Rio Ferdinand--Five Star--The Biography Read online

  ‘Money, money, money, money, money; that’s all I ever hear in this house. Manny, look at the pelican fly – come on, pelican.’

  THE PSYCHOTIC TONY MONTANA, PLAYED BY AL PACINO IN SCARFACE (1983), RIO’S ALL-TIME FAVOURITE MOVIE

  ‘When I’m 35, old and knackered, I hope I’ll be able to hear someone say, “You see that kid there? He’s going to be as good as Rio Ferdinand one day.”’

  RIO FERDINAND, 2002

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  SOME MOTHERS DO ’AVE ’EM

  Chapter 2

  ‘REE-OOH! REE-OOH!’

  Chapter 3

  OUT OF ORDER

  Chapter 4

  WATCH YER BACK

  Chapter 5

  SWIMMING WITH SHARKS

  Chapter 6

  A KICK IN THE TEETH

  Chapter 7

  A RARE COMMODITY

  Chapter 8

  THE VIBE

  Chapter 9

  RAZOR’S THE MAN

  Chapter 10

  ROCKING THE WATERBED

  Chapter 11

  SIGN ON THE DOTTED LINE

  Chapter 12

  MURDER IN PECKHAM

  Chapter 13

  DIAMOND GEEZERS

  Chapter 14

  MUNICH MASSACRE

  Chapter 15

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  Chapter 16

  THE WORLD STAGE

  Chapter 17

  END OF AN ADVENTURE

  Chapter 18

  A BOLD STEP

  Chapter 19

  THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET

  Chapter 20

  TESTING TIMES

  Chapter 21

  RIO GRAND

  Chapter 22

  THE BIGGEST TEST

  Chapter 23

  TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS

  Chapter 24

  THE FINAL CHAPTER?

  Chapter 25

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Copyright

  ‘RIO’ – THE WORLD CUP 2002 REMIX

  During the 2002 World Cup, fans in Japan adapted the lyrics of Duran Duran’s classic song ‘Rio’ to show their appreciation of the man’s superb performances during the tournament.

  Moving on the pitch now, babe, you’re a legend in your time

  In your England shirt, you’re looking in your prime

  With a step to your left and a flick to your right

  You pass the ball to Becks

  Sven knows you’re something special, that’s why you’re playing with the best.

  CHORUS

  His name is Rio and he dances on the pitch

  When his name’s called the opposition start to twitch

  And when he plays he really gives it all he can

  He’s on the ball, his name is Rio Ferdinand.

  I’ve seen you on the pitch and I’ve seen you on TV

  Cost 18 million quid, you usually play for Leeds

  On a Saturday and the midweek too

  You’re worth the dough because you know just what to do.

  CHORUS

  His name is Rio and he dances on the pitch

  When his name’s called the opposition start to twitch

  And when he plays he really gives it all he can

  He’s on the ball, his name is Rio Ferdinand.

  Hey now – wow – look at that

  Did he nearly run you down?

  At the end of the line, the goal’s in sight

  Line up the ball and score, and score, and score!

  Just take your chance cause the nation’s on your side

  I’ll tell you something, we think we can win it

  The team’s a sure thing, if Rio is in it.

  CHORUS

  His name is Rio and he dances on the pitch

  When his name’s called the opposition start to twitch

  And when he plays he really gives it all he can

  He’s on the ball, his name is Rio Ferdinand.

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘Taking care of business’ was the catchphrase used by many of the dodgier characters on the council estate where Rio Ferdinand was born and bred. The story of how he survived in that dangerous environment is as remarkable as his meteoric climb to the top of the football world.

  For while this is primarily a book about one of the most exciting footballers on earth, I hope it also provides the reader with some answers about Rio’s precarious existence before and since he made it. It may not reveal all of Rio’s most secret or outrageous thoughts, but it is the first-ever account of his life and fantastic voyage from ghetto boy to World Cup hero.

  Who is the man behind the public face? Whence comes his love of life’s luxuries, his extraordinary ambition to succeed? How is it possible for someone from such humble beginnings to cope with superstardom while still in his teens?

  I have spoken to many people in London and across England who know him well. One of his best friends, Leon Simms, summed him up: ‘Rio’s the coolest dude around. He knows how to make people laugh but there’s a serious side to him. He gets what he wants.’

  Rio’s friends agreed to talk because they all respected and adored him. I spent many hours interviewing people from his childhood to find out the real truth about his impoverished background and his relationship with the two most influential people in his life – his mother and father. Many were convinced that Rio would appreciate my intentions in bringing this book to a wide audience. Their decision to sanction my efforts deserves my heartfelt thanks. I sincerely hope the book reflects the warm feelings for Rio that stretch from the world of football right into the mean streets of south-east London.

  Another vital source was Rio’s brilliant performances on football pitches across the globe. They tell us so much about his life that they provided the thread I needed to sew the narrative together. So here you have it: an extraordinary blend of two lives that collided to produce one of the most talented sportsmen of his generation.

