Authors: Philippe Auclair
Exceptional as Éric’s talent was, and keen as his parents were on pushing him to the fore, his childhood was not just a long game of football played in the bosom of a proud and protective family. Marseilles might have been the country’s third largest city; but the boy’s and the teenager’s desires were more attuned to what the scrubby woodland of the nearby Garlaban had to offer – the walks, the daydreaming, the shooting parties in the company of his father. Rising at dawn, the two of them would look for ‘larks, thrushes and woodcocks’, Éric simultaneously pacified by the hush of the forest and inebriated by the scents of the undergrowth. From a very early age, silence and solitude held a strong appeal for him, an inclination which, coupled with his boisterousness and frequent explosions of temper, made him something of an enigma to his schoolmates. Christophe Galtier has described him as ‘a bit of a
poète
’ in the classroom. Éric’s mind easily drifted into a world of his own creation, with little regard for the consequences this might have on his work or on his teachers’ judgement of this unusual child. He could be charming one minute, appallingly rude the next; he wouldn’t harm anyone out of sheer viciousness, but could cause serious hurt nevertheless. One of his first football coaches is said to have been so shocked by a public attack on his tactics and team selection that he resigned his position there and then.
Yet there was always the other Éric, the playful, mischievous, exuberant Éric, who was never more in evidence than when the family uprooted from Les Caillols for the Christmas and summer holidays. The Cantonas had two favourite destinations, the Provençal Alps and the Côte Bleue, a stretch of coastline between L’Estaque and Martigues where Éric’s paternal grandparents owned a
cabanon –
a wooden hut – right on the shore of the Mediterranean. The whole family, Joseph and Lucienne included, seven people in all, crammed into a Lancia which had seen better days. The drive was mercifully short, and as soon as they had arrived the three brothers set up camp on the beach. The first object out of the boot was, more often than not, a football. Jean-Marie remembered blissful days spent diving from rocks, swimming and fishing for whatever Lucienne needed for the evening soup, then sitting round a bonfire, listening to the Gipsy guitarists who had been invited by his grandfather Joseph. Éric relished these regular escapades, which also gave him a chance to indulge his passion for scuba-diving, though not of the usual kind. Buying the requisite equipment was out of the question; but using one’s imagination cost nothing and could be just as rewarding. So Éric collected empty water bottles, and tied them together with a piece of string. Once he had thrown this apparatus on his bare shoulders, it was easy enough for him to pretend the bottles were filled with oxygen, and that he had joined the crew of Jacques Cousteau’s ship, the famous
Calypso.
Then there was art or, more precisely, painting. Albert, again, would be a perfect guide for his son through the mastery of his craft, his culture and, above all, his sensitivity. ‘He was passionate about many things,’ Cantona told
L’Équipe Magazine
in 2007. ‘He explained something to you and then he would start to cry. He gave us this passion and love for life. That’s very important: when your education is built around that, it is solid. And you can cry, even when you are a strong man. You can find something beautiful and cry simply because it is so beautiful. You can find emotion in the beauty of things and, to me, that’s love.’ Albert had obviously been a convincing teacher. Éric would sit by his side when he mixed his colours and painted brightly coloured landscapes in the style of the
école marseillaise
, with post-Impressionist Pierre Ambrogiani a favourite of both. Albert could see a bit of himself in Ambrogiani, a self-taught Provençal of working-class extraction who had worked as a postman for many years, before the patronage of Marcel Pagnol had launched a career spent exclusively in Marseilles. Albert, who also introduced Éric to Van Gogh’s work, was by all accounts ‘an accomplished amateur’, someone who had mastered his craft to a far greater degree than most Sunday brush-pushers. Éric watched, and learnt.
Judging from an early photograph, taken in his first two years at the
communale
of Les Caillols, the cherubic little boy possessed a strong sense of colour, using vivid blues and yellows eerily evocative of Joan Miró, a painter he would idolize later on. Though he never lost his admiration for the Ambrogianis of this world (his father included), his taste soon moved away from the figurative. Éric’s need for ‘expression’, and his somewhat naïve belief that ‘expression’ represented the be-all and end-all of the creative act, pushed him towards darker universes, such as the ‘spontaneous’ creations of the short-lived CoBrA school and the astonishing still-lifes of Nicolas de Staël – an inclination that should be proof enough that there was nothing pseudish about his visceral response to art. Cantona never felt much affinity with painting as production of imagery (think of Magritte); he instinctively responded far more to colour, rhythm, abruptness of manner as well as harmony of composition – in short, what is most ‘painterly’ about painting. Yes, Éric Cantona was an unusual child. So what could be done with him?
