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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
The new edition of the bestselling biography. Bobby Moore was the embodiment of all that was great about English football. Captaining England to glory in 1966 and West Ham to victory in several major tournaments, he was loved and respected throughout the world as football's golden boy. This definitive and authorised biography illuminates the extraordinary story of a sporting hero, from exciting accounts of his World Cup triumph to candid memories of his friendships with Beckenbauer, Eusébio and Pelé. It also reveals the inside story of a life beyond football, updated to include fascinating new material on Moore's enduring legacy in the years following his tragically premature death. Award-winning sports writer Jeff Powell, a close friend and confidant to the Moore family, has created a powerful and fitting tribute, honouring the golden era of English football and the exceptional man at its helm.
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BOBBY MOORE
THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY
JEFF POWELL
Dedicated to the lasting memory of a great friend
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to record his perpetual appreciation to Bobby Moore for more than a quarter of a century of valued friendship and shared confidences. This relationship was fundamental to the preparation of his authorised biographies.
His thanks also to Stephanie Moore for telling the moving story of their years together, to Tina, Roberta and Dean Moore for their loving memories, to the Daily Mail for its invaluable support, to John Moynihan for his caring research and, most especially, to his own wife, Maria, for all her loyalty, love and understanding.
PROLOGUE
Yet another World Cup comes and goes but still Bobby Moore remains the only England captain whose hands have reached out to grasp football’s Holy Grail and raise it aloft.
Can this be entirely coincidence?
The descent into mediocrity steepens for the nation which gave birth to this, the greatest game of all.
Brazil 2014 plumbed new depths of ineptitude.
Only once before had England gone to the World Cup Finals and failed to survive the opening group stage. At least in 1958 they drew those three matches and came home undefeated.
In this Brazil debacle they were eliminated after their first two games – drab losses to what turned out to be distinctly ordinary teams by the historic standards of Italy and Uruguay – and were fortunate to salvage one miserable point from the dead rubber against Costa Rica.
Would this degeneration really have befallen England if the Football Association had not turned its back on the inspiring legend, until the shock of his premature death, whose imposing statue now guards the gates to Wembley Stadium?
There is a perfectly dreadful symmetry to this process of decay.
Twelve World Cups have passed since Bobby and his boys of that halcyon summer of ’66 danced on the hallowed turf that sun-dappled afternoon in north-west London.
Six before he passed away, six since.
Twice only have England come home with pride.
The first was Moore’s last.
Mexico 1970 saw him captain England, a team arguably superior to his World Cup winners of four years earlier, in an epic duel in the sun against the greatest of all Brazil teams, then in a quarter-final thriller lost to the Germans in extra time.
The second was the last before Bobby finally succumbed to bowel cancer.
Paul Gascoigne cried as Bobby Robson’s team lost the semi-final of Italia ’90 on penalties. This country wept with him.
The common thread is Germany. The acute comparison is with Franz Beckenbauer.
Bobby, the blond Adonis, and Franz, the Kaiser, were exact contemporaries, the two greatest defenders football has ever seen, their majesty rooted in a deep-reading and profound understanding of the game. They were the epitome of each other.
They pitted wits in ’66 and ’70, becoming close friends, only for England to wantonly rupture the parallel thereafter.
Germany called upon Beckenbauer to go on and become the only man ever to win the World Cup as manager as well as player and captain, then to lead the bid which took football home to the Fatherland for the finals of 2006. England discarded all Moore’s comparable wisdom and experience, condemning themselves to these long years in the wilderness.
Of the fifteen managers – for one match or more since the time Sir Alf Ramsey called Moore an extension of himself on the pitch – five have fallen at the World Cup Finals hurdle, as did Ramsey himself in 1970. These were: Ron Greenwood, albeit undefeated at Spain ’82; Bobby Robson at Mexico ’86 and Italia ’90; Glenn Hoddle, who started losing the plot at France ’98; Sven Goran Eriksson, who took the money and ran after Japan/South Korea 2002 and Germany 2006; Fabio Capello, who did likewise following South Africa 2010; now Roy Hodgson, who is part victim of the mass foreign importation which has drained the pool of English players experienced in the Premier and Champions Leagues.
Is it conceivable that Moore would have done worse than that? Or that England under his guidance would have failed even to reach Germany ’74, Argentina ’78 or USA ’94? The questions swirl through the mists of time.
As I write this, can it really be twenty-one years since Bobby died? It seems like only yesterday that we embraced for the last time, on the steps of the London hotel where he and his team-mates celebrated on the night of England’s only World Cup triumph.
It takes a remarkable statistic to prescribe the time-frame: England have arm-banded more than forty captains since that triumphant afternoon of 30 July 1966. Some, of course, enjoyed that privilege as one-night stand-ins, but none have ever looked like equalling the record of ninety England captaincies which Bobby shares with Billy Wright, the most illustrious of his predecessors.
Of those who have achieved any measure of longevity, Moore had the highest respect for the one who came closest, leading out his country sixty-four times. He once said of Bryan Robson, Manchester United’s Captain Marvel:
He had that phenomenal engine to get from box to box, tackled like a vice, passed to perfection and scored bundles of goal. Just as importantly, whether it was with England or United, Bryan had that will to win, that hatred of defeat, that leadership by example which are the qualities of great captains.
In that last part, he might have been talking about himself.
Of the England managers appointed in succession to Sir Alf Ramsey, while Moore was alive, Joe Mercer’s caretaker reign was too brief for Bobby to pass judgement. Thereafter, his high hopes for Don Revie were unfulfilled; he was pleased his old West Ham professor Ron Greenwood was given his chance at world level; he was fondly surprised that Bobby Robson almost brought a second World Cup home; and he shied away from Graham Taylor’s route-one strategy.
