Read an Excerpt
Budgie
The Autobiography of Goalkeeping Legend
By John Burridge, Colin Leslie John Blake Publishing Ltd
Copyright © 2011 John Burridge and Colin Leslie
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84358-515-2
CHAPTER 1
A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH
'I'd gone a bit doolally and thought I'd be better off dead.'
They say that when you go mad, the men in white coats come and take you away. That's not true. It's the men in green boiler suits.
I'd been barricaded in my room for days, crying. I had persuaded myself that I had nothing to live for and suicide seemed like the best way out. It was eating away at my mind. The three o'clock buzz of playing professional football I had felt for more than 30 years had gone, and I couldn't find any substitute for that surge of adrenaline you feel coursing through your veins when it's time to run up the tunnel and hear the roar of the crowd. A 90-minute drug I had depended on was no longer there, and I was just now just plain old John Burridge, ex-goalkeeper, nearly 50. Now what was left for me?
When you stop playing it's like being a rock star whose glory days are behind him. It's hard to replace the thrill of playing and the attention you have come to depend on when it's gone. Football had been my life since I was 15, when I started off as a £5-a-week apprentice with my home-town team Workington in the Fourth Division. I'd played at Wembley, won the Football League Cup with Aston Villa, won the Scottish League Cup with Hibs and won promotion and championships with Wolves and Crystal Palace, but now it had all gone. The game had chewed me up and spat me out. I was finding I couldn't live with football, and I couldn't live without it.
As I lay there contemplating suicide, I would occasionally hear my wife Janet knocking at the bedroom door.
'Do you want a cup of tea, John?'
'No, go away.'
'Do you want fish and chips, John?'
'No, go away.'
'Do you want some pasta, love?'
'No, go away and leave me alone. I don't want anything.'
And so it went on. I hadn't shaved, I hadn't brushed my teeth for days. I was a complete mess. I had got depression and I had got it bad. I'd been called mad often enough in my career – for walking on my hands during warm-ups, doing somersaults, sitting on the crossbar during games, having brawls with my manager, sleeping in my goalie gloves, following the same diet as African tribesmen. None of that was seen as normal behaviour, but I hadn't been mad, just 'Mr Dedication' – someone who was way ahead of his time. But this was a whole different ball game – I was in meltdown and maybe this time I was mad. I just wanted to crawl into a corner and die.
I was thinking about giving up on my life because I didn't have a job, I didn't have anywhere to go in the mornings, no training to go to, nothing to prepare for, and most painful of all to me was that I didn't have anywhere to go on a Saturday afternoon. If I'd been thinking clearly I would have been able to see I had plenty to live for – my wife Janet, my son Tom and my daughter Katie. But I wasn't thinking clearly; I'd gone a bit doolally and I thought I would be better off dead. I was suicidal, but mercifully Janet recognised the signs that I was about to top myself. She suggested that I should go into hospital or look for professional help to sort my head out, but I wasn't having it. I must have been so difficult to deal with. I just locked myself in the bedroom for days on end, crying.
My friends and family were worried sick about me and in desperation my wife rang Kevin Keegan – my old boss and pal from Newcastle United – and told him all about it, and how she couldn't get through to me. Between them, they decided the only way to save me from myself and get me better was to have me sectioned.
So there I was, lying on my bed in a sorry state, staring at the ceiling and thinking I might as well do everyone a favour and kill myself, when CRASH – my bedroom door came flying off its hinges and three giants in green boiler suits came wading in. I was a born fighter and there was no way I was going to come quietly, so it all kicked off. I was trying to knock hell out of them until they stuck a needle in my arse with a knock-out drug and sent me to sleep. When I woke up I was in the Priory.
At first I wanted to run away. I would have done anything to get out of that place – I was like a caged animal. Eventually, though, I got used to my medication and calmed down a bit. I was soon well enough to attend group therapy, which was a real jolt to the system. When it was my turn to say my piece, I stood up and said: 'I'm John Burridge, I'm 47 years old, I've played football all my life and I can't play any more. I'm suicidal.'
But the next person to stand up was a woman, who told us how her husband and both her children had been killed in a road accident. That was like a lightning bolt. It woke me up and put things in perspective. There were people in this world with far worse problems than me, and I felt pathetic that I was letting my problems get on top of me when this poor woman had been through far worse. Her bravery was humbling and it sent a message to me to get a grip of myself.
