Graeme Le Saux: Left Field

The aftermath was awful. I got buried by television and the newspapers because I had tried to take him out off the ball. That was fair enough. But it seemed bizarre that they were focusing on that rather than the extreme provocation I had been subjected to. Because I had reacted, a lot of people seemed to want to excuse Robbie for what he had done. Three days after the game, the FA charged us both with misconduct.

I sent him a letter of apology for thwacking him over the head. I got a letter from him, too. It was a non-committal explanation of what he had done. It wasn’t an apology as such. It was an attempt to save face, couched in legal niceties, drafted by a lawyer or an agent, and designed to appease the FA tribunal before they sat in judgment on us. It was a sad excuse of a letter really. It was an insult to everyone’s intelligence:

Dear Graeme,

I am in receipt of your without prejudice letter about what occurred on Saturday, February 27 at Stamford Bridge.

I am sorry if you misinterpreted my actions during the game, which were not meant to cause any offence to yourself or anyone else. Hopefully this unhappy incident can now be brought to an end.

I am sure you share my hope that when we play together again either on opposite sides or on international duty, people have no reason to judge us other than on our footballing abilities.

Best wishes,

R. Fowler

It was supposed to be a private letter but Robbie released it to the press. He did make one serious point about the incident in his autobiography, though. ‘Football’s a tough sport,’ he wrote, ‘and to get to the top, you have to be incredibly thick-skinned. A bit of name-calling never hurt anyone and the truth is that I wasn’t being homophobic, I was merely trying to exploit a known weakness in an opponent who had done me a number of times.’

It’s an interesting line of defence. According to Robbie’s rationale, then, it’s okay to call a black man a ‘nigger’ on the pitch and pretend it’s all in the line of duty. I don’t think so. I don’t think even Robbie would try and argue that. Maybe he just didn’t think about his argument. It’s more likely he didn’t really have any defence and that that was the best he could come up with. It wasn’t a very good effort.

The television and radio presenter Nicky Campbell produced an article about what Fowler had written: ‘I bet what Fowler did that day at Chelsea made thousands of youngsters feel pretty crappy about themselves,’ he wrote. ‘Imagine if he had performed a craven Uncle Tom shuffle of subordination to a black player. A bit of name calling never hurt anyone?

‘But it is unfair to blame Fowler. The insular and impenetrable culture of football is the fundamental problem. There, difference is frowned upon and intelligence scorned. This is the world of the institutionally incurious.’

A month after Robbie offered me his backside, we both found ourselves in another England squad. There was another awkward reunion at Burnham Beeches. By now, Kevin Keegan was the manager and we were preparing for his first match in charge, a home European Championship qualifying tie against Poland. Kevin summoned us both to his room. He wanted us to stage a public reconciliation for the press. Robbie didn’t have quite as much bravado in that situation. He looked like a naughty little boy. He seemed shy and tongue-tied. Kevin wanted us to do a photo-call for the media but I said immediately that unless Robbie apologized to me first, that wasn’t going to happen. Otherwise, there was no way I was going to go out there and pretend we had resolved the situation – no chance.

I made it clear that I didn’t want a public apology from Robbie; just a private word would do. But he refused. He said he had done nothing wrong, that it was just a bit of a laugh. Keegan started to back off at that point. He wasn’t qualified to deal with it but I felt more confident about it. By now, I felt bolstered by the debate the incident had caused, and in a strange kind of way I felt relieved that the issue was totally out in the open. Now, at least, everyone knew the kind of taunting I had to put up with from the fans every week. Now, they could guess at the routine abuse I had to deal with on the pitch. From that moment on, there seemed to be less animosity about the chants that were directed at me. The debate about the incident with Fowler took some of the mystery out of it all and exposed it for the puerile cruelty it was.

I don’t feel any animosity towards Robbie now but you cannot do that to people. Because of the kind of stuff that he sought to justify, sometimes during my career it felt as if the whole world was against me. It was hard to deal with. It’s starting to sound like a sob story now, I know, and that’s not my intention. But this was like bullying, out and out bullying.