The answer lay a few miles away, at La Grande Bastide college, in the Mazargues quarter. If Éric was serious about becoming a professional soccer player, this had to be the place to put his dedication to the test. La Grande Bastide housed a
sports-études
section, which was open to talented local athletes, provided they passed a stiff admission examination (three-quarters of all applicants failed). The college’s purpose was to ensure that the natural sporting ability of its pupils could be nurtured by dedicated staff, while the children, aged twelve to fifteen, followed the national curriculum as any other student would have done in a normal secondary school. Institutions like these were dotted all over France in the 1970s and had already proved extremely successful in producing elite sportsmen, tennis players in particular. La Grande Bastide provided a superb environment for an aspiring footballer to make the transition from youth club to apprenticeship in a professional context; should he fail to make the grade, he could rely upon a solid preparation for vocational training; reintegrating into mainstream French state education was another possibility. The scholars’ routine must have seemed like paradise for Éric, who had no trouble securing a place at the college. After a couple of early lessons, mornings were set aside for training, from 11:30 to 13:00, and afternoons for study, with the odd coaching session thrown in whenever possible, which left long evenings for kickabouts in the schoolyard and weekends to terrorize whichever opposition was thrown in the path of Les Caillols. What’s more, Cantona had not just found a school ideally suited to his needs and aspirations. Luck also gave him one of the best teachers he could have been blessed with, a man who had the experience, the nous and the warmth of heart to deal with as ill-disciplined a boy as the 12-year-old prodigy was at the time.
The name of Célestin Oliver appears in few French football encyclopaedias, which says more about how little France cares about its sporting past than about what Cantona’s first real mentor had been worth both as a player and a coach. Oliver was forty-eight when Éric enrolled at La Grande Bastide and had retained much of the athleticism that had made him one of the main artisans of Sedan’s rise to the elite of French football in the late fifties. He won the French Cup with them in 1956, just one year after
Les Sangliers
(‘The Wild Boars’) had achieved promotion. A lean, muscular midfielder who could look after himself on the pitch (his black belt in judo might have given him a measure of protection), he had travelled with the French national squad to the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, together with far more celebrated players like Just Fontaine, Raymond Kopa and Roger Piantoni. There, the first ‘golden generation’ French football had ever known gave a perennially under-achieving sporting nation its first taste of international success. This group of players finished in an unhoped-for third place in the tournament, and everyone was of the opinion that they alone had provided a genuine threat to Brazil, the future world champions. Oliver himself hadn’t played. His talent was not in doubt (he had featured in two of the qualifiers), but squad rotation and substitutions weren’t part of the game in those days. Once back in France, after three disappointing seasons with Marseille, and a further three years spent with Angers and Toulon, he turned his hand to coaching, and had just left second-division Toulon for La Grande Bastide when ‘the player who gave [him] the most pleasure in [his] life, an absolute joy to coach’ stormed into his school. And ‘storm’ is no hyperbole.
When I met the dapper, elderly gentleman his friends call ‘Tico’ and everyone else ‘Monsieur Oliver’, age and illness hadn’t dampened the impression the youngster made on him when they were first introduced to each other. We were sitting a stone’s throw away from his ‘home from home’, the Stade Vélodrome, at one of the
buvettes
where OM supporters gather on match days. Madame Oliver, who had accompanied her husband to many dinners at the Cantonas’ house on the hill, was there too, perhaps apprehensive that ‘Tico’, who was ill at the time, would struggle to find the right words to describe how much he had loved, and still loved, this impossible boy. She needn’t have worried.
New to his job, Oliver had not heard of Cantona’s talent – or reputation – before the boy’s arrival, which must have made the discovery of such an exceptional footballer even more exciting for the new coach of Mazargues’
sports-études.
