The 'where are they now?' files

[brightred]

I love Lawro, hope he recovers.

Is that his wife?

If so, no need to feel sorry for him!

[Buzzo]

She looks a lot like him. I’m assuming it’s his daughter.

[Shaggy]

It is his daughter

[RedReet]

Good grief.

[Cormack74]

I love Lawro, hope he recovers.

Is that his wife?

[Fosterbloke]

Is he wearing gloves?

[Shaggy]

[ame]https://twitter.com/officialbarnesy/status/1269303499076046854[/ame]

[ame]https://twitter.com/gordonkiernan/status/1269285321176383488[/ame]

[Shaggy]

[ame]https://twitter.com/officialbarnesy/status/1269303776294338561[/ame]

[baitman]

https://twitter.com/officialbarnesy/...03776294338561

Giving or taking

[Buzzo]

Which thread to put this in covering football Mental Health and Racism...! From the Athletic.

Heskey: When I left Leicester, I asked not to be called ‘Bruno’ at my next club


By Adam Crafton Jun 12, 2020

Emile Heskey is running. He is 13-years-old, fleeing down the back roads surrounding Leicester City’s old Filbert Street stadium, and there is no let-up.

“I was 13 or 14,” Heskey says. “What do you do? Do you think he has noticed you are only a kid and he will stop? Or do you just run? You run. You run because you do not know what is going to happen.”

He pauses. “This was a Leicester fan. I was actually playing for the club. I had been there in the centre of excellence from the age of nine. How would he have realised I was in the academy? Unless he was avid, going down to the training ground, he would never have known that.”

At the start of the 1990s, there was no trusted method to report such incidents. When Heskey headed in for training the next day, he did not tell anyone.

“And what would have happened if I had?” Heskey responds. “Absolutely nothing. So what was the point? There are now more avenues to report things. If you do have to report it, fingers crossed something will be done. Before, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was your word against his and what are they going to do? Maybe they’d have made him apologise to me. That’s the most that would have happened. So I’d have got an apology — Wow.”

Sarcasm drips from his voice and the international events of the past month have stirred Heskey’s resolve to challenge prejudice wherever he finds it. Chased down the street by an angry fan as a child, he endured appalling incidents of racism as a footballer. When Heskey represented England’s under-21 team against Yugoslavia in March 2000, a fan on the terraces abused him throughout the game. In his book, Even Heskey Scored, he recalls how the supporter in question called him “Kunta Kinte, the character from Roots, n*****, and made gorilla noises and gestures at me.”

He later adds: “I was also spat at by someone at the age of 16 as I warmed up for England and called a n*****.”

The killing of the American George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis acts an overt reminder of racism but in recent weeks, the conversation has evolved. It is no longer solely about violence. As the protests go global, black communities desire a recognition of the structures that enable racism, a level of reflection in use of language, an awareness of history and, most of all, action that awards black people an equitable stake and opportunity in society.

During a frank discussion with The Athletic this week, Heskey spoke eloquently and passionately. He discusses the loneliness that gripped him when he became Liverpool’s record transfer in 2000 and football’s backwards attitudes when it comes to discussing mental health.

First, however, we turn to the past and Heskey’s life is, in many ways, a microcosm of how the challenge for black people has evolved. As a youngster, he endured flagrant abuse, while his career was maligned by imagery and stereotypes that are, at last, more widely challenged, but by no means altogether erased. Now, as a 42-year-old, he strives to become a decision-maker but faces the deep-seated prejudice that means no Premier League club has a black owner, chairman or chief executive. The Premier League and Football League, meanwhile, have no black board members.

Heskey does see baby steps of progress. At Leicester, for example, his nickname was “Bruno”, after the heavyweight boxer Frank Bruno and when the club reached the 1999 League Cup final, the club had him posing in boxing gloves. There would rightly be uproar now if Romelu Lukaku, for example, was nicknamed as “AJ” after Anthony Joshua.

Heskey reflects: “It is only looking back, it feels strange now, rather than when I was in it. You have to remember I grew up in the 1980s. If I told you some of the TV programmes where you were allowed to call people ‘darkie’, ‘blackie’, things like that, so someone calling me, an 18-year-old, ‘Bruno’, it would not necessarily be looked upon as how we do now. I don’t think it was intended in a bad way. It was a term of endearment they could use.”