I was determined to stand up for myself. I confronted Robbie about it while we were in Keegan’s room. I pointed out to him that if he’d taken the piss out of someone like that in the middle of Soho where all the gay clubs are, he would have got chased down the street and beaten up. Even then, Robbie couldn’t resist it. When I mentioned the gay clubs in Soho, he muttered: ‘You’d know where they are.’ I laughed, I admit it. He can be a funny guy. I told him I’d be professional with him on the training pitch but that there was no way I was going to shake his hand.

On 9 April, six weeks after the original incident and six days after Robbie had got himself in more trouble by pretending to snort the white lines on the pitch at Goodison Park during a goal celebration in a Merseyside derby, we were both told to attend our separate FA disciplinary hearings at Birmingham City’s St Andrews ground. I took a barrister called Jim Sturman with me to act in my defence and the Chelsea managing director, Colin Hutchinson, came along to support me. Jim had put a dossier together to show the disciplinary committee which detailed the homophobic abuse I had suffered from crowds over the years. We had video footage of some of the more extreme incidents and Jim also brought some of the hundreds of letters of support I received from members of the public.

Jim presented my case very eloquently and the panel seemed surprised by our approach. It wasn’t so much punishing Robbie that I was after. I didn’t want to get him into more trouble. He seemed to be doing pretty well by himself without any extra help from me. It was more about illustrating to them the problem with homosexual abuse that still existed in English football and the extent of what I had had to deal with.

If they had given me a punishment based on what I did, I would not have accepted it. I felt it was important to make a stand. I also saw it as an opportunity to get the whole thing off my chest. I had put up with it for so long and this was like a chance to exorcize a demon. In my mind, it wasn’t about Robbie Fowler. It was all about me. It didn’t matter who had done it to me. It wasn’t personal. It was about the victimisation and the lies.

I expected a token punishment for the fact that I had done something wrong on the pitch. If they had tried to make an example out of me, though, I would have taken it further. I would have made the FA accountable for what had happened. In the end, they banned me for a game and gave me a £5,000 fine.

They hammered Robbie. He was suddenly dealing with the fall-out from his mock-cocaine-snorting antics as well as what he did to me. In a way, it got the FA off the hook over confronting the issue of homophobia in football. But in another way, it was a fascinating glimpse of the governing body’s moral code. They gave Robbie a much harsher punishment for making what was clearly a joke about snorting cocaine than they did for his attempt to humiliate me and encourage homophobia everywhere – both serious issues.

I wonder if Robbie appreciated the irony of that. He did something as a retort to malicious rumours that had been spread about him and yet he had been happy to exploit a malicious rumour that had been spread about me.

Robbie got a two-game ban for taunting me and a fourgame ban for his goal celebrations at Goodison. So a joke about cocaine was twice as reprehensible as a gay taunt. I wasn’t angry about that, but it was interesting. It was indicative of the continuing ambivalence that exists about homophobia in sport. The American sports agent Leigh Steinberg once said it was easier to get an advertising deal for a player who was a convicted felon than a player who was gay. Nothing’s changed.

But I felt that the debate about what Robbie had done and the FA hearing gave me a form of closure on the whole thing. It was a watershed for me. After that, I still got the taunts from the crowd but some of the venom seemed to have gone out of them. Some of the seriousness had gone because what Robbie had done had underlined the absurdity of what was happening to me.

It didn’t completely get rid of it – I had people singing at me and abusing me for the rest of my career – but it did get it out in the open. It did change something. Perhaps it was because what Robbie had done had actually always been my worst fear. It represented my dread of the most extreme humiliation anyone could visit on me. Now it was over, I knew nothing could be worse than that ordeal. So no one could offend me any more. It was a necessary evil. After the hearing, the distress I had always felt about the taunts I had to endure began to ebb away.