Of all those who came after his death, he would have approved of only one. He said of Terry Venables, who would be denied his World Cup after leading England to the Wembley semi-final of Euro ’96 (Germany on penalties, yet again): ‘Terry was one of the most intelligent coaches and inspiring man managers I ever knew or worked with.’
For sure he would have opposed the doomed appointments of Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. The question of a foreign manager was beginning to be raised after a quarter of century of post-Ramsey disappointment and Moore said:
The England job is for an Englishman, not someone from abroad. Every country has its football culture and it takes one of our own to understand how the English player works. Anyway, a national team should be all about people from that country – from the manager through the players, all the way down to the tea lady.
Then he added: ‘By the way, no country has ever won the World Cup with a foreign manager.’ That remains true to this day.
Such was the beautiful simplicity of Bobby Moore, a clarity distilled from all he had learned, all he knew, all he experienced, all the complexities of his career and his life. Focussing on that now brings with it a pang of nostalgia for those of us who think about Bobby more days than not in our own lives.
24 February 1993 does seem like only yesterday.
Until you remember that it was the day the glory died.
CHAPTER 1
THE IMPACT
It was 6.36 a.m. on the morning of 24 February 1993 and the news which was to have such a profound impact on the people of Britain, provoke such an extraordinary outpouring of human emotion, inspire such an unprecedented sense of national loss and be borne around the globe with such sadness, was to remain a private matter for a little longer.
Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore, the public’s last hero but an essentially private man, still belonged to his family.
The first fingers of dawn were tugging at the curtains of the charming corner residence cloistered behind electronic gates among other homes of taste and substance high on Putney Heath. It was quiet for the moment but what his wife and children knew from experience was that the instant word of his passing filtered to the outside world there would be no peace. And there would be more than a new day tapping at the window.
The revelation that Bobby Moore was seriously ill had been made only ten days earlier. It had been withheld until an accumulation of small changes in his commanding appearance had begun prompting inquiries as to his health. It had been delayed to defer speculation as to his prospects for survival.
Although the family had known for almost two years, since major intestinal surgery in April 1991, that his cancer was terminal, they had helped him maintain for as long as humanly possible – super-humanly in truth – the gallant and convincing facade that, as he put it in one of his familiar phrases, ‘all is well’.
It seemed too soon. There was no reason, yet, for the media at large to be gathered in waiting at Lynden Gate.
Softly, one by one, Stephanie notified his uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces. The boyhood loss of his father and the recent burial of his mother had tied the most famous Moore son closely to this thoroughly decent, disarmingly old-fashioned family the like of which used to be the salt of London’s East End community.
Stephanie called her own mother and father, of whom Bobby had grown increasingly fond. She telephoned me to help prepare the formal statement. This would not be released until Roberta and Dean had waited for the sun to rise over the east coast of the United States before waking their mother, Tina, at her new home in Florida. Nor until their father had been removed in continuing peace to the premises of a funeral director who had been sworn to secrecy.
Unofficially, the word was spreading. But the dam held long enough to serve its purpose. When it broke it released a tidal wave of admiration, a flood of tributes, an ocean of nostalgia and a river of tears.
All were of such overwhelming magnitude that our society found itself challenged to accept the real significance of this footballer of humble birth and simple origin but princely integrity and regal aspirations, challenged to realise his importance to a succession of generations, challenged to assess his influence over the English way of life both now and in the future.
It came swelling up, as he would have wished, not from the privileged socialites who had sought briefly to bask in his reflected glory but then turned their backs on him, not from the self-important football institutions which had failed him in later life, but from the vast body of ordinary people.
Suddenly, as if guilty at having failed sufficiently to acknowledge its debt to this heroic defender of forgotten virtues and collapsing standards, England recognised the loss of something pure, something honest, something good, something intangible but something impossible to replace.
The national mourning ran – runs yet and maybe always will run – at least as deep as if a member of the Royal Family had died. Perhaps deeper at the time, given the House of Windsor’s fall from grace during the months through which the most gracious of England’s sporting captains rose so nobly above the ravages of cancer.
Bobby Moore was the ’60s icon. His was the decade in which the trapdoor of opportunity opened so that talent irrespective of background could come thrusting into the light. Moore, the representative supreme of the working man’s game, became the symbol of hope to so many. Here was majestic, living proof that we could all make good.
The East End war baby with his fresh-faced universal appeal and his upright bearing in defiance of the class system transcended all the barriers to become the champion not just of the working class but of all the people. He had the style, the charm and the intelligence to walk with kings. He retained his compassion for others and an attachment to his roots to remain one of the common people.
Everyman was born.
The day Everyman died he touched the raw nerve of the ’90s to comparably dramatic and influential effect.
Britain’s descent from a civilised society respected around the world into a primitive underworld of criminal violence, mob savagery, terrifying aggression, unemployed psychopaths and, by the very least of its manifestations, uncouth manners, was accelerating.
In the short time between the making public of Moore’s illness and the morning of his passing the unspoken fears of the silent majority became tragically and intensely focused by the abduction of an innocent two-year-old child from a shopping precinct in Liverpool and his ghastly murder by the side of a railway track.
The brutal termination of this little boy’s life compelled this country to address not merely the burgeoning issue of juvenile crime but also the chronic incidence of child abuse and molestation of the aged, statistics so rampantly high as to shame Britain in the eyes of the world.
When Bobby Moore went soon after it was likened to the dying of the light. It occurred so abruptly to so many anxious citizens that their last hope had died with him. Harnessed to his comparative youth – he was forty-seven days short of his fifty-second birthday – that acute sense of loss then became transformed into a mighty force which swept the length and breadth of the land.
No life, young or old, was left untouched by his passing. He became enshrined as the symbol of how civilised life ought to be lived. He represented hope and good. Donations poured in to his chosen charity as the country simply refused to let his example perish.
Since it seemed there was no one else left to pick up the flag for all that is honest, responsible and worthwhile, Moore’s spirit carried it beyond the grave.