When he returns to Leicester, the old moniker returns. “Yeah, yeah, I still get called it now. The older generation at Leicester still call me that. I take it with a pinch of salt because again, it is generational, where their endearment is to me. When I left Leicester, I asked politely not to be called that at my next club and they respected that. The fans knew me, from age 17 to 22, as Bruno. How do you stop that? Half of them don’t even know what I am talking about because they don’t understand it. They just think, ‘It’s a good name. It’s Frank Bruno. He is a heavyweight boxer, you are a big lad’. If the younger generation were to do that now about a younger player, you would be like, ‘Woah, woah, woah’ because they know the meaning.”

Heskey is, at least, reassured that such stereotypes are more fiercely contested. When Manchester United supporters devised a ditty celebrating the perceived size of Lukaku’s penis, the club requested that fans halt the chant.

“What they don’t understand,” Heskey explains, “And this is where it comes with education, is where those connotations come from — it was a myth made up to make white women stay away from black men because they ‘have’ big penises. You would not sing it if you know the connotations. I don’t think these people mean it in a bad way, or think too much about that side of it, so it is education.”

Education is Heskey’s own concern. He enrolled on a UEFA masters course last year, alongside former players such as Didier Drogba, Kaka, Andrei Arshavin and John O’Shea. His desire is to enter the administration side of football, perhaps becoming a sporting director.

Growing up in the Midlands, memories of difference pockmark Heskey’s childhood. He recalls his first day, as a seven-year-old, at Linden Primary School. He writes in his book: “I walked in to the classroom, sat down and everyone was staring at me. This went on for what seemed like a minute or two. I understand it now. They were kids and they weren’t used to seeing someone who looked like me.”

Yet as Heskey scours the boardrooms of British sport, he sees much the landscape as he discovered in Linden Primary School over 30 years ago.

“This is where we try to break down the barriers,” Heskey tells The Athletic. “I saw a report today (from the Daily Telegraph). The Football Association: 11 board members, zero black. Lawn Tennis: 12 board members, zero black. England and Wales Cricket Board: 12 members, zero black. Rugby Football Union: 14 members, zero black. Swim England: 12 members, zero black. UK Athletics: nine members, one black. England hockey: six members, zero black. England golf: 12 members, zero black. British Cycling: 12 members, zero black. British Horse Authority: 11 members, zero black. Sport England: 11 members, two black. UK Sport: 10 members, zero black.

“I knew all this anyway, so it is about challenging people and asking, ‘What are you going to do?’. We have been talking — for I don’t know how many years now — about how to get more black and ethnic minority coaches in the system. From when I started, I think there is one per cent more now. To get it up to mimicking what’s on the football pitch (more than 25 per cent of players are BAME in the Premier League), you would be looking at 100 years if it goes down the road we are now. Drastic things must be put in place.

“We talk about Black Lives Matter, which started with George Floyd, but I am probably more likely to get a job in these (boardroom) areas in America than I am here. They have structures in America. With the Rooney Rule, for example, they keep changing it so people cannot get around it. You have to have a certain amount of minorities within your system. We don’t have that here.”

He reflects on his own career, realising how, as a player, he never negotiated across a table with a black man. “You usually look at the world. You look for people who look like you and you want to emulate them. There is nobody I can look up to like that. Only Les Ferdinand.”

Ferdinand, the former Newcastle and Tottenham striker, is the sporting director of QPR. Speaking in The Times on Friday, he said he is “sick and tired of lip service” and warned that “action is to give people an opportunity”. Even when a black man in football catches a break, it can be warped by bad faith. On a recent podcast, Ferdinand revealed how he has been accused by some dissenters of pushing a “black Mafia” at QPR.

Heskey is at pains to point out that speaking up for black communities does not mean an attack on white people. He watched on, exasperated, as Sky News interviewed the British government’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock last Sunday. The presenter, Sophy Ridge, asked a straightforward question: how many black people sit in the British cabinet?

Heskey continues: “You are telling me to trust you but the trust will never be there when Matt Hancock is pulled up, asked how many black people are in his cabinet and he couldn’t say. Because there aren’t any. This is not an attack. We are not attacking anyone. But you have promised us for years that we are all here for change and here for the better.

“Instead of sitting there and feeling like you are being attacked, get to understand. Listen to people, sit down with them, and learn why people are upset. You think but you never ask. You can’t look at all these black kids and tell them: ‘You have every chance to do this or that. Go and be this person. Go to school and you will thrive’. OK, but I can’t get into those universities you can get into. I can’t go into that place you go into. I’m always looked upon this way when I am walking down the street. You don’t have people in the cabinet to show I can do what you are saying I can do.

“I saw an article with (former Derby player) Michael Johnson, who got all his badges, did everything by the book but can’t see a pathway into management. So what has he done? He has changed his career path because he cannot see where it is going and he is now looking into leadership and football directorship. I was reading the comments on the piece and it was all, ‘Well, if you were good enough, you’d get a job’ but there is no chance to show whether you are good enough or not.”