The episode still causes me some problems, particularly over the way I reacted to Robbie’s provocation. When Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final, I was asked to talk about it many times because people drew comparisons with what had been said to him and what Robbie had done to me. I found that very difficult because I felt Zidane was totally wrong to do what he did and that he set a poor example. I can understand there is part of his psyche that is weak because he has suffered abuse all his life and that is why he snapped. Whatever was said that night in Berlin was between him and Materazzi, not between him, Materazzi and every supporter in the stadium. So it was a different affair entirely to what happened between me and Fowler. Zidane had just missed a header that he would have thought he should have scored. It was his last game for France and emotionally he was probably in a bad place.

The first time we played at Anfield after the incident with Robbie, the Chelsea boss Gianluca Vialli put me on the bench. On that day of all days, he put me on the bench. Robbie was God at Anfield and there I was having to run up and down the touchline in front of the Main Stand. I was scared stiff. I thought the fans were going to kill me.

In the second half, Luca told me to go and warm up. Because the linesman was running the line in the half to our right, we had to warm up at the Kop end. So when I ran down the touchline towards the Kop, the entire Kop started singing ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’. I think it was the loudest I’d ever heard it. Then the wolf whistles started. But something really had changed. For the first time ever, it didn’t upset me. For the first time, I felt I had the confidence to see it as the wind-up it was and take the sting out of it without getting upset.

During my stretching, I was in the corner near the Kop and I turned my back to them. I did a hamstring stretch where you open both your legs out wide and you get really low and touch your elbows on the floor. As I did it, I looked between my legs at the supporters and winked and smiled. And they all started applauding me. There was nothing pre-meditated about it. It’s funny, but it made me feel as though the pressure was lifting a bit. It took the edge off everything. It was a catharsis.

In the end, I got there. But it didn’t wipe out what I’d been through. It didn’t wash it away. Let’s be blunt: it was awful; it nearly drove me out of the game. The homophobic taunting and the bullying made me feel left out and misunderstood. People have read me wrong because they thought I wasn’t a team player just because I was different, just because I didn’t conform to the stereotype of a laddish footballer.

In my first spell at Chelsea, I was so close to walking away from football. I went through times that were like depression. I would get up in the morning and I wouldn’t feel good and by the time I got into training I would be so nervous that I felt sick. I dreaded going in. I was like a bullied kid on his way into school to face his tormentors.

Sometimes, when I look back at what I went through, I don’t know why I carried on – other than this singlemindedness and some sort of belief that I had a destiny to make it as a professional footballer. I can’t work out why I didn’t pack it all in but it was like I was on a path and despite all the baggage I was carrying, I never let myself stray from that path.

It’s an indictment of our game and the prejudice it allows, but I felt a great surge of relief when I retired. Playing was such an emotional drain. I had to get myself up for the game and then I had to prepare myself for being singled out by opposition supporters. That’s another notch altogether.

Abuse is abuse, whatever it is. I never understood why, if you could be kicked out of a football ground and prosecuted for racism, why not for other forms of prejudice? Early in 2007, the FA finally said that homophobic abuse should be treated in the same way as racial abuse inside football grounds. Given the abuse that I, and others, suffered, it feels like it was about twenty years too late. Perhaps that’s their idea of a rapid response unit. Still, better late than never.

The result of football’s strange tolerance of the homophobic victimization is that for somebody in the game to admit they are gay just couldn’t happen. If somebody came to me and said they were a gay footballer and asked my advice about whether they should be open about it, I would find it difficult to give them an honest answer.

I would find it difficult to say to a gay man that he ought to be true to himself and to the community he is representing. That’s what I’d want to tell him but the reality is that if you are a footballer and you want to do well, keep your mouth shut about being gay. That’s a terrible indictment of the English game but football is a society within a society. It’s another country.

TWO A Secret

The thing is, I did have a secret; a secret I kept all through my playing career. I thought of it as a guilty secret. I was ashamed of my part in it and sometimes the guilt ate me up. Sometimes, it still does. Maybe that’s why I haven’t spoken publicly about it until now. Maybe that’s why I’ve never really even spoken to my dad, Pierre, about it, why I’ve tried to blank it out for so long. It had a big effect on me as a man and as a player. I was always concerned that it might be used as a reason for why I was so sensitive and quick to anger when I was on the pitch. For a long time, my secret went to the very heart of me.

