchester United took place during European competitions. As the 1980s began and foreign travel became ever more affordable, groups of fans, who were starved of European football, began to attach themselves to the England side. England hadn’t participated in a tournament since the 1970 World Cup and so when the team qualified for the Euro 1980 competition in a new expanded format involving eight teams, it enabled a new generation of England fans to attend the tournament, held in Italy. During a first-round game between England and eventual runners-up Belgium, there was serious crowd violence in which tear gas was used and the game was held up for several minutes. Meanwhile, the demise of the far right as an electoral force stripped them of their need to maintain an air of respectability and so, opportunistically as ever, a contingent of far-right football fans hitched themselves to the national side.

Their involvement in support for England first came to prominence during an England international against France
in Paris in 1984, where there was considerable crowd trouble. The game was also notable as the match in which South African-born Brian Stein won his one and only cap. The event was followed later in the year by a tour of South America, in which National Front members travelled on the official team plane and racially abused John Barnes and Mark Chamberlain.

Before the events of 1984, hints of far-right influence amongst the England support had surfaced at an England U-21 international in Denmark in September 1982, when Cyrille Regis, Chris Whyte, Paul Davis and John Barnes were subjected to monkey noises every time they touched the ball.

The increasing number of black players winning international honours reflected the growing number coming into the game. What few discussions there were in media circles on racist abuse advanced the somewhat naïve theory that the novelty of black players into a historically white game had led to the abuse, and that a combination of time and an increase in the numbers of black players would provide the cure. The abuse, however, continued unabated. At Upton Park, Paul Davis was greeted with monkey noises, coins being thrown, bananas and spitting. He also remembered Everton, Roker Park, Sunderland and Anfield as places where a hostile reception was to be expected as standard and black players had to steel themselves in preparation for the abuse they knew was coming. Each player’s method of dealing with this would be different. For Davis, absolute concentration and focus on what he needed to do on the pitch characterised his approach. ‘Just get on with the job’, he would implore himself. To do anything else would be unprofessional. On bad days, when the team was performing poorly and they
were being soundly beaten, when thoughts would turn more towards a desire for the game to end rather than to your own futile performance, it would be harder.

Other players reacted differently. On a visit to Goodison Park, Davis’s teammate Gus Caesar faced a torrent of abuse as he went through his warm-up routine in preparation for a substitute appearance. As monkey chants, spitting and abuse rained down on him, he waved, blew kisses and slowly and provocatively went through his routine, right in front of the baying, snarling crowd. In solidarity, Arsenal fans chanted ‘Caesar, Caesar, Caesar’. From his position in front of the mob, he waved in appreciation of his fans’ support and continued to smile and blow kisses to the chanting Everton fans. They were apoplectic with rage.

Bobby Robson had been appointed England manager after the side had crashed out of the 1982 World Cup. In September of that year, silky smooth midfielder Ricky Hill of Luton Town became the first black player to make his debut for England in the Robson era. Later that year, in December, another landmark was reached when Watford’s Luther Blissett was given his debut against Luxembourg. In scoring a hat-trick, he became the first black player to score for England. In the same game, Stoke City’s Mark Chamberlain was given his first cap as a substitute and also scored in the 9–0 demolition of a hapless Luxembourg. John Barnes received the first of seventy-nine caps in May 1983, in a now defunct Home International tournament game against Northern Ireland. The following month, Danny Thomas, Coventry’s classy right-back, was given his international debut, and
Luton striker Brian Stein got his debut in a 2–0 defeat to France in Paris.

The increased number of black players began to cause some contradictory behaviour on the terraces. Where teams had no black players, levels of racism on the terraces increased whenever a black player appeared for the opposition. Where black players became team regulars and were therefore subjected to a level of idolisation that came with playing for their team, two broad responses developed. At some, racism began to disappear, while at others, black players on opposing teams continued to be abused despite the fact that the fans had black players in their side. Where the latter occurred, black players on the home side seemed to be afforded some sort of ‘honorary white’ status, which allowed them to be accepted almost in spite of their blackness. Millwall fans had always practised this racist double standard. Trevor Lee and Phil Walker were lauded while opposition black players were abused. Later, when John Fashanu was leading the line at the Den, the same pattern would play itself out. Racist abuse meted out to opposition black players; hero worship for their own black players. At these clubs, in the eyes of those supporters, wearing the shirt rendered black players as somehow transcending their blackness. This status was neither black nor white, but afforded those black players with some of the ‘privileges’ of being white. These ‘privileges’ were, firstly, adoration for wearing the shirt and, secondly and most importantly, freedom from racist abuse. However, a misplaced pass, a mistake or a poor performance would see this status removed and they could instantly be reduced to the subhuman level of the black players on the opposition team. At West Ham, Bobby Barnes was honoured in a similar way. The Upton Park faithful nicknamed him
‘Superwog’, a kind of ‘new and improved’ or ‘gold standard’ black. Opposition black players were just the normal, ordinary, inferior species.

At times, this type of racism could be the most disturbing, as Brian Woolnough recalled in his book
Black Magic:

However, at Chelsea, this honorary status wasn’t bestowed upon Paul Canoville. He was treated with outright hostility by his own fans. Chelsea’s racist following was well known around the country, and within the club it was feared to the point where it affected team selection. At the start of the 1982/83 season, manager John Neal said, ‘I can’t just throw the coloured kids in.’

Despite growing up in west London, as a child, Canoville had supported the Leeds United side of Giles, Clarke, Bremner and especially Peter Lorimer, who was famous for his 70 mph shot. Amongst some bizarre 1970s football fashions, one item that has been held in almost universal admiration was the set of sock garters with team numbers on them that was worn by Leeds in the early 1970s. Canoville had begged his mother to get some and, after weeks of him haranguing her, she got him a pair. He proudly modelled them at the first opportunity at an impromptu football game, gaining the envy and admiration of his friends, and swiftly had them stolen.