Yes, he was my friend. No, this evaluation is not far-fetched. Newspapers are also the litmus paper of the population. Sometimes they dictate the colour of public thinking but in matters this close to the heart they know the wisdom of taking the nation’s temperature, not trying to raise it.
In all the millions of sentences expended across endless miles of newsprint – as well as spoken on television and radio – there was not one critical word.
Jeffrey Richards, professor of cultural history at Lancaster University, lamented Moore’s passing when he wrote in the Daily Mail: ‘The new Englishman is increasingly being seen as a brutish and leering figure with little or no right to respect. He combines the thuggishness of Vinny Jones with the oafishness of Gazza, the brutishness of Johnny Rotten with the boorishness of Bernard Manning.’
Keith Waterhouse, the people’s playwright, completed the philosophical equation in his complementary column: ‘No wonder Bobby Moore’s death leaves us with such a sense of loss.’
In its way the uncompromising, down-to-earth respect for Moore was manna from heaven for the media. Yet while his memory was milked it did no harm. Not to his family, not to his friends, not to his followers, not to that memory itself.
Those tribute acres were his proper due. Sadly, they came too late for the man himself to see and hear how deeply he was loved in his own country.
Whenever and wherever he travelled abroad Bobby was greeted with a respect and affection verging on awe.
Even America, the land of baseball, to which soccer is an alien game, identified Moore’s social significance. The New York Times devoted more than a full column of its front page to an explanation of how his death was acting as a re-unifying force within an ageing nation threatened by violent division, the breakdown of law and order and the collapse of its moral society.
At home his own genuine modesty and the inbred restraint of his countrymen when it comes to expressing emotion had combined to separate Bobby from England’s latent admiration.
As a nation, we took our hero for granted. Although not quite to the very end. In those few days after his illness became a matter of public sorrow the surge of appreciation began and he remained lucid and able to read the first of what mushroomed into countless triumphant reviews of his own life.
Those columns were no more than a foretaste of the patriotic volumes of praise which were to follow, but he enjoyed them just the same. Just as he would have smiled, on the morning after his funeral, at the final paragraph of one leading article. All the more so since it appeared in one of the brasher tabloids of which he was somewhat wary.
This is how it read:
God can tell Heaven’s Eleven to start getting changed. The captain has arrived.
CHAPTER 2
THE LAP OF HONOUR
Obituaries are never easy.
By a reversal of normal fortunes, so far as what used to be called Fleet Street is concerned, they come even tougher when you have to write one about a subject you know well.
While a little knowledge can lend the appearance of informed objectivity to the black border section of the newspaper, too much intimate detail can lead the author into a literary minefield, booby-trapped with excessive fragments of potential trivia.
There is also the danger of submerging clarity in a wash of sentiment. Which makes it all the harder when you love the person who has died.
And I loved Bobby Moore.
I loved him, if not like the brother neither he nor I never had, then the way one single child can relate to another … finding good companionship, sharing good times, exchanging confidences, being there in a crisis, helping out in times of need, leaning on someone reliable when the problem is on the other shoulder, picking up the phone on a whim, debating sport as well as our life and times and being happy to get together either by chance or design.
Our friendship started slowly, gathered strength through the maturing years of his playing career, then became firmly cemented by a host of shared experiences culminating when we helped each other to the altar. A couple of older – but please never wiser – chaps smitten with two younger – and, thank you, beautiful – women.
Bobby did not come easy, either. It took time and loyalty to win his trust but we came to be as relaxed in each other’s company as only good friends can be … and only when their wives approve.
We could pick up where we left off no matter how long the interval. So when we each returned from separate trips to America this fateful February and the first message was one to call him urgently the alarm bells began ringing even before the telephone.
When he had undergone his major operation at the London Clinic we had been concerned by the implications. Although he rallied impressively, recovered his age-defying physical condition and quickly re-engaged us in life on the golf links and the tennis court, in the bar and the restaurant, at his home or ours, we wondered if all really was as well as he insisted.
With characteristic lack of concern for himself he had been shielding his friends from the tragic reality. For a few hours longer he continued to do so:
‘Hello, Bobby. How are you?’
‘Tremendous holiday.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘How about a drink?’
‘Great.’
‘See you lunchtime tomorrow at the Royal Garden.’
It was light conversation as normal. With Bobby it was hard to tell if something serious lay beneath the easy surface. And at first it did not occur to me that he had chosen this particular hotel not for the convenience of its location in Kensington but because it was the very one in which he and his England colleagues had celebrated the night they won World Cup.
Bobby Moore was setting out on his last lap of honour.
It was Friday 12 February and it was a miracle he was still able to do so. Unbeknown to all outside his family, unconfirmed by superficial observation of the fine figure of a man the world had always known, that insidious, indiscriminate cancer had spread from his colon to his liver and he had been fighting mightily for his life.
When he walked tall into the bar at the Royal Garden it was an imperceptible fraction more slowly than usual. There was a faint discoloration of the features of the kind which attends jaundice and when he ordered no more than a glass of water, a touch unusual for Bobby, I knew there were grounds for concern.
In my heart I knew before he told me:
We’ve got to get a statement out soon. One or two people have started asking questions. I have got cancer. Only Stephanie and the close family know. I am sorry to have to break it to you first. I don’t want a paper chase so let’s keep it correct and as pleasant as possible. No unseemly scramble. My illness is nobody’s exclusive. How shall we do it?
The details were simple. A news agency advisory statement issued early enough on Sunday evening to give all elements of the media a chance to react. An embargo on publication or broadcast – broken only by Sky News – until shortly after 11 p.m. so that Bobby and Stephanie could be in bed, telephone switched to automatic, safe from intrusion at least until morning.
The dismay was the problem. Hand on his arm. Got to ask: ‘What’s the diagnosis? What do the doctors say?’