As protests dominate the news coverage, Heskey is braced for difficult conversations with his children. “I try not to have too much of it on TV but when you have 14-year-olds, sometimes you have to let them know how you are perceived in public. You are not perceived the same as all your other friends at times, who are white. That is not a nice thing to tell someone. How am I supposed to tell them that?

“My parents are from Antigua. When I was playing, I would fly mum business class back to Antigua. She has been stopped before from going into the business class lounge. Why? And she was told to go to the economy line. That woman got an earful. Another time, I walked up and I was with my daughter. The woman said to me, ‘I think you are in the wrong line’. I said, ‘Sorry, which line is this? The business class one, right? Then I am in the right line’. She asked to see my ticket and I showed it. This was a black woman, by the way, so it is not just white people who presume. I told her that in future, she should ask to see the ticket first, not after. I told her: ‘You could have done without this awkward situation you got yourself into’.”

Heskey admits to feeling exasperated and he says his views are shared by the majority of current and former black players. During his playing days, Heskey did not speak so much. Those who covered the England national team, for instance, remember Heskey as one of the quieter and more reserved members of the squad, despite the intense criticism he received.

He says: “I never worried too much because I knew what I brought to the team and the players were well happy with what I was doing. It was very negative at times. What could I do? You don’t control the narrative, you can’t control the media. There were no other means to get your point across, so you just left it.

“These lads nowadays have a medium in social media because if you say anything bad, they can show you the truth. I never had that. We couldn’t control the narrative. I remember one newspaper got me and Ledley King mixed up. They were criticising my name alongside Ledley’s picture. I was fuming because I couldn’t even grow a beard and you are getting us confused? It was crazy.”

Heskey is right to say his former team-mates valued his input. Mario Melchiot recently told Heskey how he hated playing against the forward but loved playing with him for Wigan. Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher said similarly in a television interview only this month. Michael Owen, his team-mate for England and Liverpool, describes him as “unplayable at times” and in the 2000-01 treble-winning season, Heskey scored 22 goals in the same campaign England defeated Germany by a 5-1 scoreline. When Heskey fell out of the England picture in the mid 2000s, Owen privately urged Steve McClaren to recall the forward to help salvage England’s qualification hopes. Heskey scored more than 100 Premier League goals and assisted 53 during his career, and represented England at four tournaments. “Not bad for someone they said was crap,” Heskey jokes.

Yet even amid his best form at Liverpool, Heskey endured personal challenges. After signing for Liverpool at 22, he found the transfer disorientating for the first year, leaving behind his network of friends and family at Leicester. He remembers laying on the floor of his Merseyside house, crying, wondering whether he had done the right thing. In his book, he says, that after a bad result, he “would drink to numb the pain of disappointment”. He became isolated socially early on at Liverpool.

“It felt miles and miles away,” Heskey says. “You are talking a two-hour drive (from Leicester). Not a 24-hour flight, like when I went to Australia later in my career. I could not put my finger on why I felt like that. We won the treble, so it didn’t affect me on the field. I just did not feel great, to be honest. It is strange. We can all go into an environment that we kind of love and thrive in — by that, I mean two hours per day of training or playing — but then go into a normality that can feel horrible.”

He would never call team-mates, such as Jamie Carragher or Steven Gerrard, to organise a social date.

“It could have been a shyness. I never really wanted to impose myself on people. I never did anything. I just sat there at home. Why didn’t I just go for a walk? Why didn’t I explore? Why didn’t I reach out to team-mates to see what they were up to? Anything. I never did anything. I just sat there.”

Would it really be so bleak as to open a few cans on the sofa until he drifted into sleep? His voice quietens.

“Some nights were like that, yes. Not all, but yes. It is something I would rather forget but, to be honest. yes. At Leicester, I could be around friends and family and crack jokes. My mates never knew what I was going through. You talk with your mates but can you go in-depth with them? They have been best mates from school and went through my career with me. Then I brought this book out and I gave them all a copy and they didn’t realise what I was going through. They said, ‘Why didn’t you call?’ I thought: ‘What am I supposed to say?’. Especially back then — you wanted to be that tough man.

“I just look back now and think, ‘Why didn’t you call up X person?’. There were a lot of foreign lads in the same boat. Why not call one up for a bit of food? How good would it have been to get to know them, maybe help them improve their English a bit? At Wigan, I made an effort with Antonio Valencia. We wrote words down in English and Spanish for him. I would always come in and say ‘Como estas? (How are you?)’ and ‘Muy cansado (very tired)’. I wasn’t tired really but it was a little thing to help him feel included.”