  Wensley Clarkson

  September 2014

  PROLOGUE

  July 2002 and everyone was waiting with bated breath for the post-World Cup transfer bonanza. Surely this would be the moment when numerous new young stars of world football achieved their dream moves after performing in the ultimate shop window of Japan and Korea.

  But in the weeks following the end of the tournament, and with the countdown to the new season already under way, the exact opposite trend began emerging – clubs throughout Europe had suddenly turned into the ultimate caution brokers.

  Gone were the days of vast profits and healthy club bank balances. In their place came mounting debts, combined with inflated salaries. Even the most ambitious clubs were starting to feel the pinch, leaving fans across Europe frustrated by the lack of transfer activity.

  In Italy, clubs were swamped with vast debts. In France, respected giants such as Marseille and Nice were close to folding and even Paris Saint-Germain, bankrolled by media giants Canal Plus, were fighting to stay afloat. Germany’s 36 professional clubs had been hit badly by a TV deal which collapsed. They were all being asked by their banks to provide guarantees to cover any projected future losses.

  In Switzerland, three clubs were denied licences for the new season, while in Austria league champions FC Tirol were in the extraordinary position of having qualified for the Champions League while being relegated because they couldn’t provide sufficient evidence of solvency.

  The 72 Nationwide League clubs in England’s lower divisions spent a total of around £3 million on trans
fers. In the summer of 2001 they’d splashed out £25 million. In the Premiership the figure dropped from more than £50 million in 2001 to £25 million during this close season.

  And if there was little money going out, there was much less coming into the Football League via the transfer market. In the summer of 2001, clubs took in £47 million, mainly in the Premiership. This year the figure was under £20 million.

  Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), said: ‘The shame is that in quantity terms there has never been so much money in the game but the trouble is the distribution is so unequal. The top clubs say they can’t give up any more money because they have to compete with the best in Europe. Many smaller clubs will be wondering if they can stay alive or will have to go part-time. But no club should spend money they don’t have.’

  The PFA covered wages for around 12 Football League clubs last season and Taylor believes the public are unaware of the plight of those players who are not household names. ‘Nobody appreciates how vulnerable and insecure a footballer is on a 12-month contract at the lower end of the scale,’ he said.

  Into this uncertain future stepped Rio Ferdinand – football’s £33-million wonderboy. Not even a catastrophic slump in the world’s football marketplace could stop him becoming the most expensive defender on the globe.

  But how did he get there?

  Chapter 1

  SOME MOTHERS DO ’AVE ’EM

  St Luke’s Church on the Friary Estate, in Peckham, south-east London. The rusting fridges and mangled bikes formed a line around both the front and back entrances. Muggings, burglaries and violence were a feature of daily life. People rarely ventured out at night because they were terrified they might encounter one of the many gangs of youths who patrolled the area. At the only shop on the estate the owner had metal shutters over the windows, but they were regularly prised open.

  Peckham had been branded an inner-city ghetto for years. It was full of lock-ups and crack factories, of joyless estates where the police dared not tread, where milk was delivered from armoured floats and postmen did their rounds in pairs. The air was thick with the noise and smell of diesel-fuelled HGVs in the seemingly never-ending traffic jams on the A2, the main road from London through Kent to the Channel ports.

  More than 70 per cent of the inhabitants of the Friary Estate were from ethnic minorities – West Indian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Somali, West African. Bizarrely, the entire place was connected to neighbouring estates by badly lit walkways. Anonymous passers-by wandered from one estate to the other, mugging, robbing, raping and vandalising as they went, then escaped by one of 49 access points. To an outsider, the estate was a total no-go zone. By day and night it remained largely deserted. Random aggression was rife and few would ever ask a stranger into their home. Only the very foolish were desperate enough to negotiate their way through the maze.

  Pregnant teenager Janice Lavender knew within days of arriving on the Friary Estate that any son of hers would need constant supervision if he was going to stay out of trouble. All boys needed watching, cajoling and hauling into line. Only responsible, caring parents stood a chance of seeing their kids survive this environment.

  Residents often found flick-knives on the tarmac, discarded during a fight the previous night, or empty wallets taken in random muggings. Low-rise blocks like the one Janice was about to make her home were drab and crumbling, creating a menacing sprawl as they merged into other estates. Although built just ten years earlier in 1968, the Friary Estate had rapidly decayed and was deemed by many to be the classic example of inner-city deprivation.

  Children as young as eight were regularly hauled off local buses and trains for ‘steaming’ other passengers to steal their wallets. Some kids would press-gang weaker children into acts of spitefulness against even weaker children. Many of these kids were not yet 10 years old but boasted of carrying knives; others flashed their knuckledusters.

  Janice Lavender moved into a block called Gisburn House, a grim four-storey, red-brick council tenement building which overlooked some rusting cars and a couple of burned-out white Transit vans. Many of the occupants of Gisburn House were aimless young males, a large percentage of whom had fallen into a life of crime and drugs.

  The flat on the estate which would become Rio Ferdinand’s home for the first 18 years of his life was up four flights of narrow, dirty, urine-infested stairs. Its red-framed front door was secured behind black metal bars. The flat was small, with threadbare carpet, sparse furniture, scratched and battered, the walls badly in need of a new coat of paint. The cramped second bedroom contained just a bed. Lack of wardrobe space meant that clothes had to be hung from door frames. But for Rio it would become a place of comfort and safety, an escape from the fear that came with running the gauntlet through the estate.