Bobby always could communicate more with a single gesture than most men with a thousand words. Ask his World Cup teammates. So he smiled. Just slightly.
And he thought for a moment before drawing attention to his coat.
I had ribbed him about it on arrival. It was cut full-length from soft leather dyed deep red and it sported a multi-coloured silk lining. It was a hint more obvious than his usual, classic mode of attire and he used it cleverly to convey the truth:
You remember when we were in Sweden last summer at the European Championships and I went shopping with Stephanie? Well, it was in the shop on the corner. It was something different. And it was lovely quality and at £600 I thought it was good value.
I thought if I didn’t buy it then I might never have something like it. But I never wore it. Not until now. If I don’t wear it today…
The sentence tailed into silence. I knew then he was on that farewell tour of his best-remembered places.
We cleared our throats and talked of old times, good days, long nights. We walked slowly to the revolving door and stood for a time on the steps from which he had reached out that summer’s evening long ago to embrace a jubilant multitude.
We held each other’s shoulders and we parted with a hug. We checked that we were both going to Wembley on Wednesday – him to offer his last words of wisdom as a commentator for Capital Radio, me for the Mail.
So we did and that night I stood by him while he chatted and joked with fellow members of the media about the modem England’s World Cup difficulties against San Marino, the kind of team his England would have swamped. And I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard how he had stepped out of his car later to direct the traffic through Wembley’s post-match congestion and all the drivers had jump-started to his command.
God knows how he even made it to Wembley, but somehow he did and he carried it off in style. He hoped to pay his last respects to West Ham four days later but that proved to be one match too far. We spoke on the telephone that Sunday afternoon and he just said: ‘Bit too tired today, old son. But might see you later in the week. How’s the family?’
Not once had he complained. Not once had he asked, ‘Why me?’
That was our last conversation but we had said our goodbyes on those hotel steps. The statement we agreed that day quoted him as saying he had a battle to fight. That was enough to satisfy a curious world but in truth he had already fought the good fight and brave for almost two years.
Still it was hard to accept. Still I couldn’t bring myself to start putting his life into words until the call came from the woman he loved.
Obituaries are never easy. This one seemed impossible. But I wrote it and I walked away from the office and next day people were generous enough to say it told them about the Bobby Moore they knew and about the Bobby Moore they wanted to know about.
And the family were kind enough to say they would like it to be kept in these pages for anyone someday who might like to read about the footballer who changed our lives and times.
So this, also by way of introduction to the chronicle of the rich, full life which follows, is what the six million readers of the Daily Mail read on the stunned morning of 25 February 1993:
PERFECTIONIST TO THE FINAL WHISTLE
The manner of his leaving was in keeping with the man’s way of living. No commotion, no complaint, no thought for himself and, most typically of all, no loose ends.
Bobby Moore was not only the world’s most imperial defender but also the most immaculate footballer ever to grace the vast theatres of the people’s game.
The meticulous attention to detail, the scrupulous care with appearance, the exact precision of time-keeping, the constant observation of manners which maketh a gentleman out of a hero, all were with him to the premature end.
A perfectionist to the last, right down to the uncanny anticipation and instinctive sense of occasion which were the essence of his sporting genius. With only days to spare, Moore paid his farewell visits to the places where he had savoured the richest vintage of his fame.
The last public appearance was at Wembley, the nostalgic stadium he made his personal domain, and since it followed the announcement of his cancer the great man’s presence at the radio microphone stirred warmer interest than England’s World Cup fumblings against San Marino.
A lot of arms went round those still straight-back shoulders that night, a final, collective embrace from the family of football in all its generations.
No loose ends.
Our last personal reunion took place at the Royal Garden, the Kensington hotel at which England celebrated its only winning of the World Cup. We stood on the steps from which he had reached out to touch hands with the throng which stopped the mighty roar of London’s traffic and replaced it with full-throated acclaim for the captain and his boys of ’66.
Moore smiled as he remembered that heady, midsummer’s evening more than a quarter of a century ago: ‘You know, old son, we had the world at our feet that night.’
No loose ends.
Beneath his feet, as he spoke, lay a time capsule lodged in the foundation stone of the building, crammed with data on the twentieth century, waiting to be opened by some future life form.
The exact contents are a secret, but for sure the story of how a working-class boy came to take delivery from his Queen of the most prized piece of silverware on the planet, has been used to explain how the human species wove so many strands of its very existence into a round-ball game.
Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore – Chelsea after a paternal uncle, not the football club or the fashionable London borough – was born on 12 April 1941 in Barking, a rough-and-tumble border town on the cusp of Essex and east London.
From childhood he was painstakingly neat and clean, scrubbed spotless, school socks pulled up straight, a crease in his short pants, his books on their shelves, toys in their box and never a hair out of place, forget about dandruff on his lapels.
No detail was minute enough to be ignored and it was this unflagging characteristic which was the bedrock of his career. Not the most naturally gifted athlete – slow, weak left foot, less than commanding in the air – he applied remorseless practice and rare intelligence to perfecting his strengths and playing to them.
Ron Greenwood, West Ham’s believer in the beautiful game, was the making of Moore and Alf Ramsey, England’s tactical pragmatist, used him to fulfilment. Between them those two managers charted Moore’s halcyon years.
The ’60s was the decade in which English society lifted the class barriers and patronised lads with more talent than breeding. The Cockney photographer, the Gorbals actor, the Yorkshire painter and, led by Moore, the heart-throb footballer stepped over from the wrong side of the tracks into the most polite drawing rooms. No dinner party was complete without one, not once the World Cup was won.
Moore prepared for football’s ultimate moment by leading West Ham to the 1964 FA Cup and, also at Wembley, the 1965 European Cup Winners’ Cup. Add all the faultless games there for England and he knew the hallowed turf like the carpet in his house on stockbroker row, could find his way up the Royal Box staircase blindfold.