My secret is this: when I was thirteen, my mother, Daphne, died. I know now that she had developed breast cancer a couple of years earlier and had a mastectomy. I know now that she thought she had beaten it but that it came back more deadly than ever. I know now that when I went away on a school football trip to northern France, my dad knew that my mum might have died by the time I got back to our home in Jersey. I know now that he had agreed with the doctors that it would be better for my mum if it was kept a secret from her. He was told that it might benefit her if she didn’t know how seriously ill she was. And obviously, if he wasn’t allowed to tell her, he couldn’t tell me or my two sisters.

So I didn’t even really realize my mum was ill. I was full of life and energy and busy chasing all my football dreams, haring to matches and training sessions all over the island. As a youngster, you don’t think about life or death. Anyway, mums and dads are always there. The thought of mum being ill never really crossed my mind. Perhaps I blinded myself to how poorly she was. Perhaps I shrugged off the signs I saw and I suppose everyone else helped me with my denial. It was only twenty-five years ago but people weren’t as open about cancer back then as they are now. It was still talked about in hushed tones.

My mum didn’t have chemotherapy so she didn’t lose her hair. She didn’t show too many outward signs of being ill. There were a couple of occasions when I walked into the room and found her crying but I just put it down to Mum being emotional. Even when an ambulance came to pick her up from our house in St Ouen, I failed to appreciate the seriousness of what was happening. I thought it was a bit of an adventure and my best mate, Jason, and I cycled furiously down to the parish hall and waited on the steps so we could see the ambulance driving past on its way to the hospital in St Helier. That was the last time I saw her. She was forty-one.

My poor dad: what a burden it must have been for him to carry. On the day he was in the hospital being told that my mum’s cancer had come back and that she had approximately nine months to live, I climbed onto the flat roof of the garage next to our house to retrieve a football. When I was getting down, I slipped and fell and gashed my shin so badly on a breeze block that it needed fifty stitches. It was a pretty dramatic injury and I was taken to hospital, too, without knowing of the terrible events that were unfolding there. Jason’s mum took me and bumped into my dad on the hospital steps. He thought she had come to inquire after my mum. When she told him what had happened and that the doctors were saying it might impede the use of my leg, the combination of it all was almost too much for him to bear. He says now it was the worst day of his life.

My mum was in and out of hospital in the weeks before her death. Then, that ambulance took her away and I went off on a football exchange trip to Caen for a long weekend. It was Easter and I was incredibly excited about it. I had an amazing time in France. We won the tournament we were playing in and some scouts from Caen, who were then in the French first division, were talking about me going over there for trials for their youth team.

When I got back to Jersey, I was euphoric. I’d bought some Easter chocolates for everyone and I couldn’t wait to give them to Mum and tell her all about my trip. We got the boat back to Jersey and I ran off it with my friend James Robinson, who was one of my close mates from school, when it docked. I spent a lot of time round at his house so I thought it was a bit weird when his dad looked straight through me on the quayside.

Soon, I caught sight of my dad. I was full of myself. I showed him the trophy I’d won and I gabbled out all the stuff about the trip. I was yakking away and we got in the car. We got about five minutes down the coast road from St Helier heading towards St Aubin. Out there in the bay was Elizabeth Castle on its rock. I suddenly thought ‘Oh Mum, how’s Mum?’ I asked Dad and he drew the car slowly into one of the lay-bys overlooking the beach.

He muttered something like ‘Just a second’ while he was stopping the car.

So I said ‘How’s Mum’ again.

‘Mum died whilst you were away,’ he said.

I couldn’t comprehend it. I said: ‘What?’

