Although he had yet to work in English football, Ferguson was recognisable to some of us as the potent young manager of Aberdeen, who were about to claim the first of three Scottish championships under his leadership. ‘Where are you heading for, lads?’ he asked. The nearest taxi that could sweep us to our hotel, he was told. If Ferguson experienced a temptation to grin at Sassenachs appearing to mistake Merkland Road for Park Lane in the West End of London, he resisted it. ‘You’ll never get a taxi here this time of night,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’
Due to this and other encounters, Ferguson became known on the fringes of English football as a good bloke. It was a reputation that survived his arrival at Manchester United, whose manager he became in 1986 when Ron Atkinson was dismissed with the team placed nineteenth in England’s old twenty-two-club First Division. Results improved, but not steadily. By the end of the 1986/7 season, though safe from relegation, United had lost to Wimbledon (twice), Oxford United, Norwich City and Luton Town, among others, and a luminary of a former Old Trafford era mentioned that fans, including his grown-up sons, were unconvinced about Ferguson. My friend said he kept telling his sons to be patient and bear in mind that everyone at the club thought the Scot a ‘good lad’. This never mollified them. ‘Good lad!’ they would splutter. ‘We don’t want a good lad. What we want is a bastard who’ll win us the League.’
They got both in the sense that Ferguson, in guiding United to eleven League titles, became recognised as one of the hardest men in football, significantly less popular with some former players than their public pronouncements might suggest. And certainly less anxious to throw open his car door to an English journalist. Some twenty-two years after his generosity in Aberdeen – in May 2002, the day before Arsenal came to Old Trafford to confirm that they would be borrowing the title for a year – he sat down with the daily-paper representatives and was immediately asked by the man from the
Sun
to assess the first season at United of Juan Sebastián Verón. He threw the question back at the reporter, who replied that he did not think Verón had been worth the fee paid. Ferguson erupted and ended the briefing almost before it had started.
‘Out of my sight,’ he yelled. ‘I’m not fucking talking to you any more. Verón’s a great fucking player. You’re all fucking idiots.’
It was true to the extent that Verón had inhabited the verge of greatness. I had first seen him playing for Argentina in a friendly match against Brazil at the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro in 1997. He was not quite twenty-two and already with Sampdoria in Italy, and such was his indefatigable midfield craft that Argentina’s 1-0 win flattered their hosts. He looked a potential star of the forthcoming World Cup in France but, despite a gently impressive performance against England in the match in which David Beckham was sent off, did not quite stamp the expected authority. Afterwards he moved to Parma and then Lazio, whom Ferguson had paid more than £28 million for him.
After the outburst, Ferguson kept Verón for one more season and then sold him for £15 million to Chelsea, where he did not last long either. He had a spell with Internazionale back in Italy before returning to Argentina to join Estudiantes de La Plata, with such success that Diego Maradona restored him to the national team and took him to the 2010 World Cup.
Why had Verón flopped in England? The best guess would be that the physical determination required for a player to flourish in England was incompatible with his mid-career comfort zone. It was, however, beyond conjecture that the idiots had got this one right – and Ferguson cannot have enjoyed being exposed by a breed he appeared to regard as inferior.
It was not always so. He had grown up as a footballer in Scotland in an age when it was possible to engage with the common man, who often turned out to be a journalist. Once, Ferguson claimed, when suspended for a Rangers match abroad, he and a clubmate, Sandy Jardine, had sat in the press seats and penned the report that appeared under the name of the man from the
Scottish Daily Express
. But over the years, while retaining friendships with old-timers, above all the great Hugh McIlvanney of the
Observer
and later the
Sunday Times
, he seemed to develop a contempt for what the press had become.
It was not unreasonable, given the tendency to speculation and point-stretching that contaminated even some of the formerly broadsheet sections of the industry, not to mention such perceived coups as the bugging of conversations involving, among others, Sven-Göran Eriksson and the ill-fated FA chairman Lord Triesman (who stood down in May 2010 after he had been caught making ill-advised comments concerning the 2018 World Cup bid). ‘It’s not so much the reporters,’ Ferguson once told me, ‘as what their newspapers make them do now.’ And it was easy to agree.