I decided to knuckle down and get better. I was in there for five months and I came out with a much better attitude to life. I came out full of positive thinking, but the first thing I needed to do was to get out of the UK. I had to get away from the frustration of not being able to play. I also needed to be far away from the pissing rain and the howling gales. I knew that I couldn't go to a match again because I would start crying. Some people come out of the Priory determined to give up cigarettes and alcohol. I came out of there vowing to give up English football.
I did just that, and I moved to the Middle East where I spent a decade working for the Oman Football Federation as goalkeeping coach. In many ways it was my dream job – I worked maybe 60 days a year with the national team, going to football matches and training sessions. I've been to places you can't even spell! Unfortunately, as part of a backroom team, you sometimes carry the can for the supposed mistakes of the coach, and in January 2011 the Oman FA decided to axe the head coach, Claude Le Roy, and pretty much everyone associated with him. Bloody happy new year, eh? That unfortunately included me, even though we'd been keeping a lot of clean sheets and our goalkeepers had been playing really well. It was another blow, an absolute sickener to be honest, but one I am determined to quickly bounce back from. The old John Burridge spirit has served me well for nearly 60 years, and I'm going to need it again.
I'm not sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself, though – I'm keeping busy as a television pundit in Dubai. It's great work if you can get it – getting paid for the privilege of watching and talking about football games from around the world. I'm keeping my mind and body active, and the world is still my oyster. There's nothing left for me in England now, but Janet and I own three houses in Muscat, and it is paradise out here in the Gulf. As I tell you my story, it's the middle of winter and I'm lying here in my hammock, gazing out at a stunning beach with the Indian Ocean beyond. Yet I still get asked whether I want to come back to England ... no chance, not if I can help it! But England gave me plenty of cracking memories, and so did Scotland. I played 771 league games in Britain and had 30 clubs. Now seems as good a time as any to reflect on it all.
CHAPTER 2
'BUDGIE' HATCHES
'It was a hard upbringing. I was a man by the age of 12. I had a chest on me that was bigger than Marilyn Monroe's!'
I would love to tell you that I had a warm and loving upbringing, but my life as a child was absolutely horrendous. I was born on 3 December, 1961, to my mum Greta and dad Jim in Concrete Terrace, Great Clifton – a small mining village near Workington, Cumbria, in the north west of England.
My early memories of the village were of a grim landscape dominated by slag heaps – the leftover materials from down the pit. The horrible smell of sulphur was always in your nostrils and everyone led a no-frills existence. You wouldn't believe now that people lived in such harsh conditions, but there was no time for complaining. They just got on with it.
In a mining village, the men were men and the women knew their place; they kept their mouths shut or there would be hard consequences for them if they didn't. The women did all the housework and kept the family in check while the men worked hard and drank hard, my dad included. My mother was a wonderful woman who did everything she could for me and my two sisters, Lillian and Marian. My dad was the bread-winner, and like most men in the village, he was something of a hard man. Not in a way that he would throw his weight about or be a bully, it was more just a case of his harsh way of life making him that way. There was one pub in the village called the Queen's Head and that's where all the miners would drink.
I have early childhood memories of us being huddled around the radio, because we didn't have a television, and my dad would come home from the pit and if I didn't have a bath ready for him I would be in danger of getting a hiding. If you got a crack about the head or body from your dad when you were a kid, you took it like a man. If you complained, he would hit you harder. It was done to toughen you up because round these parts you had to be tough. We never had any hot running water – we used to have a washhouse and my job was to get the coal fire started, set a fire underneath a big pot filled with water and then get his bath ready for when he came home from the pit. I would have to scrub his back as he was covered in coal.
It was traditional for men in the village to go down the pit, and I was faced with the prospect that that was going to be my life too. I was taken down the pit when I was still very young to see what it was like, to give me a grounding for what was seen as my inevitable career as a miner. I watched my dad and the other miners slogging their guts out in a dark confined space with water running round them. My job was to collect all the coal and slurry he had dug out, shove it into a barrow and wheel it away.
I used to be frightened to death down there and I hated the dark. I couldn't admit that to my dad, though; he would have thought I was soft and disowned me. Mining accidents were commonplace and you would hear all the time of people dying down there. It was a very hard life. How my dad used to do it I'll never know. They were hard, hard men. On Sundays, they would actually have fist fights outside the pub. You would see them outside, shirts off, stripped to the waist and ready to knock hell out of each other bare knuckle. It was like UFC 1960s-style – but after the punch-ups, you would see them the next day going to the pit again, comrades together, with no lingering hard feelings.