The 1966 tournament was overflowing with supreme footballers – Pelé, Eusébio, a promising young West German called Beckenbauer ranged against the host nation in the Final itself – as well as household English names like Banks and Stiles, Charlton and Ball, Hurst and Peters. But by the time Moore came to climb those steps once more, to espy Her Majesty’s white lace gloves and so wipe his muddied hands on the velvet balustrade before reaching out for the Jules Rimet Trophy, there was only one Player of the Final.
The captain’s overwhelming composure, calculated suppression of emotion and self-possessed resistance to pressure, imbued Moore with an aura of haughty, almost arrogant superiority in the estimation of most of the international media.
Nevertheless, their vote for the ice-man was as near to unanimous as made no difference.
It was sealed in the closing moments of extra time against the Germans. With England leading 3–2 by courtesy of a Russian linesman he laid claim to the ball amid the pandemonium of his own penalty area, ignored Big Jack’s bellowing entreaties to kick it over the Twin Towers, stepped calmly around two lunging opponents and floated out the inch-perfect pass which launched Geoff Hurst towards his historic hat-trick and commentator Ken Wolstenholme into his unforgettable line: ‘They think it’s all over, it is now.’
No loose ends.
Pelé and Beckenbauer, Eusébio and his own teammates are in mourning for him now. They knew the real Bobby Moore behind the chilling professional mask and the tackle like a vice, the lovable, loyal man devoid of ego who could laugh and cry with the best of them. They jousted with him through a golden age when not even the loftiest rivals ever lost respect for each other.
They recall not only Wembley ’66 but Mexico ’70, the World Cup year of Moore’s sternest trial and England’s strongest team but their mutual disappointment.
The ice-man hurried into the Finals from house arrest in Bogotá, where the Colombian authorities had held him on a preposterous charge of stealing an emerald bracelet. He played majestically, as if nothing but football had ever been on his mind. At the conclusion of an epic duel in Brazil’s group, Pelé trotted past all other supplicants among his English opponents to exchange shirts with the man he calls: ‘The finest and most honourable defender I ever played against.’
They would surely have met again in the final had Ramsey, by then Sir Alf, not substituted Bobby Charlton with England ahead against Germany in the quarter-final and thereby invited the full-grown Franz Beckenbauer to run rampant. Extra-time revisited, but reversed.
So Bobby came home to mutterings about a bracelet instead of carrying another World Cup medal. He maintained a stoic, understated defence, privately and steadfastly protecting the one witness who could have silenced the whispers forever. Once, late at night, he swore me to secrecy and confided that one of the younger lads in the squad might have done ‘something foolish, a prank with unfortunate consequences.’
No loose ends.
Here was loyalty of the highest order from a man who led not by word but by deed and example. When his first marriage, to Tina his boyhood sweetheart, broke up and he set up home with his beloved Stephanie, he shouldered all the blame. No complaint. Suffice it to say now that there are two sides to every divorce.
It was not always loyalty repaid, not even by the game he dignified.
Sir Alf dropped him for his only notable blunder in more than a hundred appearances for his country, a second managerial misjudgement punished when Norman Hunter committed a carbon copy in the return game with Poland which knocked England out of the 1974 World Cup and began the end of the Ramsey era.
Moore the human computer would never have repeated that error had he won another 108 caps, a record for an outfield player. Only goalkeepers go on forever.
His country gave him the OBE but his game gave him the elbow. Ramsey described him as ‘my general on the field who translates our strategy into reality.’ His game was built on intelligence and, when still a teenager, he became the youngest holder of the Football Association’s full coaching badge.
Yet while his alter-ego Beckenbauer led Germany to another World Cup as head coach, Moore’s best offer in management was a mission impossible at Southend. While his great rival Pelé became FIFA’s ambassador to the world, the FA chose to ignore his treasure chest of knowledge, even though a succession of England teams were crying out for help.
His radio audience learned that ‘you can’t defend on your backside’ while his successors down there on the Wembley pitch kept sliding into difficulty. Greenwood watched and listened with a smile: ‘Bobby would stroll across to the near post and catch most of the crosses they put in these days on his chest. In fact he did it so often at West Ham we used to say he would end up with a hole in his chest.’
But it was the hole in his stomach which beat him in the end, that and the perforations of his liver. Still no complaint. ‘Can’t blame it on the old liver,’ he said at our last meeting. ‘Did us proud down the years.’ I went home and replayed some of the tapes recorded when we had gathered up all his memories for his biography. The recollections are interrupted by the frequent hiss of lager cans being opened. Never mind football, you didn’t take on Bobby at drinking.
‘A car needs petrol,’ he used to say. Especially a high performance job like Bobby Moore. So when the fuel finally ran out you remembered the night in Turin after he had played against Italy and passed the other Bobby’s record number of England caps. It was turned 6 a.m. when we wandered back to the hotel and he said: ‘Back down at 7.’ The rest of us complied, looking like death. He reappeared showered and spruce, all in the cause of seeing a team of amateur footballers from England on to their tour bus with a crate of champagne.
Last out of the bar, first in for training. That was Bobby Moore, the arch defender, the scourge of the Scots, the envy of the football world. It seemed he was indestructible.
As recently as September 1992 he turned out at a charity golf tournament, hit the ball out of sight, then sat down to lunch next to the Barnado boy who caddied for him. Until December he still looked as if he should be playing for England and thousands despairing of some of the new generation of defenders wished he would.
Yet long before recognition of his gaunt appearance prompted his admission of his illness, he knew his days were numbered. When they operated on his colon in April 1991 the specialists told Bobby his condition was terminal. He, in turn, told only the closest of his family and set about defying the odds.
Moore’s in-built strength of will and physique drove him back into training and he held off even the customary ravages of chemotherapy. He treated death with all the respect he gave a dangerous forward, denying his opponent space in which to advance, cutting off his avenues of penetration, diverting him into areas where he could do least damage, always keeping his feet.
