Stan: Tackling My Demons - Stan Collymore

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was Lotta, the first woman I was in love with. I was living away from home for the first time. I was playing in England’s top league. I was scoring goals in my own right in the reserves. I was playing at the shrines of English football, places like Anfield. I was sampling London nightlife for the first time.

      Some of it scared me a bit because I felt I didn’t come off well against certain personalities. Some of my fears and self-doubts were exacerbated by some of the people there. They were strong characters. They could play with you and try to mess with your mind. These were guys who had cut their teeth in the lower leagues. No cunt was going to knock them off their perch, certainly not a naïve, raw Brummy. When I left in February 1992, sold to Southend for £80,000, I felt a little bitter because I thought I should have been given more of an opportunity at Palace. But my time there was two good years of learning behind some of the best in the business and some of the most hard-nosed players in the business.

      I learned my lessons well. Off the pitch, too. I bought a Golf GTI off Jamie Moralee in my second season and Andy Gray’s brother, Ollie, financed it for me. He said he would lend me the money. I was supposed to pay it back over two months. He kept saying he was doing me a favour and I should never forget it. I was a bit late paying him back and then I wrote the car off. Ollie used to ring up Lotta’s house every day. It all got a bit sinister then. ‘Stan, I can’t lose, brother,’ he would say in his Cockney accent. ‘I can’t lose. Listen to me, hear me out. Unless I get my money, you’re going to get it, bruv.’ You come across people that are harsh fuckers.

      Curiously, though, the one thing Palace didn’t prepare me for was being the target of racist abuse. I say ‘curiously’ because there were so many racial undertones there and the racial split seemed so obvious and so defined. But the days of Micky Droy had long gone, and despite the banter between, say, Wrighty and Nigel Martyn, despite the fact that the black guys hung out with each other and the white guys hung out with each other and there was little social mixing, there was still respect between the two groups. Racial abuse was never an issue. It was never a possibility. It just wouldn’t have happened. Anybody who indulged in it would not have had a prayer at that club. It would have made things unworkable. The only time I was ever confronted with rampant racism in my playing career was long after I had left Palace. It caught up with me when I was playing for Villa, and the culprit, funnily enough, came from among my former team-mates at Anfield.

      When the Liverpool game came around on the last day of February 1998, I was in the middle of a goal drought at Villa. I hadn’t scored for seven games. It was also John Gregory’s first match in charge after Brian Little had been sacked. Because of that, and because it was Liverpool, I was wound up for the match. I played well. In fact, the Liverpool central defenders, Jamie Carragher and Steve Harkness, couldn’t get near me. And then, early in the second half, it started. It was the kind of abuse I had never suffered before and would never suffer again.

      Harkness was the culprit. The ball was up at the other end and he stood right next to me. ‘You fucking coon,’ he said. ‘Fucking nigger.’ I was taken aback more than anything to begin with. Then he stepped it up a bit. ‘At least my mum never slept with a fucking coon,’ he said. Nice bloke, Steve Harkness. Fucking neanderthal from Carlisle with a very, very small brain. Then, it was all the time: ‘coon’ this, ‘nigger’ that.

      When we were at Liverpool I had organised a collection for Children in Need one year. A lot of the players were very generous. Some of them put a grand in. I wanted us to make a really big donation. Harkness sneered. ‘I ain’t giving anything,’ he said. ‘Charity begins at home.’ I never got on with the cunt. I always thought he was the most mealy-mouthed bloke you could meet. He was a nasty, horrible, mean, racist little prick.

      He managed to keep it up right until the final whistle. I’d scored two goals but I was shaken and incensed by what he had been saying. I told the referee during the game but he did nothing. I wasn’t hurt by what he said because he was just a moron, but I felt degraded.

      When the game was over, I was ready to kill him. I ran straight down the tunnel and waited by the Liverpool dressing-room door. Two of their coaches, Sammy Lee and Joe Corrigan, were first in and I told Sammy he needed to have a word with Harkness, that that kind of behaviour and language just weren’t acceptable. ‘Why don’t you fucking say something to him,’ Sammy said. So I thought I would.

      As soon as Harkness came down the tunnel, I went for him. I threw a punch at him and then it all kicked off. It was a screaming, yelling, flailing melee. Everyone seemed to be involved. Stewards, players, coaches. Eventually they got me out of there and bundled me into the Villa dressing room and I was still shaking with the anger of it all. I was so enraged I had to go and sit down away from everyone else by the baths in a corner of the dressing room. John Gregory came over and told me to concentrate on the fact I’d scored two goals. I just told him I wanted to make an official complaint.

      I made sure no one forgot about it and that the issue was not allowed to fade away. I reiterated in the press what Harkness had said and he responded by denying everything and threatening to sue me unless I stopped calling him a racist. What a joke that was. He trotted out the usual shit that racists always come out with about how a black man was one of his best friends. In the case of Harkness, it was Paul Ince apparently. The two of them used to share lifts in from Southport together. Something like that.

      I wonder when people will start to realise that just because you might smile at a black man occasionally, even shake his hand, that doesn’t guarantee you immunity from being a racist. We never seem to learn. Okay, so somebody claims a black guy is his friend. Or somebody says he can’t be a racist because he let black players play in his football team. Does that mean that if the same man goes back home, puts on a white hood with holes cut out for the eyes and mouth and starts burning crosses and singing racist songs, he is still not a racist?

      That is the kind of logic that people like Steve Harkness and Ron Atkinson seem to apply to their actions. They haven’t even got the guts to admit what they are. They try to hide it away. They try to conceal it. They try to keep it indoors among friends, among like-minded people. That is what makes them dangerous. And, usually, society lets them get away with it; lets their sickness fade away and then beckons them back into the warmth.

      Well, I didn’t want to let it fade away. So the PFA got involved and Harkness and I were summoned to Manchester for a meeting. Harkness turned up with his lawyer. He insisted he couldn’t remember what he had said to me on the pitch but he denied again he was a racist. Gordon Taylor, the PFA Chief Executive, tried to get us to sign a joint apology to the fans for bringing it all out into the open. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I mean, the PFA brings out all these glossy brochures about kicking racism out of football, and when they’ve got a real live incident out there begging to be dealt with, they bottle it. They wanted me to apologise for being called a coon and a nigger. They wanted me to apologise because Harkness had taunted me about my mother sleeping with a black man. I couldn’t believe it. It had all been swept under the carpet. A cosy little cover-up to keep all the boys and girls happy about the Premiership. It left me feeling disgusted and disillusioned with football’s ability to police itself on race.

      The next time we played Liverpool, I knew what I was going to do. The first time Harkness got the ball I was on him in a flash. I took him out. He was carried off. I found it fairly gratifying at the time, especially as I only got a booking for it. With hindsight and some time to heal the wounds, I regret it. Whatever he had done to me, there is no excuse for trying to injure a fellow professional.

      So I’m glad he didn’t break anything. I got my comeuppance later in the game anyway. I had a tussle with Michael Owen, grabbed him by the throat and got sent off. I did my Harry Enfield ‘calm down, calm down’ impression to the Liverpool fans as I was walking back to the tunnel but at least I felt I had achieved some form of retribution for what Harkness had done to me.

      And that was it. The only time I’ve been overtly racially abused as a player. What else lies beneath at football grounds and in football minds, I don’t really care to imagine. Once, playing for Villa at Tottenham after I had been admitted to the Priory, the Spurs fans had a field day with me. ‘You’re mad and you know you are,’ they were singing. Well, substitute the word ‘mad’

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