The pit may have held plenty terrors for me, but I wasn't scared of hard work. I got a job working on a farm when I was 12 and that made me grow up fast. I had to be up at 5.30 every morning, then run a mile to get there before I started getting on with my jobs. Then I had to run another mile to get the dog to help round up the cows. I was mucking in with anything that needed doing, including gathering and moving the hay bales, chopping wood, sawing wood – I wasn't the tallest kid, but my muscles and strength were developing fast with all that hard graft and I had a chest on me that was bigger than Marilyn Monroe's! I used to get a 10-shilling note every week from working on the farm. All the Burridge kids had jobs so we had an Oxo box that we used to have to put our wages in to help with the housekeeping and pay our way.
Workington wasn't really a football area. It was a big rugby league stronghold. The rugby league side, Workington Town, were a big club playing in the top division, while Workington Reds – the football team – were in the old Fourth Division and were very much in the shadow of the rugby team. Like most of the miners, my dad would always go to watch the rugby league side when they were at home. They would come out of the pit on a Friday and you would never see them again till two o'clock on Sunday for their weekly rugby game on the village green. The only time I would ever see my dad at the weekend was when he came out the pub. They used to have 15- a-side games for cash, and you wouldn't be able to play if you hadn't put your share of the kitty in. I was only 11 or 12 years old but I was playing against 18-stone miners at rugby league. We would go into the village field and wait for the miners to come out of the pub. I was wearing clogs, not football boots, because we couldn't afford them. It was 'skins' against shirts and we would play in all weather – people would take their shirts off even if it was snowing. I remember one game when my dad was in the opposite side to me. He was a good player and a good athlete. I saw him coming towards me, and there was no question of him going easy on me. SMASH, he battered right into me and scored. He took the money, went straight into the pub, with not even the slightest remorse that his boy was outside with a black eye. There was no mollycoddling, but I wouldn't change it for anything. Playing with the miners was hardening me up, and it stood me in good stead when I played with lads of my own age, because it seemed far easier by comparison. It was a hard, hard upbringing. I was a man by the age of 12.
I enjoyed rugby, but football was always my main passion, and for some reason I always wanted to be a goalkeeper. I don't why, but I was just attracted to the one position that made you stand out from the crowd. I was a born showman. The field in the village was kept like a bowling green and you would find me and my mates down there most days kicking a ball about. When I go home now I'll drive past that field, but you never see anyone playing football there now which is sad. I was the most popular lad in the village because every Christmas my dad used to give me a leather ball because I was always playing football. If I wasn't in the football field during daytime, I was in the Miners' Welfare boxing. I was a good boxer and I could look after myself. I was always fighting older lads. I was in the Cumbrian YMCA under-16 championship at Carlisle when I was 14, fighting lads who were 16; another thing that really toughened me up.
I was playing rugby one week, football the next, and boxing in between. At 13 years old I was playing for the Workington district team, and I also later played for England schoolboys at rugby, second row. At 13, I was playing football with 16-year-olds – they were all big but I was a little hard nut, and I was an athlete, because I was so strong from working on the farm. We had a very good district team. We had a lad called Dave Irving, who played for Workington and then Everton, and Peter Nicholson, who started off at Blackpool and went on to play hundreds of games for Bolton. I got noticed playing for our district team and then made the progression into the Cumbria area team, where we would play against the likes of Scotland, Yorkshire and Lancashire, with our home games taking place at Carlisle. Scouts were starting to watch my games and I was getting noticed. It was only a matter of time before a club came calling.
To be honest I was very ashamed of my house. There were no indoor toilets in those days, and our lavvy, like every other house round our way, was outside. If you wanted to go during the night, we had these quaint things we called 'piss pots', which would be kept under the bed for emergencies. Rather than walk across the yard in the snow in the middle of the night you would just forget about dignity and use one of those. They put flowers in them now and you see them being sold in antique shops, but they had a more practical use when I was kid. Unluckily for me, I was the one given the job of emptying the piss pots in the morning. I love the smell of piss in the morning! It wasn't exactly the perfect way to start your day, that's for sure. My dad had a novel approach when the piss pot was full – and after downing a few drinks, he would come in drunk and with his bladder full of ale and at bursting point, so he would be needing to go a few times during the night. But there's no way he was going to stumble outside into the yard to use the toilet, instead he would just piss into the pot then chuck the contents out the window. It would go splashing all over the yard outside. Or, if he had really had a skinful and even that was too much trouble, he'd just open the window and piss straight out into the yard.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Budgie by John Burridge, Colin Leslie. Copyright © 2011 John Burridge and Colin Leslie. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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