Thus he bought himself two years of extra-time, played and lived to the full, free from curious intrusion and spared the gush of sentiment he would have found embarrassing. He enjoyed friends unburdened by confirmation of his plight and he worked on, tidying his affairs as he went. His father died years ago and he buried his mother in 1992.
No loose ends.
Although fated never to succeed in business, he was lucky in love. Stephanie, the bright and cultured British Airways girl who had stabilised his life, became his pillar of support in death.
They married in December 1991, in time, in private, with myself and my wife as witnesses-in-chief and delighted to be so, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him so happy, an honest man making certain he would be leaving an honest woman.
No loose ends.
When he knew he wasn’t going to make his fifty-second birthday, when the time came to say goodbye, he looked me in the eye and said: ‘It’s cancer. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it?’
Ashamed? Not only England, the whole of Britain is proud of him. The style with which he captained his country and the dignity with which he conducted himself remain a monument as to how football should be played and footballers should behave.
A more tangible memorial would not be out of place at Wembley: The Bobby Moore Steps. Because he died as he lived, the first and only Englishman to walk up them and raise the World Cup aloft.
The loss is ours. England has lost a distinguished ambassador, the world of football has lost a giant, Mrs Moore has lost a loving husband. Roberta and Dean have lost a devoted father, little Poppy has lost a grandfather far too young and I have lost a friend who, when the mood and the after-dinner wine took him, imagined he could sing like Frank Sinatra.
We’ll be seeing him in all the old familiar places.
CHAPTER 3
UNDER THE INFLUENCES
Bobby Moore was seventeen the night he nerved himself to walk into West Ham’s first team across the debris of Malcolm Allison’s broken dreams.
The anguish behind the eyes of Allison’s bold handshake was the image burned deepest into Moore’s memory of that autumn evening in 1958 when the roar of a huge crowd first prickled his spine, when he first sniffed the addictive aroma of stardom.
It was not the new boy’s thrill of playing the Manchester United legend off Upton Park which fidgeted with Moore’s mind during his long, insomniac nights.
Through solitary hours spent counting shadows on bedroom ceilings, Moore still nursed the faint sense of guilt that his own precocious arrival on the central stage of English Soccer denied Allison the fulfilment of his own playing career. In the moment of Moore’s accession to the number six shirt, Allison lost his forlorn chance of playing just once in the First Division for West Ham United.
Allison, the man who taught Moore all he knew. Allison, his idol. Allison, friend. Allison, inspirational fighter against the gasping corrosion of tuberculosis. Allison, having put young Bobby on the road from West Ham’s worst apprentice to England’s most-capped international, turned from his protégé to walk heavily from the dressing room.
For that one night only, Big Mal was a beaten man. Yet of everything he gave Moore, that unwilling sacrifice was the most important. Bobby watched him go through a confusion of emotions, elation at his own imminent debut bruised by pity for the man whose teaching had made it possible. His own future was at the mercy of his feelings.
Many an adolescent might have collapsed under the weight of the guilt. Instead, Moore’s boyhood went out into the corridor with Allison. As the door closed, Bobby shut out his feelings, locked away in some hidden corner of his private self all the dangerous turmoil of excitement, fear, passion and compassion.
Before he even kicked a ball, he was being forged into the haughty captain of England. The immaculate Bobby Moore was conceived out of Allison’s most grievous disappointment.
He went out and wowed them.
West Ham, newcomers to the First Division, beat Manchester United 3–2. The press telephones chattered acclaim for a new young master of the defensive arts.
Moore smiled at that: ‘I just hit a couple of balls straight. Nothing really.’
The Allison connection could only be dredged up from the bottom of a long, long glass. Even then, Moore probed gingerly at the memory:
Malcolm had been battling for months to recover from tuberculosis. I’d even seen him the day he got the news of his illness. I was a groundstaff boy and I’d gone to Upton Park to collect my wages. I saw Malcolm standing on his own on the balcony at the back of the stand. Tears in his eyes. Big Mal actually crying.
He’d been coaching me and coaching me and coaching me but I still didn’t feel I knew him well enough to go up and ask what was wrong.
When I came out of the office I looked up again and Noel Cantwell was standing with his arm round Malcolm. He’d just been told he’d got TB.
It wasn’t like Malcolm to give up. By the start of that ’58 season we were battling away together in the reserves, Malcolm proving he could still play, me proving I might be able to play one day.
West Ham had just come up. They went to Portsmouth and won. They beat Wolves at home in their second game. After three or four matches they were top of the First Division, due to play Manchester United on the Monday night, and they had run out of left halves. Billy Lansdowne, Andy Nelson, all of them were unfit. It’s got to be me or Malcolm.
I’d been a professional for two and a half months and Malcolm had taught me everything I knew. For all the money in the world I wanted to play. For all the money in the world I wanted Malcolm to play because he’d worked like a bastard for this one game in the First Division.
It would have meant the world to him. Just one more game, just one minute in that game. I knew that on the day Malcolm with all his experience would probably do a better job than me. But maybe I’m one for the future.
It somehow had to be that when I walked into the dressing room and found out I was playing, Malcolm was the first person I saw. I was embarrassed to look at him. He said ‘Well done. I hope you do well.’ I knew he meant it but I knew how he felt. For a moment I wanted to push the shirt at him and say ‘Go on, Malcolm. It’s yours. Have your game. I can’t stop you. Go on, Malcolm. My time will come.’
But he walked out and I thought maybe my time wouldn’t come again. Maybe this would be my only chance. I thought: you’ve got to be lucky to get the chance, and when the chance comes you’ve got to be good enough to take it.
I went out and played the way Malcolm had always told me to play. Afterwards I looked for him back in the dressing room. Couldn’t find him.