‘He had huge qualities already,’ he remembered. ‘He was already top class at the age of thirteen. He might have been a little less powerful – physically speaking – than the others at the very beginning. But he could do exceptional things without thinking about them, as if they were normal.’ Soon, however, a spurt of growth changed the spindly teenager into a superb athlete. ‘Aged fourteen, he could control the ball on his chest; none of the others could do it. He really stood apart.’ And this, when the group of twenty-odd young footballers Oliver took care of was, by his own reckoning, the strongest he would ever see in his career. There were still flaws in the teenager Oliver considered to be ‘not a football player – but a footballer’. He could dribble past defenders with such ease that he sometimes took the ball too far, carried away by his own ability. But ‘he had two feet, he could head the ball, control it, pass it, he could do everything!’
So the former international gave Éric far more freedom than he granted others. Some rules were inflexible (‘I first taught my youngsters to behave on the field. If someone insulted the referee, or showed a lack of respect to his teammates or his opponents, I’d take him off’), but Oliver, drawn by Éric’s smile, and astonished by his ability, was willing to bend others to enable the teenager to blossom. He let him practise on his own. He forgave him minor infringements against the school’s regulations, certain as he was that he would be repaid tenfold for his forgiveness. Encouraged by his own delight in Cantona’s gift, Oliver chose not to ignore what his heart was telling him. Éric was tricky and overreacted when he was needled by his schoolmates, but the only way to have access to what was best in him, the human being as well as the player, was to trust him. Is it any coincidence that the managers who got the most out of Cantona in his career – Guy Roux, Marc Bourrier, Gérard Houllier, Michel Platini and Alex Ferguson – all made the decision, driven by their affection as much as by their judgement, to do precisely the same, and trust him, even when his behaviour must have sometimes felt like a betrayal?
Célestin Oliver didn’t wish to wander round the darker alleys of Cantona’s character; his sense of shared loyalty prevented him from fishing out an anecdote or two which might have clouded his judgement of ‘a charming, adorable boy’. I felt this very keenly, but opted not to find out how tautly the string could be pulled. This is something I noticed very early on when talking to people who had fallen in friendship, or in love, with Cantona at any stage in his and their lives. It is as if they had signed a pact in which, it must be said, Cantona hated to relinquish the upper hand. Célestin Oliver himself admitted as much when he said that, should he miss one of the beach-soccer tournaments the Cantona brothers regularly organize in the area,
‘ooh-la-la
. . .’ – and he wasn’t referring to the song they would sing in Leeds or Manchester.
An extreme example of this is given by Bernard Morlino, the author of
Manchester Memories –
a loose yet riveting collection of Cantonesque reminiscences as yet untranslated in English, which is a pity. Morlino, a disciple of Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (whose path we’ll cross again), justified his forgiveness of what others judged unforgiveable (the Crystal Palace kung-fu kick, for example) by quoting the novelist Roger Nimier. ‘If a friend of yours commits a murder, you do not ask “Why did you do that?” but “Where is the body?”’ Admirable, foolish, foolishly admirable, or admirably foolish, others can be the judges of that.
Oliver made his decision early. His reward was to gain the confidence of a man who didn’t pick his friends lightly, even if he sometimes withdrew this confidence for the flimsiest of reasons later in life. ‘For me, he was a pure centre-forward,’ Oliver recalled, ‘but he could also be deployed in many other positions, which he did with good grace. “We’ll give it a go, Monsieur Oliver!” and, oh, he certainly did.’ From the outset Cantona, this most individualistic of players, was keenly aware of the collective nature of his sport. The personal urge for self-expression which alone could justify considering football an art form, in the romanticist sense of ‘art’, remained a worthless impulse if it was not inextricably, almost incomprehensibly, wedded to the victory of a team. Maradona had to be the greatest of all footballers not because he danced past scores of English and Belgian defenders in the 1986 World Cup, but because his virtuosity made Argentina world champions. Cruyff’s only blemish was that the Dutch team of 1974,
his
team, didn’t win the trophy. Just as revealingly, the ‘emotive’ adolescent (which is how Cantona was described in a school report his parents received during his first year at La Grande Bastide – not just sensitive, but unafraid of showing how his sensitivity had been hurt) could take justified punishment with equanimity. And what greater punishment could there be than to be cast aside from the first XI?