He was less persuasive in disparaging some of the younger reporters for wearing ‘torn jeans’ at his briefings, as if he himself did not often turn up in a tracksuit or even shorts. Self-awareness seldom appeared to be a strong suit of Ferguson’s and mounting success made it less and less evident. He might bemoan injustice at large while being unfair to, say, referees. He demanded respect while, increasingly, lapsing into rudeness. Asked a fair question by the television reporter Rebecca Lowe at Birmingham, he brusquely replied: ‘Were you watching the match?’
This was early in the 2009/10 season, when he was sixty-seven. Sir Bobby Robson, whom Ferguson admired, was around the same age when I interviewed him in connection with a biography of José Mourinho. ‘Let me tell you what happens to successful managers,’ said Robson. ‘It’s happened to me. It happens to all of us. We acquire a bit of power, don’t we? That success . . . you know what you stand for . . . you know what people think of you. And this power, this control you have over people, becomes ingrained into you. You use your position to be more powerful. More powerful than you basically are.’
Late in the summer of 2009 a memorial service was held for Sir Bobby in Durham Cathedral and Ferguson gave a wonderfully sensitive address, as he invariably does when called upon to pay tribute (it is said that no one has attended more funerals, in itself a remarkable reflection on a man with so much else to do). On the train back to London, I sat with McIlvanney and took the opportunity to ask how he would describe his friend. ‘Alec,’ he said (Ferguson’s shortened name began to be pronounced ‘Alex’ only after he left Scotland), ‘is a good man.’ Quite deliberately McIlvanney left it there, knowing that I wanted a distillation. But no one, of course, is that simple.
A Hero and an Inspiration
M
cIlvanney was to remain a close friend of Ferguson even after going into print with elegant advice to him to quit after United’s early exit from the Champions League in 2005. He had written of Ferguson that ‘his achievements are already so monumental that recent events could not conceivably cast a shadow . . . a personally choreographed exit would be bathed in the dignity and honour that are his due . . . he must never run the risk of being dispatched by remote control from Florida . . . there must come a time when the best and bravest of fighters shouldn’t answer the bell’. Although I have never been emboldened to consider myself a friend of Ferguson’s, let alone an intimate such as McIlvanney, I have known Ferguson for longer than most observers of the game.
And to me, despite the odd professional kindness Ferguson has done, he has always been more of a hero and an inspiration than a chum. This is not to imply that the choice has been offered. One of my favourite stories about Ferguson is of the journalist sent to Manchester to take over the United beat for a tabloid. At the first Ferguson briefing he attended, he boldly advanced through the group of colleagues, shook hands and introduced himself. Afterwards, he quietly returned to Ferguson. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘now that we’re going to be working together, I wonder if I could have your home phone number.’ Ferguson’s reply was more of a derisive snort and, as the chastened scribe withdrew, he added: ‘And don’t read too much into the bloody handshake either!’
Ferguson is a hero and inspiration for a variety of reasons. Above all is his gift for time management. I confess that, when the day contains too much to contemplate, I find myself asking: ‘What would Ferguson do?’
An especially memorable conversation with him took place towards the end of 2008, when a mutual friend was dying. Hymie Wernick was a car dealer in Manchester whom I had met many years earlier through a fellow journalist, Roy Collins. Hymie was not hard to like and yet, whenever I drove from London to Manchester on journalistic duty, I cursed myself for the common affliction of never quite having time to see him. Once I asked Ferguson how Hymie was. ‘Not good,’ he said, pausing before entering a press conference to impart every detail of Hymie’s medical condition, including, at length, the certainty that it was terminal. When he added that Hymie was in reasonably good spirits but occasionally forgetful, I realised that Ferguson had been a frequent visitor to his bedside. Ferguson, with infinitely more calls on his time, had proved an infinitely better friend than me.