It went very quiet over Moore’s big house when he told the story. He sat surrounded by the plush rewards of all the football years which followed, right hand holding a lager up to the light of a crystal chandelier, left forefinger tracing patterns in condensation on the expensive glass.
It was the sort of silence you are afraid to break with a cough.
Moore shattered the rare and brittle moment himself, snapping the top off another beer. He gulped down the merest hint of embarrassment. This man was accustomed to betraying as much emotion as the Post Office Tower.
Allison taught him that ‘Be in control of yourself. Take control of everything around you. Look big. Think big. Tell people what to do.’
The words hummed in Moore’s schoolboy ears. He said:
I was a boy, training at West Ham on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Malcolm was in charge, always the commanding figure. For me it was an adventure. Malcolm was the hero.
Now I see that for him I was the first of a long line of players who he looked upon as his own creations. Malcolm always had one special player close to him.
What a challenge it was for him to take an older player like Tony Book up from Bath and Plymouth to Manchester City. Then there was Mike Summerbee, then Colin Bell. He bought Rodney Marsh for City to be like a son he could adore. At Crystal Palace he had Don Rogers and then Peter Taylor. Malcolm had to have one.
Well I was the first, when Malcolm was coaching schoolboys. He took a liking to me when I don’t think anyone else at West Ham saw anything special in me. Just for that, I would have done anything for him. Every house needs a foundation and Malcolm gave me mine.
It went beyond that. He was the be-all and end-all for me. I looked up to the man. It’s not too strong to say I loved him.
Behind that rush of sentiment lay Moore’s undying gratitude for the simple philosophy which was the basis for his reputation as a player of vision, as the best reader of a football match in the world. Moore’s capacity for detecting the subtlest shifts and eddies of the highest quality play was the priceless gift handed down to him in one sentence by Allison.
Moore explained:
Malcolm said one simple thing which was to stay in my life forever. We sometimes used to get the same bus from the ground and we were sitting upstairs one day when Malcolm said very quietly, ‘Keep forever asking yourself: “If I get the ball now, who will I give it to?”’ He told me that was di Stefano’s secret at Real Madrid.
So simple. So real. So easy. I carried that with me into the middle of Wembley, Maracana, Hampden Park, every great stadium.
Wherever it was, I would always know that maybe the left back was free, the right winger running, the inside left dropping off his man into space for me.
There’s nothing complicated about vision. It’s pictures in your mind, put there purely and simply by looking around yourself. It’s good because it’s so simple. The bad players are the players who make the game difficult. I passed that piece of Malcolm on down to one or two players I believed could benefit. I’ll always be in Malcolm’s debt for that insight. It was like suddenly looking into the sunshine.
The vision, however, did not blind Moore to the imperfections in Allison’s lifestyle. Bobby swallowed Malcolm’s football philosophy, ran in many of the same social circles, but always held back something of himself, refusing to dive headfirst into the whirlpool of self-indulgence.
In his later years as captain of West Ham and England, Moore was probably more aloof from the majority of his fellow players than was Allison as manager of Manchester City and Crystal Palace.
Far from curbing the social habits of his players, Allison more often led them gaily into the night clubs and up to the bars. There was a swagger about such behaviour. It has style. It has dash. But it has dangers, and not only in Manchester’s Piccadilly or London’s Park Lane.
Even in the sunshine of a 1973 summer in South Africa, Allison caught a cold. In a country where sport and the social life are the white man’s haven from political criticism, Malcolm’s high octane mixture of the two brought trouble to his touring team.
Moore said:
Malcolm had a great life but he left some question marks behind him en route. As a manager I would have wanted to be part of my players. But only up to a point. I wouldn’t have thought about taking them out to night clubs. I would like to feel that after a game I could go round to the local pub and have a drink with them.
Come seven o’clock I would say, ‘I’m going home.’ I might be going out somewhere later myself. But not with the lads. How else could you discipline people? I would have told Mike Summerbee he had it in him to be the greatest winger in the world and to go out and prove it to me every game. If he failed, he would have to get in the reserves and prove he was still in good physical condition. I don’t know if Malcolm left himself the right to do that.
Look at South Africa. I went there, had a marvellous time.
Malcolm went there with a team of great players: Rodney Marsh, Frank McLintock, Don Rogers.
Yet they got diabolical publicity and I asked myself why? Why do it, Malcolm? He’s no different from me in that whatever he does is going to get blown up by the publicity. We know that, and it happened to me once or twice, yet I’ve managed to stay clear of day-to-day troubles.
Malcolm should have conquered South Africa but the truth is that he has a streak in him which made him abuse people or a situation. I appreciate life and don’t want to spoil it for myself. If people put themselves out for me I won’t abuse them.
That’s the difference between us and that difference is why I can’t support Malcolm blindly in everything he does. Much as I love him as a man, much as I respect his knowledge of football, I still have to question him in my mind.
That process of clinical reappraisal was digging to the very roots of Allison’s teaching fifteen years later, in Bobby’s last season at West Ham.
Like a reliable computer, Moore’s mind sifted its input of information absolutely on merit, aloof from the apparent importance of the source.
Hence the impact of one Lenny Heppell, ballroom dancer and night club proprietor who strictly belongs no closer to football than a distant relative. He was father-in-law to Bryan ‘Pop’ Robson, once a regular scorer of goals with Newcastle, West Ham and Sunderland.
Heppell had been loosely involved with West Ham for the best part of a year before he secured a firm introduction to Bobby Moore.
He moved south from Durham in the wake of his son-in-law’s transfer from Sunderland and began to work with a handful of West Ham players on their balance and timing. Moore remembered thinking: ‘What the hell’s he doing? I can’t believe in that nonsense.’
For months they exchanged no more than a good morning nod. The more appearances Heppell made at Upton Park, the more remote England’s captain seemed. Moore had no problem presenting a forbidding exterior when he sensed someone fidgeting to get into his company.