  But none of these conditions fazed Janice Lavender. She was one of 11 children whose Irish mother left home when she was young, and she was determined her own kids wouldn’t suffer the same fate. ‘My dad did a wonderful job in bringing us up but I can never remember being spoiled,’ she recalled.

  Janice left home at 15 and took a job at Top Shop in Oxford Street, in London’s West End, to help pay the rent on her bedsit. When she was just 17 she got pregnant after starting a relationship with St Lucia-born Julian Ferdinand, whose family had arrived in Britain from the Caribbean in 1958. Julian’s mother, Angelina, worked as a nurse at St Bart’s Hospital in London. One day Janice met a girl at Top Shop who told her about a river in Jamaica called the Rio Grande, which means ‘great river’. As Janice later explained: ‘I knew immediately that was the name I wanted for my baby.’

  November 1978 will be mainly remembered in history for the mass suicide, or murder, of 913 people in Jonestown, Guyana. Since then there have been rumours of CIA involvement in the tragedy. Some even believe CIA agents posing as members of the People’s Temple cult were gathering information in Guyana. But what is known for sure is that on 18 November cult leader Jim Jones ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-poisoned punch. He then told guards to shoot anyone who refused or tried to escape. Among the dead were more than 270 children.

  It was into this uncertain world that Janice’s baby boy was born at King’s College Hospital, Camberwell, south London, on 7 November 1978. He was almost named Gavin but his mother Janice and father Julian both preferred Rio, so Gavin became his middle name. The young parents never married, and for Janice: ‘It was a big shock to come home with Rio. That tiny two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor was freezing. And back in those days it was quite a thing that Rio’s dad was black and I was white.’

  The racist bigots of the National Front were still active at that time and there was a lot of animosity shown to Janice and her tiny, milky-coffee-coloured baby. ‘There was one particular person who would call us names – but as a woman with a baby, what do you do? There was me, this white woman, with a black child. I was so proud of him and I wanted him to look perfect every minute.’

  Janice and her sister Carol adored walking around Peckham with Rio and Carol’s son Ben in a double baby buggy. Janice explained: ‘Ben is white with ginger hair – people’s faces were a picture. Rio soon became a local celebrity even back then.’

  The teenage mum was shown the ropes of estate life by single parents Sharon McEwan from Grenada and Dallas Gopie from Guyana. Janice remembered: ‘At the end of a week when we didn’t have much food or money left we’d pool together and feed the kids with something – rice, chicken, anything that was cheap.’

  Janice and Dallas often took their sons Rio and Lawrence on outings to local parks and museums. ‘You don’t have to have money to support your children,’ said Dallas. ‘You just need to give them your time and your love, and Janice was very good at that.’ And Janice was always saying to her friend, ‘My Rio is going places. You mark my words.’

  As soon as she could return to her job as a credit controller at Top Shop, Janice got little Rio into a nearby nursery
school. She was determined to be a good role model to her son. ‘I wanted my kids to know there’s a big world out there with lots of things to do – but you have to work hard to get there. It was about Rio seeing that you have to work hard to make a better life for yourself.’

  Janice eventually became a childminder so that she could keep earning a living but spend more time with Rio. Any spare cash soon went on sending her sports-mad son on after-school activities and even occasional holidays. There was a sports shop in Peckham called Mark One, where Janice would take Rio. ‘The lady knew my situation and used to take us through to the cheap section we could afford. I always said to Rio, “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it.”’ Rio’s first holiday was when he was five and the family went to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and stayed in a friend’s chalet. ‘We didn’t have any money but still had lots of fun on the beach,’ he recalled.

  When Rio was about six years old, his mum Janice took him to see mighty Liverpool take on Millwall at the Den, just a few minutes away from the Friary Estate. ‘It was the most wicked thing in my life,’ is how Rio remembered it. ‘The crowd was noisy. The players seemed like gods out there. I was drawn right into it.’ Rio elevated Liverpool’s John Barnes to the status of superhero as his goal helped the Reds scrape through 2–1.

  That trip to the Den sparked Rio’s obsession with football and he was soon kicking a ball around on the two concrete playgrounds at his junior school, Camelot Primary, in Peckham. There wasn’t enough money available for a grass pitch. Rio’s old headmistress, Joye Manyan, recalled: ‘He was a tall lad and would play football whenever he was allowed to. He scored goals back then, too.’ Keith Tewkesbury, facilities manager at Camelot Primary, had similar memories: ‘Rio was always kicking a ball about and sometimes he would be out in the playground on his own just practising.’

  In class, Rio proved to have a lively sense of humour and a good grasp of maths. ‘I remember seeing him take care of a complicated question about fractions when he was just six. His mental arithmetic was good,’ added Mrs Manyan, who described Rio’s mum Janice as ‘a very determined lady. She knew what she wanted for her children and didn’t let anything get in her way. She could have made excuses, but she never did. She was a proud, decent woman.’