One of Ferguson’s friends in high places – at least when Tony Blair ran the country – was Alastair Campbell and often Ferguson would define ‘the real friend’ for him as ‘the one who walks through the door when the others are putting on their coats to leave’.
Anecdotal evidence of his willingness to stretch the day for a good reason was frequent. Walking to Piccadilly railway station after United’s late victory in the derby at the City of Manchester Stadium in April 2010, I was assailed by a voice from a van halted in traffic: ‘Hey, lay off our Fergie!’ I guessed it was to do with an article linking the unpopular ownership of United by the Glazer family with Ferguson’s erstwhile friendship with the Irishmen – the racing people Magnier and McManus – who had sold out to the Americans in 2005. The piece had irked a lot of Ferguson’s admirers. So I walked over to have a chat with the man and only then noticed that the van had been converted; he and his companions were physically disabled. ‘Fergie’s brilliant’, I was told. ‘He’s always got time for us.’
There are some, on the other hand, with reason to attest that time, tide and adulation have soured him. In 2008, though obviously comfortable in an extended television interview with Sir David Frost, he reacted with sudden aggression to a reminder that Gary Lineker had criticised him for maintaining a refusal to speak to the BBC. Lineker, he said, after what appeared to be a hasty search for a verbal weapon, ‘has had stuff stopped going in the papers’. Ferguson went on to claim that he never bore a grudge, adding: ‘What I’m doing to the BBC is a
stance
.’ Funny though it sounded, it was a genuine distinction to draw.
A good man or not, Ferguson is very much his own man. This sets him apart. In more than time management, he makes his own rules. In the early years of the present century, the entire British nation seemed in a permanent state of astonishment; everything was ‘awesome’ or ‘amazing’. Ferguson, seldom bowing to fashion in words or anything else – his hairstyle remained as it was in his playing days and his dress sense owed much to the neat Crombie coat once proudly purchased with a Rangers wage – actually did amaze people. Even McIlvanney must have been surprised by the response to his well-intentioned piece in 2005. Ferguson had been beaten by José Mourinho to one championship and was to lose out again in 2006 – before winning three in a row, plus a second European title.
Ferguson time somehow permitted hobbies. There was the horse-racing, to which he gradually returned, mixing business with pleasure, after recovery from a chastening defeat in his court case with Magnier and McManus over the stud rights to Rock of Gibraltar. There was wine, in particular French red, in which he took a keen interest after being introduced to the nuances of its character by an hotelier while in France to watch Montpellier before a European tie in 2001; coincidentally or not, his favourite wines often turned out to be very expensive ones. And there was politics.
Michael Crick, the distinguished broadcaster, journalist, United fan and chronicler of Ferguson’s life, once described his politics thus: ‘Like Alastair Campbell’s, Ferguson’s socialism is pragmatic: like a committed football fan, his prime concern is to see the team win.’ To that I should add that he is tribal. His responses are less those of an intellectual than a partisan. In an interview with Campbell for the
New Statesman
in 2009, he declared: ‘I grew up believing Labour was the party of the working man, and I still believe that.’ The first reader to respond emailed from Glasgow: ‘Ferguson is remembering a dream.’
Nor, despite his disparagement of Margaret Thatcher – ‘Don’t compare me with that woman,’ he once snapped, after being told that each of them got by on a few hours’ sleep a night – has his stewardship of Manchester United involved much restraint on the extremes of capitalism, as the Glazers and, before them, Magnier and McManus, would delightedly testify.
But then Ferguson might be quite happy to accept a definition of a football club as a profit-making dictatorship. In a
Times
article about Mourinho’s pre-eminence after success with Inter Milan in the 2010 Champions League final, Matthew Syed wrote: ‘Ferguson’s tendency is more towards megalomania than narcissism, but the consequences are the same. The central tenet of life at Manchester United is the primacy of Ferguson.’ This was hardly unique; ‘Arsenal’ could have been substituted for ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Arséne Wenger’ for ‘Ferguson’. But the subtle difference between Ferguson and Mourinho was identified: Ferguson’s is a dictatorship of conviction rather than ego.