Heppell got no further than ‘hullo’ until one day in February 1974 Moore went into a local steak house for lunch and found a spare chair at a table with Robson, Trevor Brooking and Heppell. Moore admitted he had enjoyed a lager or two after a hard morning’s training and sat relaxed and easy in his chair.
Heppell looked across and said: ‘I’m glad you’re sitting like that.’ Moore, on the defensive, said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m glad to see you relaxed and round shouldered. I never thought you could relax.’
‘You don’t know me. Maybe it’s because I’ve had a lager.’
It was not the friendliest start to a relationship. Yet the seeds of interest were sown.
Moore said:
I had a few sessions with him after that and he made simple common sense. He made me question the very first thing Malcolm ever told me: Stand big.
Lenny told me I ran like a coat hanger. Upright. I looked at myself on television and saw he was right. It was what Malcolm had told me fifteen years earlier. It made me look big all right but it made my running harder and slower. Lenny talked me into rolling my shoulders but not my body.
West Ham went to play up at Newcastle and I knew Lenny was watching so I ran out the way he wanted. We lost, so it sounds crazy to say it, but it worked. I made one long run, the sort of run that would have had me blowing hard a few weeks earlier, and this time I was fresh and ready to go again.
I watched myself on TV the next day, the Sunday. I looked terrific. It made me want to get out there and play, the way watching Tom Mix at the Saturday morning pictures made you want to go out and play Cowboys and Indians.
Lenny got on at me then about turning. He told me to turn I like the ballroom dancers – head first. It was logic when he made you think about it. He told me to turn my head and my body would follow. He made me notice that when I crossed the road I leaned forward head first. My feet followed. I started throwing my head and instead of falling flat on my face, my feet would follow.
Simple? To me it was magic. It was something I wished I had heard years before. My turning and speed of movement had unproved 100 per cent. It was a bit late for me. But Lenny was helping the others. He told Trevor Brooking exactly the opposite to me. Trevor was too relaxed. Easy-ohsy, flopping here, flopping there. Lenny tensed him up. Put some oomph in him. Next thing Trevor’s in the England team.
Makes you realise that too many people in football think they know everything and don’t want to listen to people outside the game.
Nevertheless, Moore still needed a conscious effort to resist Allison’s indoctrination. Unthinking, he stood erect at his private bar dispensing the drinks. Shoulders back.
The house was named with head-high pride: Morlands. In some distant comer the au pair was putting the children to bed. The latest in a succession of fast cars sat crouched and ready in the drive.
By road, it was perhaps ten miles from the chimneys of industrial Barking to the charm of stockbroker Chigwell. Essex is a county of sharp contrasts. Materially, Moore’s progress could scarcely be measured. Mentally, he had also come a long way; able to turn a wry phrase around his origins: ‘Ordinary street, ordinary people, ordinary home, a few ordinary factories in the back garden.’
Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore, only son of Robert and Doris Moore. Born in Upney Hospital on 12 April 1941. Bred in the whimsically misnamed Waverley Gardens, a terraced tributary of Barking’s lorry-laden River Road. As destiny would have it, reared no more than a loud cheer from Alf Ramsey’s native Dagenham.
Unlike Ramsey, unlike, in fact, so many local boys made good, Moore showed no desire to cut the umbilical cord which links us all to our heritage. Stretch the ties, yes. Sever them, never.
The voice remained unmistakably working-class-London as Moore recalled:
I lost my first Cup Final 3–1 at the age of twelve. I couldn’t get home fast enough. To my Mum and Dad. To cry my eyes out. They made me see it wasn’t the end of the world.
I thought it was. I thought I was a failure. Deep down I had wanted to play for England way back, when I was a baby in the Barking Primary School team.
When I passed the eleven plus I went to Tom Hood Grammar School in Leyton. The first two months were murder. I was the only boy from my district. Up at 7 a.m., on my own on the bus from home to Barking station, train to Wanstead, trolleybus to Leyton, long walk to the school. I was sick with it. I went to the doctor pining for any sort of school in Barking and got a certificate for a transfer on the grounds of travel sickness.
The same week, though, I got picked for the district at football. Played for them. Got into that first Cup Final but didn’t realise I’d been spotted.
The West Ham ground became thick with people willing to claim first sighting of Moore’s talent. Between them, they talked Bobby into training at Upton Park.
It was a significant pointer to his personality that he remembered being overawed more vividly than he recalled most of his early triumphs.
He said:
I was the thirteenth player on the ground staff. I was ordinary. I was lucky to be there. And every time I looked at one of the other lads I knew it.
Every one of them had played for Essex or London, and at least been for trials with England Schoolboys. I had nothing. All around me were players with unbelievable ability. They were the same age as me and I was looking up at them and wishing I was that good, that skilful.
The first time I got a representative game I played for Essex over-fifteens because they needed a makeshift centre forward. I kept lumbering down the middle until our keeper hit a big up-and-under clearance which their keeper caught as I bundled him into the net. Very classy.
The referee was weak – there’s a familiar thought – and gave the goal for Essex. Everyone knew it was a joke. Most of all, the lads who knew they were better than me.
Inferiority was not a complex Moore enjoyed. The longer it lasted, however, the more it became a spur to improvement. ‘The best quality I had was wanting to succeed.’
For a time, Moore was a better cricketer than footballer. As a young batsman with a quick eye and characteristic willingness to stand in the line of fire, he captained South of England Schoolboys against the north.
Colin Milburn was their skipper but I won the toss, we batted, I opened. I’d just reached double figures when I got an edge and Ollie caught me in the slips.
He said ‘On your way, Mooro.’ I was sick. But half an hour later it rained. The match was abandoned. At least I got my innings.
Essex wanted Moore to take a lot more knocks for them. The County Cricket Club were interested in several other West Ham boys, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters among them. They knew in which sport the real money was to be made.