‘Mum’s died,’ Dad said. ‘She’s not with us any more.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It all seemed horribly unreal. As much as I tried to comprehend it, I just couldn’t accept it. I burst into tears while Dad tried to comfort me. As we drove home, fear gripped me. What was I going to say to my sisters? Who would I turn to now that Mum wasn’t ever going to be home again? Arriving at the house we walked into the lounge and there were all these cards of condolence – bizarrely it reminded me of Christmas. Mum was a very popular lady. She was a great netball player. She had loads of friends. And I just felt so lost. I looked around and I thought: ‘Everyone knows and I don’t. I’m their son and I’m the last one to know.’ Both my sisters were there – Jeanette is two years older than me and Alison is six years younger – and I felt that I hadn’t even been there for them. I can’t really express how difficult it was or how desperate I felt. I suppose you just spend time trying to come to terms with it.

I couldn’t even go to my own mother’s funeral – I was too embarrassed. I felt guilty because I suddenly saw it with such clarity after the event. It was like when someone throws a surprise party for you and you genuinely don’t know about it until you walk in. It’s that instant when you realize what has happened and suddenly all these pieces fit together.

Suddenly I knew why James Robinson’s dad couldn’t look me in the eye. I knew why we had been asked to go to church in France on the school trip the previous Sunday when we weren’t even a religious school. The teacher knew mum was seriously ill so he was desperate for us all to go to church and say a prayer for our loved ones. I didn’t realize any of that at the time. I was distracted because I had a game of tennis organized for that Sunday morning and I didn’t want to go to the church. So the teacher let me off church and allowed me to play tennis. I thought that was unusually generous. I thought I’d got the best of the deal because everyone else was going to church while I was hurtling round a tennis court.

On reflection, all these pieces came together and I just couldn’t deal with it. I regret not going to the funeral more than anything now because it stopped me coming to terms with my mum’s death. On the day of the funeral, I went down to a hotel in St Brelade’s Bay with Jason, where his father worked, and just sat by the side of the swimming pool, staring into the water. I grieved and I went through a lot of emotions but I never had any support in those early years. I’m not blaming anyone – it wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just didn’t speak about it and it wasn’t until later in my life, when I met Mariana, that I felt I could open up about it. I did grieve at the time. I cried – a lot. It was more shock than anything. I found it really difficult to let go of her. I tried to remember her and relive things that happened before she died as part of trying to preserve her memory. But that made me even more upset. I’d transport myself back to a time when she was there and then, when I was forced to come out of it, it just accentuated the loss. I was a thirteen-year-old kid having to deal with that kind of emotional baggage. It added a complicated layer to my psychology.

It certainly wasn’t my dad’s fault. He didn’t have anyone to tell him the best way of dealing with the situation. It all happened a generation ago and cancer was still a bit of a taboo subject back then. You were supposed to deal with tragedies like that with a stiff upper lip and just get on with it.

I went back to school after the Easter holidays. I can still see the look in people’s faces now: their sympathy. When people said how sorry they were it used to annoy me. I wanted to say to them ‘Why are you sorry; it wasn’t anything to do with you; you’re not to blame’. Emotionally, I became a lot more sensitive. Add the sensitivity from my mum’s death to the alienation I felt at Chelsea when I first arrived there in my late teens and it made me particularly vulnerable.

My mum had been so supportive of me as a child. One of the things that upset me most about not having her around was that I could no longer share my experiences and achievements with her. She was the one who picked us up from school. She took so much interest in us. Some of the things I did, I felt I was doing for her. We couldn’t wait to tell her what we’d done at school when she was there waiting for us at the school gates. She was so interested in our lives. After she died, I felt this huge hole because she was no longer there. From the age of seven upwards, I always played football on the school pitches during lunch hour. Because I was left-footed, every day I used to come home with eight inches of mud down my right trouser leg, a crusty, muddy mark that mapped out the trajectory of a slide tackle and invariably ended with a hole in the trouser knee. Mum used to wash them and mend them patiently. She had a rota with my school trousers because I got them muddy every day. I often think now ‘Thank God she let me carry on ruining my trousers’. I wish I could communicate that to her but I can’t.