Does he suspect other players turned to drink for comfort?

“Yes, 100 per cent. I could not tell you who… there might be more players coming out and saying it now. There would be more players like myself who go home after a bad game and got on it, just to… forget. We didn’t have any avenue to channel that sort of thing. We did not have any education to channel it. Even down to mentors or life mentors. We never have had someone to understand what we were going through and able to say, ‘Try this, do this”. Meditation, for example, if you talk about that now, it is the norm. Back then, if you tried to talk about meditation, they would lock you up. This was the macho, bravado thing back in the day. You could not show any kind of weakness and I still hear it from many of the older generation.

“Even when you talk about racism, you hear people say, ‘Back in our day, they just got on with it’. Well, you don’t know what was going on in the cold nights when they went home. You don’t know what they were doing. You don’t know what they felt. But you never asked. So you cannot assume.”

[Scratch]

I know I'll probably get flack for this, but I struggle to see how an endearing nickname for Heskey, like 'Bruno' was (Heskey even says that in the article), was seen as an issue. He was a big, well built bloke, much like Bruno was renowned for being. I didn't think skin colour even came into it, or is that naive thinking to assume it was just a compliment based on his physique?

Edit: Looking to be educated.

[McDermotX]

No flack from here.........plenty of people have come and gone before in all walks of life being nicknamed due to their physical similarities to other people.....White, black, Asian etc etc
As you say, even Heskey reflects on it as a term of endearment and he's the only one who can comment on how it was arrived at/used in private (seems fine with it) but there is a filter of sorts through which comments are passed through, especially in recent years, and it can betray the intent of words and observations.
In fact, even Heskey suffers from it in this particular regard when he mentions about how it would be regarded with young players nowadays, whereby he is cognisant of how it may be perceived. But I think it needs to be distanced from the far more serious discussions around racism that are taking place now and down the years.

It would be a completely different situation if there were people at Leicester at the time referring to black players as 'Bruno' or some other visible black figure based solely on the colour of their skin, but that was never the case here IMO. It's an individual nickname for obvious reasons.

[Shaggy]

I know I'll probably get flack for this, but I struggle to see how an endearing nickname for Heskey, like 'Bruno' was (Heskey even says that in the article), was seen as an issue. He was a big, well built bloke, much like Bruno was renowned for being. I didn't think skin colour even came into it, or is that naive thinking to assume it was just a compliment based on his physique?

Edit: Looking to be educated.

He definitely wouldn't have been nicknamed 'Bruno' if he was white though would he. Loads of big, well-built white players and to the best of my knowledge not one of them has ever been nicknamed 'Bruno'.

There was a big 6'5 centre-forward at Chesterfield in the 90s called Andy Morris whose nickname was also Bruno. He looked absolutely nothing like Frank Bruno, literally nothing like him, but he was big and black. Same as Heskey - he looks nothing like Frank Bruno, but he's big and black so he gets called Bruno.

[Venton]

No flack from here.........plenty of people have come and gone before in all walks of life being nicknamed due to their physical similarities to other people.....White, black, Asian etc etc
As you say, even Heskey reflects on it as a term of endearment and he's the only one who can comment on how it was arrived at/used in private (seems fine with it) but there is a filter of sorts through which comments are passed through, especially in recent years, and it can betray the intent of words and observations.
In fact, even Heskey suffers from it in this particular regard when he mentions about how it would be regarded with young players nowadays, whereby he is cognisant of how it may be perceived. But I think it needs to be distanced from the far more serious discussions around racism that are taking place now and down the years.

It would be a completely different situation if there were people at Leicester at the time referring to black players as 'Bruno' or some other visible black figure based solely on the colour of their skin, but that was never the case here IMO. It's an individual nickname for obvious reasons.

He clearly says he asked not be called it when he moved on, so I don't see how you can say he seems fine with it. Isn't it just because of the colour or his skin and his size? He doesn't look anything like Bruno apart from that. No white lads get called Bruno. Not sure that really fits.

[McDermotX]

He clearly says he asked not be called it when he moved on, so I don't see how you can say he seems fine with it. Isn't it just because of the colour or his skin and his size? He doesn't look anything like Bruno apart from that. No white lads get called Bruno. Not sure that really fits.

And one of mates is nicknamed Arnie, purely because of his size and physique, not because he's an identical twin.

I guess we'll just have to stop all nicknames based on physical similarities......white and black. Or is it when referring to black individuals ?

The acute, and important difference here IMO, is that there is a physical reason why Heskey garnered the nickname. Its important not to conflate the reasons IMO.